It must not be supposed, however, that manual labour alone was thought worthy of praise.  On the contrary, the necessity for mental and spiritual workers was fully appreciated, and all kinds of labour were thought equally worthy of honour.  ’Heavy labourer’s work is the inevitable yoke of punishment, which, according to God’s righteous verdict, has been laid upon all the sons of Adam.  But many of Adam’s descendants seek in all sorts of cunning ways to escape from the yoke and to live in idleness without labour, and at the same time to have a superfluity of useful and necessary things; some by robbery and plunder, some by usurious dealings, others by lying, deceit, and all the countless, forms of dishonest and fraudulent gain, by which men are for ever seeking to get riches and abundance without toil.  But while such men are striving to throw off the yoke righteously imposed on them by God, they are heaping on their shoulders a heavy burden of sin.  Not so, however, do the reasonable sons of Adam proceed; but, recognising in sorrow that for the sins of their first father God has righteously ordained that only through the toil of labour shall they obtain what is necessary to life, they take the yoke patiently on them....  Some of them, like the peasants, the handicraftsmen, and the tradespeople, procure for themselves and others, in the sweat of their brows and by physical work, the necessary sustenance of life.  Others, who labour in more honourable ways, earn the right to be maintained by the sweat of others’ brows—­for instance, those who stand at the head of the commonwealth; for by their laborious exertion the former are enabled to enjoy the peace, the security, without which they could not exist.  The same holds good of those who have the charge of spiritual matters....’[1] ‘Because,’ says Aquinas, ’many things are necessary to human life, with which one man cannot provide himself, it is necessary that different things should be done by different people; therefore some are tillers of the soil, some are raisers of cattle, some are builders, and so on; and, because human life does not simply mean corporal things, but still more spiritual things, therefore it is necessary that some people should be released from the care of attending to temporal matters.  This distribution of different offices amongst different people is in accordance with Divine providence.’[2]

[Footnote 1:  Langenstein, quoted in Janssen, op. cit., p. 95.]

[Footnote 2:  Summa Cont.  Gent., iii. 134.]

All forms of labour being therefore admitted to be honourable and necessary, there was no difficulty felt about justifying their reward.  It was always common ground that services of all kinds were entitled to be properly remunerated, and questions of difficulty only arose when a claim was made for payment in a transaction where the element of service was not apparent.[1] The different occupations in which men were engaged were therefore ranked in a well-recognised hierarchy