Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea, until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles and turned them back
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Dorothea recalls St. Theresa of Avila but she also prefigures St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who only a few years after the publication of "Middlemarch" wrote the following passages, dealing directly with the issue of heroic-or-small deeds:
"I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way– very short and very straight little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection ... Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less....
"Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love."
This is "The Little Way" of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
