The Church Suffering (ecclesia patiens).—The Church teaches, and her doctrine is abundantly supported by the Scriptures, that man can produce fruit for the eternal life only in this world, and not in the next world. “Work whilst it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work” (Jn. ix, 4; cf. 1 Cor. xv, 24 ff.) This earth alone is the field, wherein both good seed and cockle germinate and grow. The next life is the eternal harvest-time. In that life there is no “meritorious” activity, nothing that can elevate a man to a higher degree of grace and beatitude. When he stands before God in the Particular Judgment he sees himself by the judgment of his own conscience assigned once and for all either to the company of the damned or to the ranks of the blessed. And his soul will bear for ever those essential traits which it has acquired in the performance of its earthly task, in its wrestling with God, that is in fulfilling the duty which conscience illuminated by grace pointed out to it. The Catholic doctrine of Purgatory has no affinity with that Platonic and Origenist view, of Eastern derivation, whereby the human soul embarks after death upon a new stage of its development. On the other hand the Church teaches that not every soul, even though it have passed out of this world in the state of sanctifying grace, partakes at once of eternal bliss and of the Vision of God. It is true that sanctifying love gives the soul a right to the possession of God, and is already in germ a participation in the divine life. But since, according to the Catholic conception, justification does not consist in an external imputation of the merits of Christ (see p. 188), but in a true re-creation of the inward man, in his re-birth and in the supernatural emergence of a new love for goodness and holiness, therefore justification of its nature demands sanctification and perfection, and is only complete and finished in this sanctification. Strictly speaking, therefore, a man in a state of grace is not already a saint (homo sanctus), not, that is, until he has given this grace free scope in his life and under its awakening impulse overcome every evil tendency, even to his most intimate thoughts and most subtle inclinations, and having made goodness supreme within him has become the perfect and unalloyed man. Only such a one, whose being is in its every part transfigured by love of God and his neighbor, only such a one will see God. Are there such men on this earth of ours? “Who shall be able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?” (1 Kings vi, 20). History testifies indeed that God has been pleased to reveal His power in weak human vessels. There have been, and there are saints, who have ripened even in this life “unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” though they may in outward form have remained the children of their time and have achieved their final perfection only in their death. But experience also teaches us that the great majority of the pious faithful who leave this life have not attained that sublime ideal of being perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect” which our Lord puts before us and which is prefigured and implanted in us with the grace of our adoption as His sons. A great many Christians, when they die, are united and devoted to God, the absolute Good, only in the center of their being, but remain otherwise imperfect and immature. God’s rule is not yet supreme in every room and corner of their being. They have been subject to many erratic impulses and errors; they have fallen at times into transgressions, without full consciousness of the sinful character of their acts or omissions. Some sins there have been, which they rather suffered than deliberately committed, sins which are to be ascribed to unruly nature and not to the center of their personal being, sins which theology therefore calls “venial sins:” And there is no doubt that innumerable souls leave this world with a load of venial sin, and in consequence are unfit to “walk the holy way” (cf. Isaias xxxv, 8).