A close study of this aspect of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s teaching indicates certain fundamental elements as conditional to the solution of the economic problem. One of these elements is the universal obligation of useful labor. Consider how idleness is condemned by physiologist and psychologist today, no less vigorously than by the moralist and the student of economics. Wealth does not exempt any human being from the consequences of idleness or even misdirected activity. The consequences are ill-health of mind as well as body, and that disordered condition whose end is impotence or insanity. Moreover, in avoiding useful labor, the privileged classes and their parasites have deprived themselves of the very capacity for labor, while that capacity increases in those who cannot or will not avoid work. In this condition we may see perhaps one meaning of Christ’s saying: “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has also stated that useful labor, performed in the spirit of service, and with the ideal of perfection, is accounted an act of worship and a form of prayer. Now prayer and worship, in their true signification, are not cries for assistance, nor requests for a gift, nor yet taxes paid to a spiritual overseer, but are expressions of love to God and gratitude for the supreme gift of life in the spirit that knows no death. It is this spirit of love and devotion which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá declares should actuate our daily labor. Moreover, work performed in this spirit is creative work, and to create is an attribute of God, so it is the worker who shows forth the divine image and likeness on this material plane. But consider how many changes must take place in the industrial world before this creative sense can be generally expressed, and before labor is surrounded by the conditions which this conception of labor demands! Nevertheless, even this shall be; for the Holy Spirit is destroying mightily all that intervenes between man and his own reality.

Another fundamental element is that of the voluntary sharing of wealth.

Reflect how those who possess other forms of wealth—physical, mental, moral and spiritual—have ever obeyed this universal and wonderful law. Thus those who share their physical strength with the weak; those who strive incessantly to increase the commonwealth of beauty and of truth; those who devote their lives to the realization of greater political justice; and, above all, those who give love to whosoever has it not, fulfill this divine law. All the love, beauty, truth, justice and science we have on earth are the result of a voluntary sharing of wealth—a divine principle whose veils grow darker and darker as we approach the lowest degree of wealth, which is gold. But were we to estimate the sum total of all the taxes paid to any government within the past fifty years, and regard this total as being wealth forcibly rather than voluntarily shared, we can perceive how disastrously extravagant material selfishness is, even on its own plane. For a fraction of that sum total, given in the spirit of unity, would have obviated most of those expenses by which taxes are consumed, while in addition increasing vastly the means of producing more wealth by all and for all.

Yet, far from condemning wealth, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes its attainment through useful labor a specific advice; but the object of its possession is the promotion of the unity of mankind. By considering wealth as a talent on the material plane, the principle becomes clear. It is not the inequality of talents or possessions which produces injustice, but the spirit of separateness in the poor as well as the rich, in the ignorant as well as in the learned. Mutual dependence is the essential foundation of love, for no one can stand alone.