It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four years of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity which, even then, extended quite as much to matters of decentralization of the self as of bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively directed against the successive refuges and ambushes of self-complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is significance in the secondary place occupied, (even in the _Vita_, and doubtless still more in her own mind), by the question of continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar indicates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous practice of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the question of the systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish attachments and self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners as “cold,” even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-, not snow-conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive, love itself. In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil, a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat, we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing,” and of his combat between flesh and spirit.--Yet the evil which she is thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil and temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimfulness and intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.--And this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got, standing there for the massive experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and spirit. But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness, its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God, “Who knows that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body and that soul.