Claims and Teachings - Ahmad The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 243
243 occupy the hearts which are totally devoid of every impression of the glory and majesty of God. (Vol. II R. R. 1903. ) It should be further borne in mind that for proof of the blessings and fruits of Islam stated above, we do not refer the seekers after truth only to the past. Islam is not a dead religion, and we are not compelled to say that the blessings of Islam are left behind. It is in fact the unique excellence of the holy faith of Islam that its blessings are unbroken and continuous. It offers not only its blessings in the past but similar blessings even now. The world stands ever in need of blessings and heavenly signs, and it is absurd to suppose that it stood in need of such signs in the past but can do without them now. Man is a weak creature, and walks blindly until he is shown traces of the heavenly kingdom ; and his faith is a blind faith until he wit- nesses the wonderful signs of the existence and power of God. The signs shown in a previous age are of no avail in a later age unless they are renewed. The relation of stories of wonders dis- played in the past can never produce the conviction which signs witnessed by a man himself can do. Every new century is the inauguration of a new era and the beginning, as it were, of a new world. The God of Islam, who is the true God, therefore mani- fests new signs in each new world; and in the commencement of every new century, especially when the world goes astray from probity and righteousness and is involved in darkness, He raises a vicegerent of the Holy Prophet in the looking glass of whose nature the person of the Holy Prophet is imaged forth. The repres- entative so raised shows the excellences of the Holy Prophet whom he follows and establishes the charge against his oppo- nents by truth, by showing the reality and by exposing them; by truth, because shows that the prophet whom they rejected was a true prophet, and shows the heavenly signs for his truth ;