'A short-cut to hell. If parents would take my advice, they would rather marry their daughters to the very poorest of men, or else keep them at home under their own eye. If young women will be wicked at home, their wickedness will not long be hidden at home; but in monasteries, such as I speak of, their worst wickedness can be completely covered up from every human eye. And all the time the poor things are not to blame. They only walk in the way that is shown them. Many of them are to be much pitied, for they honestly wish to withdraw from the world, only to find themselves in ten times worse worlds of sensuality and all other devilry. O my God! if I might I would fain speak of some of the occasions of sin from which Thou didst deliver me, and how I threw myself into them again. And of the risks I ran of utterly shipwrecking my character and good name and from which Thou didst rescue me. O Lord of my soul! how shall I be able to magnify Thy grace in those perilous years! At the very time that I was offending Thee most, Thou didst prepare me by a most profound compunction to taste of the sweetness of Thy recoveries and consolations. In truth, O my King, Thou didst administer to me the most spiritual and painful of chastisements: for Thou didst chastise my sins with great assurances of Thy love and of Thy great mercy. It makes me feel beside myself when I call to mind Thy great grace and my great ingratitude.' This leads us up to the conception and commencement of that great work to which Teresa dedicated the whole of her after life,--the reformation and extension of the Religious Houses of Spain. The root-and-branch reformation of Luther and his German and Swiss colleagues had not laid much hold on Spain; and the little hold it had laid on her native land had never reached to Teresa. Had Luther and Teresa but met: had Melanchthon and Teresa but met: had the best books of the German and Swiss Reformation but come into Teresa's hands: had she been somewhat less submissive, and somewhat less obedient, and somewhat less completely the slave of her ecclesiastical superiors; had she but once entered into that intellectual and spiritual liberty wherewith Christ makes His people free,--what a lasting blessing Teresa might have been made to her native land! But, as it was, Teresa's reformation, while it was the salvation of herself and of multitudes more who came under it, yet as a monastic experiment and a church movement, it ended in the strengthening and the perpetuation of that detestable system of intellectual and spiritual tyranny which has been the death of Spain from that day to this. Teresa performed a splendid service inside the Church to which she belonged: but that service was wholly confined to the Religious Houses that she founded and reformed. Teresa's was intended to be a kind of counter-reformation to the reformation of Luther and Melanchthon and Valdes and Valera. And