Santa Teresa is the mystic, as organizer: she is yet another part of the will of Isabel and Spain. The religious houses of the land are dissolute and weak. Against the hostility which her sex aroused, against the distrust of the Inquisition, Teresa moves through Spain, cleansing and creating hearths for the luminous life. The world, to her, is a household. The Master is Christ and he requires service. Her imaginative powers ... in which the Arab glamour is not wanting ... make so vivid the delights of service that the convents of Spain become as magnets, sapping the humbler households of the land. To Teresa, the soul also is a home; and her book _Las Moradas_ is a picture of its chambers. “As above, so below.” Christ, the bridegroom, enters the household of the soul: and at once, the humble household becomes Heaven. Teresa’s convents are literal heavens upon earth: they are the dwelling of a Lord whose passion fails not. Spain’s will pours a sea of energy into this fragment of her deed. Teresa’s work is homely; and so is the rough plastic language of her books. _Las Moradas, El Libro de su Vida_ articulate the sense of the common Spanish matron who makes of her bridal bed an altar, and of her religion a marriage. * * * * * Teresa is no merely powerful reformer: she is a creator. In her hand, the broom and the account-book become mystic weapons: even as in the hands of Torquemada the wrack; and in the hands of Columbus the rudder and the compass. He was born in Italy; and the question of his descent, Italian or Spanish or Jew, is unsolved and has no bearing. Christopher Columbus in his historic rôle belongs with the Spanish mystics. We have lost his book of _Prophecias_. But we can reconstruct the trend of the argument which, having failed to convince the “practical” Courts of England, Portugal and France, won over the clerics of Spain and at Córdoba moved the Queen to send him westward. Like the platonic Jews, Columbus idealized his route and made a symbol of his navigating passion. Like Philo, he mapped out his scheme in Scripture. Yet another phase of Spain’s organic will was served by this devout seafarer: and through Spain, yet another need of Europe. Medieval Christendom is in dissolution. Much energy is released; and needs an outlet, and cannot find it until this mystic mariner, Christian and medieval, finds America. Down to earth pours the energy of Europe: the Vision and Body of a Gothic Christ no longer hold it. Down it clamors, seeking earthly forms--seeking an America, indeed! But Columbus is a Catholic. And Isabel, the Catholic Queen, smiles on his adventure, aiming to spread the Church to India. And what they do--this mystic seafarer, this rapt good monarch--is to give to Europe an escape for its too-long stored Catholic might: to give to it a land in which the blood of the medieval Christ may be sluiced, may be lost forever! Irony marries with heroic Spain. _c._ _The Jesuit_