He, for Whose sake the world was called into being, hath
been imprisoned in the most desolate of cities (Akká), by reason of that which
the hands of the wayward have wrought. From the horizon of His prison-city He
summoneth mankind unto the Dayspring of God, the Exalted, the Great. Exultest
thou over the treasures thou dost possess, knowing they shall perish? Rejoicest
thou in that thou rulest a span of earth, when the whole world, in the
estimation of the people of Bahá, is worth as much as the black in the eye of a
dead ant? Abandon it unto such as have set their affections upon it, and turn
thou unto Him Who is the Desire of the world. Whither are gone the proud and
their palaces? Gaze thou into their tombs, that thou mayest profit by this
example, inasmuch as We made it a lesson unto every beholder. Were the breezes
of Revelation to seize thee, thou wouldst flee the world, and turn unto the
Kingdom, and wouldst expend all thou possessest, that thou mayest draw nigh
unto this sublime Vision. (Baha’u’llah, excerpt from a Tablet to Napoleon III; quoted by Baha’u’llah in the ‘Epistle
to the Son of the Wolf’; “The Summons of the Lord of Hosts’)
