And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of them,--not the most purely physical-seeming of these acts,--which he cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,--by willing it, more and more, because of its rational end and justification. And there is not one of them,--not an act which, judged simply by its direct subject-matter and by the soul’s faculties immediately engaged, would be the most purely mental and religious of acts,--which man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it were, following it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical attraction and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution of liberty; in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body, is but the occasion and means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere phenomenal flux of the surface of existence, and of its subjection to the determinism which obtains here.[176] Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in this matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and desirableness in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent upon that soul’s special circumstances, temperament, _attrait_, and degree of perfection reached and to be reached. (3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contemplative forms of Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States of Pure Love; and, again, of such Prayer and Love, and Abnormal or Miraculous conditions: it is clear that, if there is no true Contemplation without much Pure Love, there can be much Pure Love without Contemplation.