Hazrat Ahmad — Page 14
14. HADHRAT AHMAD regard and consideration. Nevertheless, their solicitude for material advantages and their life-long struggle for the same and their failure to win them in a measure to which they considered themselves rightly entitled by reason of their family status were sufficient to impress upon the pure and undefiled soul of Ahmad the truth that the life of this earth is transitory and in the end one must render its account to one's Creator. This was the lesson he learnt in his childhood, and he learnt it so well that he did not forget it till his last hour. Though the world approached him in its most alluring garbs and tried to tempt him from his path, never did he pay the least attention to it. Once estranged from it he never made it up with it again. . Thus in his early childhood he had observed such a bitter object lesson in the life of his father that it turned his heart cold towards the world forever. At a very early age his whole mind was centered upon winning the pleasure of the Almighty. His biographer, Shaikh. Yakub Ali, relates a very significant anecdote of his childhood, when he exhorted a girl playmate, whom he later married: 'Pray for me, miserable one, that I may be granted the grace of prayer. '. In this brief exhortation uttered while he was still a mere child we may discern the quality of the emotions that surged through his heart even at that early age, and perceive that even then the goal of his desires was God and God alone. We can, moreover, observe the insight he had already developed in those early years. He had come to recognize that God alone has the power to bring about the fulfilment of all desires and realized that even the grace of prayer is a gift which is only in God's power to bestow. This yearning for the grace of prayer and this realization that it was God alone who could satisfy in the mind of a child of tender years around whom the young and the old were all devoted to worldliness is proof that his heart was entirely free from the defilements of the world and was in receipt of special Divine assistance for the working of a mighty change in the world. . Early Education. He was born in an age of darkness when little thought was given to learning. During the period of Sikh supremacy, if a person received a letter from a friend, he had to put himself to considerable pains to get it read out to him, and letters often remained long undeciphered for that reason. Many of the