At
sixteen she was an impetuous, worldly-minded, and very vain
though very dignified young lady. Then her father, fearful as to
her future, sent her to a convent, with orders that she should be
kept in strict seclusion.
Such a punishment awoke all the feelings of conscientiousness and
self-conviction that had so influenced her when she was a little
girl, and Theresa, left to her own thoughts, first grew morbid,
and then fell sick.
During her sickness she resolved to become a nun, persuaded her
ever-faithful brother, Pedro, to become a friar, and when Don
Alphonso, their father, refused his consent, the brother and
sister, repeating the folly of their childhood, again ran away
from home.
Then their father, seeing the uselessness of resistance,
consented, and Theresa, at the age of twenty, entered a convent
in Avila, and became a nun in what was known as the Order of the
Carmelites.
The life of these nuns was strict, secluded, and silent; but the
conscientious nature of Theresa found even the severities of this
lonely life not sufficiently hard, and attaining to a position of
influence in the order she obtained permission from the Pope in
1562 to found a new order which should be even more strict in its
rules, and therefore, so she believed, more helpful.
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