Life Supreme — Page 11
14. LIFE SUPREME mistakes from time to time as we have many temptations to battle with and overcome; but if our spirit is strong we need not despair of ultimate success. In fact our every effort to advance in moral development will lead us upward towards heaven and even if we fall short of the heights of our aspirations we shall have travelled a long way on the heaven bound path of virtue. God says in the Holy Quran that even when we falter and stumble we should not despair: "O my servant who have committed excesses against their own soulsı. Despair not of the Mercy of Allah, surely Allah forgives all sins. Verily. He is Most Forgiving, Merciful. " (39:54). Hazrat Khalifatul Masih II is the author of the book Ahmadiyyat or True Islam in which he writes: "Islam rescues man from despair and tells him that he can, in spite of his errors and mistakes, attain to the purity of mind and conduct which is the highest goal of man. It thus encourages him to make constant effort towards virtue and purity and enables him ultimately to arrive at his goal. ". William Gladstone, a former British Prime Minister of the Victorian era, made the following significant statement: "No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. ". Although the prophets of God are exempt from this observation because they are exceptionally good all their lives, it is a truth which is witnessed in the lives of all other great men; so if from time to time we slip on the path of virtue we should not be unduly grieved but pick ourselves up and carry on, determined more than ever not to make the same mistakes again. . Two thousand years ago a famous Roman author named Seneca wrote the folowing appraisment of a virtuous man: "The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution; who resists the sorest temptations from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and the most fearless under menaces and frowns; whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God is the most unfaltering. وو