man or woman of the Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this
conflict lasted for four years, after which the thought of sin ceased to
rule her consciousness.[60] St. Teresa's intermittent struggles are
said to have continued for thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply
religious, did not attain the inner stability he calls assurance till he
was thirty-five years old. Blake was for twenty years in mental
conflict, shut off from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do
great personalities come to their full stature, and subdue their
vigorous impulses to the one ruling idea.

The ending of this conflict, the self's unification and establishment in
the new life, commonly means a return more or less complete to that
world from which the convert had retreated; taking up of the fully
energized and fully consecrated human existence, which must express
itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity
for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first
return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world
of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and
St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for
their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a
disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as a
busy and devoted hospital matron and inspired teacher of a group of
disciples. St. Teresa's long interior struggles precede her vigorous
career as founder and reformer; her creation of spiritual families, new
centres of contemplative life. The vast activities of Fox and Wesley
were the fruits first of inner conflict, then of assurance--the
experience of God and of the self's relation to Him. And on the highest
levels of the spiritual life as history shows them to us, this
experience and realization, first of profound harmony with Eternity and
its interests, next of a personal relation of love, last of an