Purification continues to be an unpleasant part of life up to the very last breath, however advanced in holiness a man may be. The first stage in the way of perfection is called ‘purgative’ or purifying only because that ascetic activity is the predominant one at the beginning. A man has to struggle to abandon vice when he turns to God and sincerely tries to follow him. And so he purifies himself and opens his heart to the purifying action of God in the ways already suggested in previous articles. God himself also cultivates the soul as the farmer first cultivates the soil with plough and harrow. But at the point we have reached we come to the first outstanding transformation; the Christian soul is about to be converted once more and to enter upon a new form of life, fuller and more fruitful. He begins to enter another kind of asceticism, asceticism, a a dark night of the senses in which the spirit becomes far freer than before.