And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference to a coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man will give you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living bread which hath come down from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the conception of the eternal Christ-God offering Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by St. Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to be spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread of life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh (alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is, again through the Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her favourite Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45. (4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find that Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions, which undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich outlook than that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching. Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3, 5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words” that are “spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear to His words “hath eternal life,” v, 24. Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment, which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun κρίσις--like when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from the darkness,” Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,--the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the matter.