unrest can indeed give way to clear sight and certitude: yet this very clarity and assurance will, in each human soul, still bear a certain individual character,” fully comprehensible to the other souls by love land trust alone.[303] (3) And this same element we find, of course, in a still greater degree,--although, as I shall argue later on, our experimental knowledge of God is greater than is our knowledge of our fellow-creatures,--in the relations between our love of God and our knowledge of Him. St. Thomas tells us most solidly: “Individual Being applies to God, in so far as it implies Incommunicableness.” Indeed, “_Person_ signifies the most perfect thing in nature,”--“the subsistence of an individual in a rational nature.” “And since the dignity of the divine nature exceeds every other dignity, this name of Person is applicable, in a supreme degree, to God.” And again: “God, as infinite, cannot be held infinitely by anything finite “; and hence “only in the sense in which comprehension is opposed to a seeking after Him, is God comprehended, _i.e._ possessed, by the Blessed.” And hence the texts: “I follow, if that I may apprehend, seeing that I also am apprehended” (Phil. iii, 12); “then shall I know even as I am known” (1 Cor. xiii, 12); and “we shall see Him as He is” (1 John iii, 2): all refer to such a possession of God. In the last text “the adverb ‘as’ only signifies ‘we shall see His essence’ and not ‘we shall have as perfect a mode of vision as God has a mode of being.’”[304]--Here again, then, we find that souls loving God in His Infinite Individuality, will necessarily love Him beyond their intellectual comprehension of Him; the element of devoted trust, of free self-donation to One fully known only through and in such an act, will thus remain to man for ever. St. John of the Cross proclaimed this great truth: “One of the greatest favours of God, bestowed transiently upon the soul in this life, is its ability to see so distinctly, and to feel so profoundly, that … it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like to the souls in heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those that have the less clear vision, do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[305] With this teaching, so consonant with Catherine’s experimental method, and her continuous trust in the persistence of the deepest relations of the soul to God, of the self-identical soul to the unchanging God, we can conclude this study of her Eschatology. CHAPTER XIII THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY, MYSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE. MYSTICISM AND THE NATURE OF EVIL