A Present to Kings — Page 43
( 43 ) the o confidence grows that when the prophecies of a person concerning these troubles made thirteen hundred years before the event, have been fulfilled to the letter, it is certain that the remedy prescribed by him will also be fully effective and that God, Who had so long saved Islam from the attacks of its foes will also succour it at the present juncture. What then is this remedy? It is the advent of a person who, endowed with the spirit and power of Jesus, will save the world from the peril of Christianity, and, vested with the rank of the Mahdi, will quell the distempers of the Moslem society and bring about an internal reformation of the same. People will be healed by his breath, in as much as by faithful following he will come to be such a perfect image of the Holy Prophet that the work done by him will veritably be the work of the Holy. Prophet, from whom he will cease to be separate. This is what God refers to in the following Quranic verse: which means that the Holy Prophet will twice منهم لما يلحقوا بهم undertake the guidance of the world-once in his own time, the time of the holy companions, and once again in the latter days, when he will teach a company who will be far, in point of time, from the holy companions. Now, it is clear, that the Holy. Prophet is dead and cannot return to the earth. The verse, therefore, means that some other person in the spirit and power of the Holy Prophet will by perfect obedience and submission to him bring about in this age the reformation and revival of. Islam. His reforms will, count as the reforms of the Holy. Prophet himself, because he will be so completely taken up by the love of the Holy Prophet as to lose his individuality in that of the Holy Prophet. Their mutual relation will be such as has been described by a poetI merged in thee, thou merged in me, I the body, thou the sou! ;. So n'er may it be said again each of us a separate whole. . This close relation is also referred to in the tradition in which