And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the classical authority on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares: “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locutions or on the intelligible form of the vision, will of necessity fall into delusion; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment from sense.” “He who shall give attention to these motes of the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality at all.” “All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others.” Indeed “virtue does not consist in these apprehensions. Let men then cease to regard, and labour to forget them, that they may be free.” For “spiritual supernatural knowledge is of two kinds, one distinct and special,” which comprises “visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions”; “the other confused, obscure, and general,” which “has but one form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them.” Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too, “one desire only doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual apprehensions will, in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified soul. “One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly, that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[50] 3. _Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies._