(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations, on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are essential to all true perfection. “To understand something merely in general and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly”; Our Lord Himself has taught us that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”; hence God must “know all other individual things with a distinct and proper knowledge.”--And “a thing is most perfect, when it can make another like unto itself. But by tending to its own perfection, each thing tends to become more and more like God. Hence everything tends to be like God, in so far as it tends to be the cause of other things.”[295]--We get a full insistence, with St. Paul, (in I Cor. xiii), upon our love of God, an act of the will, as nobler than our cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John, upon God’s forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and measure of His perfection. “Everything in nature has, as regards its own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others, as far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to the Divine Goodness, from which all perfection is derived.” “Love, Joy, Delight can be predicated of God”; Love which, of its very essence “causes the lover to bear himself to the beloved as to his own self”: so that we must say with Dionysius that “He, the very Cause of all things, becomes ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His loving goodness, in the providence exercised by Him towards all things extant.”[296] (v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as teaching that “the action (_operatio_), by which Angels are conjoined to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal”; whereas his commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrariwise, implies that these Angels have two simultaneous “operations,” and that their succouring action in nowise disturbs their intellectual contemplation. Hence, even if we press Matt. xxii, 30, that we “shall be as the Angels of God,” we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating between the soul and God, and the soul and other souls, each constituent and object working and attained in and through all the others.