And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in its strict sense and “the most excellent of all the virtues”: for “ever that which exists for its own sake is greater than that which exists in view of something else. Now Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the source from which there accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and the acquisition of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with a view to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue to us from Him.” And perhaps still more clearly: “ When a man loves something so as to covet it, he apprehends it as something pertaining to his own well-being. The lover here stands towards the object beloved, as towards something which is his property.”[165] And note how, although he teaches that whereas “the beatitude of man, as regards its cause and its object, is something increate,” _i.e._ God Himself, “the essence of the beatitude itself is something created,” for “men are rendered blessed by participation, and this participation in beatitude is something created”: yet he is careful to explain some of his more incidental passages, in which he speaks of this essence of beatitude as itself man’s end, by the _ex professo_ declaration: “God” alone “is man’s ultimate end, and beatitude is only as it were an end before the very end, an end in immediate proximity to the ultimate end.”[166] (2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and desirableness of single Acts of such Pure Love, even here below: all this is assumed as a matter of course throughout St. Thomas’s _ex professo_ teaching on the matter. For throughout the passages concerning the Nature of Pure Love he is not exclusively, indeed not even primarily, busy with man’s acts in the future life, but with the respective characteristics of man’s various acts as executed and as analyzable, more or less perfectly, already here below. And nowhere does he warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence upon the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such love cannot, as a matter of fact, be practised, at least in single acts, here below at all. Hence it is clear that, according to him, the soul as it advances in perfection will--alongside of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope, Fear, etc. (and the production of such acts will never cease), produce more and more acts of Pure Love: not necessarily more, as compared with the other kinds of contemporary acts, but certainly more as compared with its former acts of the same character.