“We ask God to sanctify the hearts of certain of the doctors from rancor and hatred that they may regard things with eyes which closure overcometh not; and to raise them unto a station where the world and the lordship thereof shall not turn them aside from looking toward the Supreme Horizon, and where [anxiety for] gaining a livelihood and [providing] household goods shall not divert them from [the thought of] that day whereon the mountains shall be made like carpets. Though they rejoice at that which hath befallen Us of calamity, there shall come a day whereon they shall wail and weep. By My Lord, were I given the choice between the glory and opulence, the wealth and dignity, the ease and luxury wherein they are, and the distress and affliction wherein I am, I would certainly choose that wherein I am today, and I would not now exchange one atom of these afflictions for all that hath been created in the kingdom of production! Were it not for afflictions in the way of God My continuance would have no sweetness for Me, nor would My life profit Me. Let it not be hidden from the discerning and such as look towards the chiefest outlook that I, during the greater part of My days, was as a Servant sitting beneath a sword suspended by a single hair who knoweth not when it shall descend upon Him, whether it shall descend instantly or after a while. And in all this We give thanks to God the Lord of the worlds, and We praise Him under all circumstances: verily He is a witness unto all things. “We ask God to extend His shadow,(47) that the unitarians may haste thereto, and that the sincere may take shelter therein; and to bestow on [these] servants flowers from the garden of his grace and stars from the horizon of his favors; and to assist him in that which he liketh and approveth; and to help him unto that which shall bring him near to the Dayspring of His Most Comely Names, that he may not shut his eyes to the wrong which he seeth, but may regard his subjects with the eye of favor and preserve them from violence. And we ask Him (exalted is He) to make thee a helper unto His religion and a regarder of His justice, that thou mayest rule over [His] servants as thou rulest over those of thy kindred, and mayest choose for them what thou wouldest choose for thyself. Verily He is the Potent, the Exalted, the Protecting, the Self-Subsistent.” Now since suitable occasion hath arisen it hath been considered appropriate that some of the precepts of Bahá’u’lláh which are contained in tracts and epistles should also be inserted briefly in this treatise, so that the main principles and practice and [their] foundations and basis may become clear and apparent. And these texts have been copied from numerous tracts.