Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible master are living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame, but of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our sensibilities as something fundamentally and eternally wrong.

They are a servant class, although, being servants of a very exalted master, they rank high in the social scale by virtue of this borrowed light.

Their consumption is vicarious consumption; and since, in the advanced cults, their master has no need of material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in the full sense.

"Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they are conceived to be servants of the divinity.

So far this imputed vicarious character attaches also to the layman's life.