He gives wisdom to whomever He will, when that person expends sincerely and is doing it with God [in mind], and so He gives him wisdom of expenditure so that he might expend of [this] divine wisdom qualified as he is by His attributes; and he who is given wisdom, has been given much good, because it is the attribute most specific to God; yet none remembers, that wisdom is the noblest of things and the most [God-]specific of attributes, but the people of pith, whose intellects God has illumined by the light of guidance and thus rid it of the blemishes of estimation and the rind of descriptions and habits that is the soul. The reward for the first [type of] expenditure is the doubling [of the reward]. The reward for the second is Paradise of the attributes that yields the fruits of doubled [rewards]. The reward for the third is the wisdom that is the concomitant of existence and the one endowed [with it]: consider then how very different each [type] is.
