Morning
Make not your deeds as snares wherewith to entrap the object of your aspiration, and deprive not yourselves of this Ultimate Objective for which have ever yearned all such as have drawn nigh unto God. Say: The very life of all deeds is My good pleasure, and all things depend upon Mine acceptance. Read ye the Tablets that ye may know what hath been purposed in the Books of God, the All-Glorious, the Ever-Bounteous. He who attaineth to My love hath title to a throne of gold, to sit thereon in honour over all the world; he who is deprived thereof, though he sit upon the dust, that dust would seek refuge with God, the Lord of all Religions.
- Baha’u’llah (‘The Kitab-i-Aqdas’)
Evening
Thy vision is obscured by the belief that divine revelation
ended with the coming of Muhammad, and unto this We have borne witness in Our
first epistle. Indeed, He Who hath revealed verses unto Muhammad, the Apostle
of God, hath likewise revealed verses unto ‘Alí-Muhammad. For who else but God
can reveal to a man such clear and manifest verses as overpower all the
learned? Since thou hast acknowledged the revelation of Muhammad, the Apostle
of God, then there is no other way open before thee but to testify that
whatever is revealed by the Primal Point hath also proceeded from God, the Help
in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. Is it not true that the Qur’án hath been sent
down from God and that all men are powerless before its revelation? Likewise
these words have also been revealed by God, if thou dost but perceive. What is
there in the Bayán which keepeth thee back from recognizing these verses as
being sent forth by God, the Inaccessible, the Most Exalted, the All-Glorious?
The essence of these words is this: Were We to bring thee to a reckoning, thou wouldst prove thyself empty-handed; We in truth know all things. Hadst thou uttered ‘yea’ on hearing the Words of God, thou wouldst have been seen to have been worshipping God from the beginning that hath no beginning until the present day, never to have disobeyed Him, not even for the twinkling of an eye. Yet, neither the upright deeds thou hast wrought during all thy life, nor the exertions thou didst make to banish every thought from thy heart save that of the good-pleasure of God, none of these did in truth profit thee, not even to the extent of a grain of mustard seed, inasmuch as thou didst veil thyself from God and tarried behind at the time of His manifestation.
- The Báb (From an address to a Muslim divine; ‘Selections from the Writings of the Báb)
