The Descent of the Messiah — Page 8
THE DESCENT OF THE MESSIAH or a soothsayer. This is a hidden secret of my Powerful God. All will be decided once this secret has been manifested. A Warner came unto the world but the world did not accept him. If he is indeed from God, shall God abandon him? No. In fact, the days are at hand when He shall prove his truthfulness through pow- erful assaults. Of all the punishments in hell, there is none like regret the regret of having rejected a truthful one after the time has passed. What I intended to write here is that my book Dāfi ʻul-Balā' [Defence against the Plague], which is about the plague has been countered by my evil-minded opponents with all kinds of false- hood and they have so partaken of the impurity of lies that even an unclean animal would be unable to match them. I wonder how these people have reached this state where they see, but do not perceive, they hear but do not hearken and understand but do not comprehend. The foremost among them in telling lies is the editor of Paisa Akhbār who has repeatedly suffered humilia- tion as a result of his slander yet he does not desist. He had himself admitted that the revelation that I had pub- lished regarding Qadian was only to the extent that a devastating plague would not visit this place, but that it was quite possible for there to occur a few cases that did not result in chaos; and yet, in some of his other papers, cries out that the plague has indeed appeared in Qadian. If he possessed a shred of honesty, justice, or honour in his nature, he would not have ventured into this frivolous debate. A few people in Qadian may have died of sea- sonal fever but was it confirmed by any doctor that it was the plague? Can the mischievous writings of one of the ignorant and mean-spirited Aryas of Qadian, or one of their cohorts who have a deep hatred for the truth and do not possess the mental capac- ity to even know what the plague is, prove that the plague broke out in Qadian? The fact is that their own morality and hones- 8