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.
(Baha’u’llah, ‘The Kitab-i-Iqan’)
