A representative of the workers’ guild met Elia and asked him to speak on work.  Elia spoke:

“If you would have your work be fruitful, count not the days and nights of your labor.  Counting the miles always lengthens the journey.

Some would hold that work demeans.  Yet work can demeaned him who is already demeaned.  Others would say:  work makes free.  But I ask:  free from what?  Just as surely work can make unfree.

Yet others would have be slaves to the company.  But what is the hive without its worker bees?  And what is ownership without labor?

Still others would have you confuse ownership with labor.  Now, I do not presume to be in direct communication with the God who created human nature, but I know this:  all that contradicts human nature is destroyed and relegated to the garbage can of history.

You would take on the might hammer and fashion yourselves?  You would be your own potters?  You would smoothen out your metal and purify your essence?

Alas, brothers, this will not work; man has wrought untold change in mountain and ocean, but is powerless to wring himself.  And though his vapors might change, his inner combustion does not. 

Would you immerse your heart in a smelter?  But to what end?  What metal man would you create?  A tin man of mineshafts?

The wisdom of God has created your program and he has decreed that it shall rule man.  But he Promethean fire might yet be discovered; and when man has left his mark even on himself, even the earth will have had enough.