penalty. For the penalty for an illicit, mis-spent love is merciless torment. For sure, one particle of the love of a Pre-Eternal Beloved Who, through the names of Most Merciful and Compassionate, has prepared for you a dwelling like Paradise adorned with houris in which all your bodily desires will be gratified, and through others of His names has readied for you in that Paradise everlasting favours that will satisfy all the longings of your spirit, heart, inner heart, mind, and other subtle inner faculties, and in all of whose names are contained many treasuries of grace and munificence – one particle of His love may take the place of the whole universe. But the universe cannot take the place of even a particular manifestation of His love. In which case, heed this Pre-Eternal Decree which that Pre-Eternal Beloved caused His own Beloved to announce, and follow it:
If you love God, follow me, and God will love you.(3:31)
Second Fruit
SECOND FRUIT
O soul! Worship is not the introduction to additional rewards, but the result of previous bounties. Yes, we have received our wage and are accordingly charged with the duties of service and worship. For since the All-Glorious Creator, Who clothed you in existence, O soul!, which is pure good, has given you a stomach and appetite, through His name of Provider He has placed before you all foods on a table of bounties. Then, since He has given you a life decked out with senses, life too requires sustenance like a stomach; all your senses like eyes and ears are like hands before which He has placed a table of bounties as broad as the earth. Then, because He has given you humanity, which requires many immaterial foods and bounties, He has laid out before that stomach of humanity, in so far as the hand of the mind can reach, an extensive table of bounties as broad as the worlds of both the inner and outer dimensions of things. Then, since He has given you Islam and belief, which require infinite bounties and are nourished through countless fruits of mercy and are supreme humanity, He has opened up before you a table of bounties, pleasure, and happiness which includes the sphere of contingency together with the sphere of His sacred names and attributes. Then, by giving you love, which is a light of belief, He has bestowed on you an endless table of bounties, happiness, and pleasure. That is to say, with regard to your corporeality you are an insignificant, weak, helpless, lowly, restricted, limited particular, but through His favour you have as though risen from being an insignificant particular to being a universal, luminous whole. For by giving you life, He has raised you from particularity to a sort of universality; and by giving you humanity, to true universality; and by bestowing Islam on you, to an exalted, luminous universality; and by giving you knowledge and