The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states. Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory, gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification, but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed, as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection, on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive of her truest self.--Act and state and state and act, each presupposes and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures, and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states. V. CATHERINE AND HEAVEN--THREE PERPLEXITIES TO BE CONSIDERED. We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. But what about Heaven, which we must, apparently, hold to consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition of mere reproductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state of unmixed, unchanging joy?--Here again, even if in a lesser degree, certain experiences of the human soul can help us to a few general positions of great spiritual fruitfulness, which can reasonably claim an analogical applicability to the Beyond, and which, thus taken as our ultimate ideals, cannot fail to stimulate the growth of our personality, and, with it, of further insight into these great realities. I shall here consider three main questions, which will roughly correspond to the three perplexities just indicated. 1. _Time and Heaven._