Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced by St. Thomas in the words, “Since these souls are completely averse to the final end of right reason, they must be declared to be without any good will.” Yet St. Thomas himself (partly in explanation of the Areopagite’s words, “the evil spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to be, to live, and to understand”), is obliged to distinguish between such souls’ deliberate will and their “natural will and inclination,” and to proclaim that this latter, “which is not from themselves but from the Author of nature, who put this inclination into nature … can indeed be good.”[237] And, if we would not construct a scheme flatly contradictory of all earthly experience, we can hardly restrict the soul, even in the beyond, to entirely indeliberate, good inclinations, and to fully deliberate, bad volitions, but cannot help interposing an indefinite variety of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and the like, and thinking of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed this conclusion seems also required by the common teaching that the suffering there differs from soul to soul, and this because of the different degrees of the guilt: for such degrees depend undoubtedly even more upon the degree of deliberation and massiveness of the will than upon the degree of objective badness in the deed, and hence can hardly fail to leave variously small or large fragments of more or less good and imperfectly deliberate wishings and energizings present in the soul. And finally Catherine’s “little drop of Love” would, she says, “at once” turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot mean some ordinary good moral disposition or even such supernatural virtues as theological Faith and Hope, but Pure Love alone, which latter queen of all the virtues she is explicitly discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires the absence from these souls of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate virtue of a less exalted, and not necessarily regenerative kind. 3. _Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost._