ers unto His people?" Even as the All-Glorious hath recorded
their statement: "Why hath not an angel been sent down to him, so that he
should have been a warner with Him?"(63)

Such objections and differences have persisted in every age and century.
The people have always busied themselves with such specious discourses,
vainly protesting: "Wherefore hath not this or that sign appeared?" Such
ills befell them only because they have clung to the ways of the divines
of the age in which they lived, and blindly imitated them in accepting or
denying these Essences of Detachment, these holy and divine Beings. These
leaders, owing to their immersion in selfish desires, and their pursuit of
transitory and sordid things, have regarded these divine Luminaries as
being opposed to the standards of their knowledge and understanding, and
the opponents of their ways and judgments. As they have literally
interpreted the Word of God, and the sayings and traditions of the Letters
of Unity, and expounded them according to their own deficient
understanding, they have therefore deprived themselves and all their
people of the bountiful showers of the grace and mercies of God. And yet
they bear witness to this well-known tradition: "Verily Our Word is
abstruse, bewilderingly abstruse." In another instance, it is said: "Our
Cause is sorely trying, highly perplexing; none can bear it except a
favorite of heaven, or an inspired Prophet, or he whose faith God hath
tested." These leaders of religion admit that none of these three
specified conditions is applicable to them. The first two conditions are
manifestly beyond their reach; as to the third, it is evident that at no
time have they been proof against those tests that have been sent by God,
and that when the divine Touchstone appeared, they have shown themselves
to be naught but dross.

Great God! Notwithstanding their acceptance of the truth of this
tradition, these divines who are still doubtful of, and dispute about, the
theological obscurities of their faith, yet claim to be the exponents of
the subtleties of the law of God, and the expounders of the essential
mysteries of His holy Word. They confidently assert that such traditions
as indicate the advent of the expected Qa'im have not yet been fulfilled,
whilst they themselves have failed to inhale the fragrance of the meaning
of these traditions, and are still oblivious of the fact that all the
signs foretold have come to pass, that the w