Life of Ahmad — Page 512
512 CHAPTER 53 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH It should be remembered that the scenes that were being enacted in Qadian and the Punjab in those days were by no means local in their character and significance. They did not have reference only to the immediate present. It was not an ordinary man in a remote village who was discussing the local petty topics of the day. Not only was the subject of Ahmad’s as discourses of universal significance and importance but the voice that was being raised was a voice that was to grow in strength and might throughout the world. It was to gather a force that the wildest imagination of his contemporaries could not conceive. It was to transform the whole trend of world events. It was indeed the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Ahmad as was speaking as the vicegerent of God in his official capacity of a universal reformer. His opponents were the voices of the dying faiths of the world. The Dean of St. Paul’s said a short while ago that not more than 20 per cent of the people of Great Britain were Christians in any possible sense of