Читать книгу Saint Teresa of Ávila: Collected Works. The Life of St. Teresa, The Interior Castle, Way of Perfection онлайн
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ssss1 This must be an error. See ch. i. § 7, note 7.
ssss1 There is a difficulty about this. The Bollandists maintain that she went to the monastery of the Incarnation in the year 1533. On the other hand Ribera, her most accurate biographer--with whom Fra Jerome agrees,--says that she left her father's house in 1535, when she was more than twenty years of age; Yepes, that she was not yet twenty; and the Second Relation of the Rota, that she was in her twentieth year. The Bull of Canonisation and the Office in the Breviary also say that she was in her twentieth year, that is, A.D. 1534. The Chronicler of the Order differs from all and assigns the year 1536 as the year in which she entered the monastery.
The Life
of the
Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus.
ssss1
Written by Herself.
Prologue.
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As I have been commanded and left at liberty to describe at length my way of prayer, and the workings of the grace of our Lord within me, I could wish that I had been allowed at the same time to speak distinctly and in detail of my grievous sins and wicked life. But it has not been so willed; on the contrary, I am laid herein under great restraint; and therefore, for the love of our Lord, I beg of every one who shall read this story of my life ssss1 to keep in mind how wicked it has been; and how, among the Saints who were converted to God, I have never found one in whom I can have any comfort. For I see that they, after our Lord had called them, never fell into sin again; I not only became worse, but, as it seems to me, deliberately withstood the graces of His Majesty, because I saw that I was thereby bound to serve Him more earnestly, knowing, at the same time, that of myself I could not pay the least portion of my debt.