Bahá'u'lláh and the New EraEsslemont, J. E. (John Ebenezer)
Religion
Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era
Esslemont, J. E. (John Ebenezer)
Bahai Faith; Bahá'u'lláh, 1817-1892
If we wish to pray, we must have some object on which to
concentrate. If we turn to God, we must direct our hearts to a
certain center. If man worships God otherwise than through His
Manifestation, he must first form a conception of God, and that
conception is created by his own mind. As the finite cannot
comprehend the Infinite, so God is not to be comprehended in this
fashion. That which man conceives with his own mind he
comprehends. That which he can comprehend is not God. That
conception of God which a man forms for himself is but a phantasm,
an image, an imagination, an illusion. There is no connection
between such a conception and the Supreme Being.
If a man wishes to know God, he must find Him in the perfect
mirror, Christ or Bahá’u’lláh. In either of these mirrors he will
see reflected the Sun of Divinity.
As we know the physical sun by its splendor, by its light and
heat, so we know God, the Spiritual Sun, when He shines forth from
the temple of Manifestation, by His attributes of perfection, by
the beauty of His qualities and by the splendor of His light.
(from a talk to Mr. Percy Woodcock, at Akká, 1909).
Again He says:
Unless the Holy Spirit become intermediary, one cannot attain
directly to the bounties of God. Do not overlook the obvious
truth, for it is self-evident that a child cannot be instructed
without a teacher, and knowledge is one of the bounties of God.
The soil is not covered with grass and vegetation without the rain
of the cloud; therefore the cloud is the intermediary between the
divine bounties and the soil.... The light hath a center and if
one desire to seek it otherwise than from the center, one can
never attain to it.... Turn thine attention to the days of Christ;
some people imagine that without the Messianic outpourings it was
possible to attain to truth, but this very imagination became the
cause of the deprivation.
A man who tries to worship God without turning to His Manifestation is
like a man in a dungeon trying through his imagination to revel in the
glories of the sunshine.
Prayer Indispensable and Obligatory
The use of prayer is enjoined upon Bahá’ís in no uncertain terms.
Bahá’u’lláh says in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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