And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of these contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both in a state of unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take it that it is not her immensely impulsive and impatient temperament, nor survivals of the Old Testament idea as to instantaneousness being the special characteristic of divine action, but her deep and noble sense of the givenness and pure grace of religion, and of God’s omnipotence being, if possible, exceeded only by His overflowing, self-communicative love, which chiefly determine her curious presentation and emotional experience of spiritual growth and life as a movement composed of sudden shiftings upwards, with long, apparently complete pauses in between. For here this form (of so many instants, of which each is complete in itself) stands for her as the least inadequate symbol, as a kind of shattered mirror, not of time at all, but of eternity; whilst the succession and difference between these instants indicates a growth in the apprehending soul, which has, in reality, been proceeding also in between these instants and not only during them. And this remarkable scheme presents her conviction that, in principle, the work of the all-powerful, all-loving Spirit cannot, of itself, be other than final and complete, and yet that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in weak, self-deceptive, and variously resisting man, but ever turns out to require a fresh and deeper application. And this succession of sudden jerks onwards and upwards, after long, apparently complete pauses between them, gives to her fundamentally ethical and continuous conception something of the look of the forensic, dramatic series, with its separate acts,--a series which would otherwise be all but unrepresented in her picture of the soul’s life on this side of death and of its life (immediately after its vivid sight of God and itself, and its act of free-election) in the Beyond. 6. _Pauline Social Ethics._ As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God being servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of (mercenary) soldiers; and as to her determination violently to appropriate the monk’s cowl, should this his state be necessary to the attainment of the highest love of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20, “nothing is common in itself, but to him who considereth anything to be common, to him it is common,”--“all things are clean”; and of 1 Cor. x, 26, 28, “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And her sense of her soul’s positive relation to nature, _e.g._ trees, was no doubt in part awakened by that striking passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the expectation of the creature awaiteth the revelation of the sons of God; for the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly.”