Who said "self purging"? Not me.
One can mistake an imperfection in the seeing apparatus to something in one's surround. So it is here. I have not said "self purging" nor have I said the cross was insufficient. I hold with Augustine and Paul that perseverance is a grace. I don't know how I can be clearer than I have been,but if people are so sure that they know what I'm saying that they will not listen nor read, that seems to be beyond my power to amend.
Perhaps the problem is that, while they deny it, the post-Nominalist Calvinists and others really think that God makes marionettes of us. I suggest this because of hints of a misunderstanding of freedom. I remember defending a Biblical statement "Deus autem noster in cælo; omnia quæcumque voluit fecit," against a sola scriptura proponent, who did not understand that a truly free will chooses good, while the will the chooses evil is compromised in some way. God's will is truly free, therefore He can do and does "omnia quaecumque voluit", whatever He wishes.
The man who MEANS it when he says, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," means it because he has received the gift and grace of a free will, which, being free, wills as it ought, namely: as God wills -- quaecumque voluit, because God's will compells WILLING assent by its beauty.
In the popular love songs of our time, a lover compares himself to a puppet. What makes that wrong is NOT that his will is drawn by love, but that that sort and degree of love is inappropriate to its object, another human.
But when we encounter an "object" which is due that sort and degree of love, and when our wills are, by grace, unhindered then we freely love with all our will. At that point, the distinction between the saint's will and God's is hard to discern.
One would think that some of my antagonists had never waltzed. In such a comparatively simple task and delight, if the dancers are any good at all, it ceases to be clear who is leading and who is following. The gentleman indeed sets the pattern, but the lady is so attuned to little pressures of hand and arm that there is no perceptible lag in compliance.
I have always admired my waltz partners because it seemed to me they had the much harder task. But I never saw any trace of complaint that their will was dominated by mine. We danced and enjoyed it.
So God, who is the music (and dance floor, and ballroom) as well as the dance partner, draws eager and happy assent from us.
Yet my antagonists persist in putting into my words a pelagianism or semi-pelagianism that is simply not there. Lingering behind their protestations of sola gratia there is a seeming inability to conceive of the will which is graced into freedom and, maintained by grace in that freedom, is further graced to see the Good and to be drawn to it by its intrinsic beauty. The irony is rich and sorrowful.
Basically, what you are saying is: Gift and Response
That’s the “waltz”.... and the Gift and the Response become interchangeable in this communio of Love.