(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine that sin defiles,--affects the quality of the soul’s moral and spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here, or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself; and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride and _solipsism_, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if, in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God), as a _sine qua non_ condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a _Metabasis_, a moving from Death over to Life. 4. _Catherine’s conceptions as to the character of the stains and of their purgation._