Claims and Teachings - Ahmad The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 152
152 ' in the world is, therefore, due to an absence of true knowledge concerning the Divine Being. The chief criterion of a true religion is that it should point out. the means to a true knowledge of God, so that through knowledge men may be kept back from sins, and realizing the Divine beauty and glory, they may so love God as to deem even a momentary estrangement from Him more / painful than the severest tortures of hell. The truth is that V ' freedom from sin and the love of God are the highest aims of man's life, and in these lies in fact the true bliss which is known as the heavenly life. Every desire which goes against the pleasure of God, is really a flame of hell-fire, aud'to indulge in such desires is to lead a hellish life. The question hence arises, how can a man be saved from this hellish life ? I answer this question with / the knowledge which I have received from God, that no one is saved from this fire except by a true and perfect knowledge of God. The flood of passions and desires rages high arid nothing but the embankment of a perfect knowledge of God can withstand it. Salvation which means a freedom from the control of passions and : desires, cannot, therefore, be attained unless our faith is based on the impregnable fortress of perfect knowledge which no flood can destroy. The fact that our appraisement of a thing or our love or fear of it, depends only upon our correct knowledge of it, needs no argument. Give a diamond worth a million pounds to a young child and he would not set upon it a higher value than a mere plaything. If honey mixed with poison is given to a person who is ignorant of the fact, he would take it for honey and eat it with pleasure, not knowing that the effect would be fatal. But you cannot thrust your hand into a hole which you know to be the hole of a serpent, for you know that such an act might bring about your destruction. Similarly no one would dare to take poison with a knowledge of it, for he knows that it must