And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its general drift, deeply dualistic,--at least in the matter of body and spirit. Their difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of the body; the spirit’s getting outside of it,--by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly life, and by this earthly body’s death, for good and all; the body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul: all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin. 1. _New Testament valuations of the body._ Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type--if not of doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament. (1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least solitary, exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His commendation of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven),[113] we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body, even to the average earthly human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.[114] This background to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time, in part abstracted from, in part restated.--The entrance into life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul, can he find it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being ever reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is weak,” and that we must pray for strength against its weakness:[116] but He nowhere declares it evil--an inevitable prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a corresponding doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or systematic dualism, are here everywhere apparent.