God, therefore, has exalted Poverty and has made it a special distinction of the poor, who have renounced all things external and internal, and have turned entirely to the Causer; whose poverty has become their pride, so that they lamented its going and rejoiced at its coming, and embraced it and deemed all else contemptible. Now, Poverty has a form (_rasm_) and an essence (_ḥaqíqat_). Its form is destitution and indigence, but its essence is fortune and free choice. He who regards the form rests in the form and, failing to attain his object, flees from the essence; but he who has found the essence averts his gaze from all created things, and, in complete annihilation, seeing only the All-One he hastens towards the fullness of eternal life (_ba-faná-yi kull andar ru´yat-i kull ba-baqá-yi kull shitáft_). The poor man _(faqír)_ has nothing and can suffer no loss. He does not become rich by having anything, nor indigent by having nothing: both these conditions are alike to him in respect of his poverty. It is permitted that he should be more joyful when he has nothing, for the Shaykhs have said: “The more straitened one is in circumstances, the more expansive (cheerful and happy) is one’s (spiritual) state,” because it is unlucky for a dervish to have property: if he “imprisons” anything (_dar band kunad_) for his own use, he himself is “imprisoned” in the same proportion. The friends of God live by means of His secret bounties. Worldly wealth holds them back from the path of quietism (_riḍá_). _Story._ A dervish met a king. The king said: “Ask a boon of me.” The dervish replied: “I will not ask a boon from one of my slaves.” “How is that?” said the king. The dervish said: “I have two slaves who are thy masters: covetousness and expectation.” The Prophet said: “Poverty is glorious to those who are worthy of it.” Its glory consists in this, that the poor man’s body is divinely preserved from base and sinful acts, and his heart from evil and contaminating thoughts, because his outward parts are absorbed in (contemplation of) the manifest blessings of God, while his inward parts are protected by invisible grace, so that his body is spiritual (_rúḥání_) and his heart divine (_rabbání_). Then no relation subsists between him and mankind: this world and the next weigh less than a gnat’s wing in the scales of his poverty: he is not contained in the two worlds for a single moment. SECTION.