Arba'in — Page 24
24 that are prevalent in the world. And it is clear that some people are [spiritually] diseased on account of intellectual afflictions while others are plagued by doubts of scriptural integrity, but the requisite for being ‘ I s a [ Jesus] is curing all the sick through the help of the Holy Spirit. And it is clear that if a person is flung into doubts solely through an intellectual error, it is not enough to satisfy him to simply show him, for example, a miracle, such as restoring a sick person back to health. This is because he cannot be deliv- ered from the deception of intellectual misunderstanding by such a miracle until the misconception is removed in the same way that it arose. This is why I say again and again that this age in which we dwell demands the Messiah as well as the Mahdi. The Mahdi [is needed] for the reason that in this unholy age the link between the new generation and the earlier generations has been broken and therefore it is essential that the one who is to appear must appear in the manner of A dam, whose teacher and mentor would be God alone. He is verily the one who, in other terms, is referred to as the Mahdi; that is, the one who receives guid- ance exclusively from God and who attains spiritual life entirely from Him, and he dispenses the [spiritual] knowl- edge and divine insights from which people have become alienated, insofar as the unavoidably essential quality of being a Mahdi is that he restore the lost [spiritual] knowledge and divine insights to the world since he is the spiritual Adam. In the same way it is necessary that he