The greatest name among the Spanish mystics, and one of the greatest in all religious history, is that of Teresa de Zepeda y Ahumada, who called herself “in religion” Teresa de Jesus. She was born of a noble family of Ávila in Old Castile in 1515, and died in 1582. We are not directly concerned here with her religious life, her reform of the Carmelites, or her doctrine, which indeed was not original. The inspiring motive of Santa Teresa was her desire to save the souls of the Lutheran heretics, not by preaching to them, but by so reforming her own order, the Carmelites, that they should return to their original purity, and prove an effective instrument for the Church. Her literary work may be divided into two parts. One contains the different treatises she wrote by the order of her superiors, who probably began by wishing to test her orthodoxy, and who ended by revering her as one inspired. Then there are her many letters, written to all ranks of her contemporaries, from the king down to the nuns of her houses. In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian--the language as it was spoken by the nobles, not learned, indeed, but not wholly uneducated, who belonged to “the kidney of Castile,” and had not been affected by the Italianate style of the Court. Her own great character is stamped on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly character, “Meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the will of devout whim mainly!” Her letters, which are not only the most attractive part of her writing but even the most valuable, show her not only as a great saint but as a great lady, with a very acute mind, a fine wit, and an abounding good sense. [SN: _Juan de la Cruz._] Santa Teresa’s disciple and colleague in the reform of the Carmelites, Juan de la Cruz, whose family name was Yepes (1542-1591), not unjustly named the Ecstatic Doctor, was emphatically a saint of the “melodious” order. His emotional--not to say gushing--style has been, and is, much admired by the Spaniards. To us it seems that nobody stands in greater need of being judged by the widest interpretation of the text, “To the pure all things are pure.” There is an amatory warmth of language, an application to religion of erotic images in Juan de la Cruz, which, considered in itself, and apart from what justified it at the time, is nauseous. A quite sufficient example will be found in the much-quoted verses in his _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, which begin, “En una noche escura.” Yet Juan de la Cruz wrote eloquently in his emotional way, and his verse is beautiful. [SN: _Decadence of the Mystic writers._]