Hazrat Maulvi Nooruddin - Khalifatul-Masih I — Page 192
KHILAFAT Hadrat Maulw i Nur-ud-D i n ra — Khalifatul Masih I 192 On the occasion of three young men, two of them students of medicine, making the pledge of allegiance, Hadrat Khalifatul Masih ra admonished them: "One who takes the pledge becomes a slave, voluntarily and of his own free will. Those of the West say that man is born free and slavery is an evil. But let me mention an incident to you. One of my spiritual preceptors was the greatly revered Shaikh ‘Abdul Ghan i Mujaddad i , who was settled in Medina. People from far countries like Syria, Egypt, the West and Russia etc. , swore allegiance to him. I used to visit him often, but I imagined that as good and evil were expounded in detail in the books, and I had completed my education, it was no use my swearing allegiance to any one; and I wondered at the large number of those who did so. Then at one time I thought I might swear allegiance to him, as it were experimentally. If I derived no benefit from it, I could repudiate it. So I visited him with that design, but my conscience rebuked me at the possibility of my repudiating a pledge and I went back without taking that step. Later I made up my mind to make the pledge, and when I visited him I enquired from him what would I gain if I swore allegiance to him. He answered that through making a pledge of spiritual allegiance hearsay is experienced as fact, and the heard is converted into the seen. I learnt a great deal from him and made much spiritual progress under his guidance. " 80 During the last ten days of Ramadan (October 1908) Hadrat Khalifatul Masih ra went into retreat