Ahmadiyya Movement — Page 22
22 canal, on one side of which would be found coral and on the other pearls, and large ships would pass constantly through this canal and remind people of the favours and blessings of God (this refers to the construction of the Suez Canal); monarchies would fall; workmen would be given a chance of governing; the police would increase; order would be maintained inside dif- ferent countries, but governments would be suspicious of each other and would seek to injure one another, etc. , etc. All these things, as we know, have already come to pass, and they are recorded in well-known books preserved in European libraries. These prophecies show that the Promised Messiah should have appeared in the present age, but the question next arises, what is there to show that the Founder of the is the person concerning whom all these prophecies were made? We find that there are some prophecies which indicate even his personality. For instance, it had been written that, during the time of the Prophet of the Latter Days, the moon would suffer an eclipse on the 13 th , and the sun on the 28 th , of the lunar month of Ramadan, and this sign has not been vouchsafed to or fulfilled in the case of any other claimant to prophethood. But in the case of the Promised Messiah (on whom be peace) this sign was ful- filled four years after he had published his claim, viz. , in 1894, in a manner which was admitted even by astronomers to be ex- traordinary. Again, it had been written that Mahdi would belong to a family of landholders, that his father would be a great land holder, but that in the time of the Mahdi the greater portion of the lands would be lost to the family. So it came to pass that, al- though in the time of the Promised Messiah’s father the family had lost its position as a ruling family, yet he was the proprietor of eight villages, but at the advent of the British Government even these villages were confiscated, the estate now consisting of proprietary rights over one village and Taluk-dari rights over three villages. On the death of the Promised Messiah’s father, even this small estate was still further curtailed as, owing to