At any rate, the special task of the final step of life is living in all sincerity in nearness to God--something that it is much easier to think of than to describe. The descriptions of those who have themselves experienced this suddenly leave us, as a rule, in the lurch, whether because they lived in order to act, and not to describe, or because they disdained saying things about themselves which, at their stage of advancement, seemed matters of course and nowise meritorious, but something to be continuously received in humility. The goal of this period is just here--no longer to receive anything for one’s own sake, but to become a blessing to others in that humble spirit which now has come to belong to the virtues that have been won. To begin with, there will usually come a great and final trial; for all men in whom God takes a real interest (if we may so speak) must again and again, in the different periods of their life, pass anew into a kind of smelting fire, whose glow, as Dante says, alone brings the spirit to its majority and separates the inferior elements of its nature, which perhaps appear as still necessary at a lower stage. Without a firm trust in God, such as should now exist in this final period of life, these last trials were often not to be endured; yet in them, nevertheless, each hard blow now has a tenfold effect. It is the best sign of advance if the soul possesses the grace to welcome this suffering and not to be tired of it until God himself removes it as quite superfluous. Psychologically correct in this regard is the remark of St. Angela of Foligni, that men at this stage must still, for their penance, harbor within themselves for a time, quite against their will, the very faults which once they voluntarily cultivated. Out of all this there then arises the thoroughly humble man, no longer in the least infatuated with himself, to whom everything is right that befalls him, who believes he deserved nothing better, but something still worse if pure justice had been done, and who can let everything please him if it is God’s will. But if this is all genuine and not mere pious talking, this is a difficult task for which the man will be completely qualified only toward the end of his life. For self-love must be burnt out still more thoroughly than before, and he must be inflicted, or at least threatened, with the hardest blow that can be given to his special failing. If he passes through this without ever losing his trust in God, then he has approached nearer to the divine than could happen in any other way; and if there is such a thing at all as a life of blessed spirits after the fashion of our present feelings and conceptions, then he will be brought so near to this by acquiring such a temperament, that a transition to that life will now appear conceivable and possible to him.