First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine formulated over and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid consistency, as the key and limit to all her anticipations and picturings. Only because of the fact, and of our conviction of the fact, of the unbroken continuity and identity of God with Himself, of the human soul with itself, and of the deepest of the relations subsisting between that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do experience and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws and realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or less time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering the analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life here) safely and profitably forecast certain general features of the future which is thus already so largely a present. But, given these conditions in the present, we can and should forecast the future, to the extent implied. And as Plato’s great imaginative projection, his life-work, the _Republic_, achieves its original end, (of making more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a large scale, the life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has rightly understood the human soul and has found appropriate representations of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth, even if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all its details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if bolder in its subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more general in its indications than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul. Man’s spiritual personality, being held by her to survive death,--to retain its identity and an at least equivalent consciousness, of that identity,--the deepest experiences of that personality before the body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in a heightened degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures, of what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no _then_ at all. And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition of the spirit’s future life,--that of the purification of the imperfect soul,--does she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed picturing; and this, doubtless, not only because she has experienced much concerning this matter in her own life here, but also because the projection of these experiences would still give us, not the ultimate state, but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed, joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we get only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are strongly marked by her general position and method. 2. _Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly limited._