wage or remuneration, but for each item of work that they carry out at their lord’s command, they experience a subtle pleasure and pleasant eagerness. Whatever they utter by way of praise and description of their lord increases their pleasure and eagerness. Knowing their connection with their holy lord to be a great honour, they content themselves with that. They find pleasure from looking to their work with the view of their lord, and for his sake and in his name. They are in no need of any wage, rank, or remuneration.

The Second Category are ordinary servants. They do not know why they are working or that they are being employed by the glorious lord. He causes them to work through his own ideas and knowledge and gives them an appropriately small wage. These servants are unaware of the various, comprehensive aims and exalted matters that result from their work. Some of them even imagine that their work concerns themselves alone and has no aim besides their wage.

The Third Category: The lord of all dominion has some animals which he employs in various jobs in the construction of the city and palace. He only gives them fodder, but their working at tasks suitable for their abilities gives them pleasure. For if a potentiality or ability is realized in action and work, there is a breathing in and expansion and this results in pleasure. The pleasure to be had from all activity stems from this. The wage and remuneration of this sort of servant, then, is only fodder and that pleasure. They are content with that.

The Fourth Category are workers who know what they are doing, and why and for whom they are working, and why the other workers are working, and what the purpose of the lord of all dominion is and why he is causing them to work. Workers of this category are therefore the bosses and supervisors of the other workers. They receive remuneration that is graded according to their rank and degree.

In exactly the same way, the Sustainer of All the Worlds, Who is the All-Glorious Lord of the heavens and the earth and the All-Beauteous Builder of this world and the hereafter, employs both angels, and animals, and inanimate beings and plants, and human beings in the palace of this world, in this realm of causality. He employs them not out of need, for the Creator of everything is He, but for certain instances of wisdom such as the functioning of His might, sublimity, and dominicality. He causes them to worship and has charged these four categories with their different duties of worship.

THE FIRST CATEGORY is the angels, who are represented in the comparison by the slaves. For the angels there is no striving and progress; they all have their fixed station and determined rank, and receive a particular pleasure from the work itself and an emanation from their worship accord-