h exerted,
partake of such benefits as have been pre-ordained in God's irrevocable
and hidden Tablets. If no one be willing to direct his steps towards its
shores, if every one should fail to arise and find Him, can such a failure
be said to have robbed this ocean of its power or to have lessened, to any
degree, its treasures? How vain, how contemptible, are the imaginations
which your hearts have devised, and are still devising! O My servants! The
one true God is My witness! This most great, this fathomless and surging
Ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you
than your life-vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but
wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given
grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious
bounty.

O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of My munificence and
bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth, rid
yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a true
knowledge of your own selves--a knowledge which is the same as the
comprehension of Mine own Being. Ye would find yourselves independent of
all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner and outer eye, and as
manifest as the revelation of My effulgent Name, the seas of My
loving-kindness and bounty moving within you. Suffer not your idle
fancies, your evil passions, your insincerity and blindness of heart to
dim the luster, or stain the sanctity, of so lofty a station. Ye are even
as the bird which soareth, with the full force of its mighty wings and
with complete and joyous confidence, through the immensity of the heavens,
until, impelled to satisfy its hunger, it turneth longingly to the water
and clay of the earth below it, and, having been entrapped in the mesh of
its desire, findeth itself impotent to resume its flight to the realms
whence it came. Powerless to shake off the burden weighing on its sullied
wings, that bird, hitherto an inmate of the heavens, is now forced to seek
a dwelling-place upon the dust. Wherefore, O My servants, defile not your
wings with the clay of waywardness and vain desires, and suffer them not
to be stained with the dust of envy and hate, that ye may not be hindered
from soaring in the heavens of My divine knowledge.

O My servants! Through the might of God and His power, and out of the
treasury of His knowledge and wisdom, I have brought forth and revealed
unto