The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh/The wellspring of happiness

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possess in perpetuity. If it seem hidden from us it is not hidden by distance but by nearness. We do not have to go questing for it through the wide earth nor through the immensity of the heavens. It is in our midst. It is closer to us than breathing. It is buried in our own heart’s-deep, deep in the heart’s inmost recesses ; and there it dwells waiting to be recognised, to be discovered. 7 Everyone can be happy and ought to be. God expects it and enjoins it. Every Revelation comes as Glad Tidings, bidding man be glad and giving him cause to be. Every Prophet has found men wandering in sadness and misery and has rebuked them for it. He has called them away from the things that produce unhappiness , from anxiety and worry and cupidity, from fear of the future, from anticipation of evil, from lack of hope and faith. He has - opened to them a way of escape, promised them deliverance from evil, and the attainment, by God’s grace, of a happiness that will satisfy and endure. Now in our time the Prophet of the New Age into which we are entering, Bahá’u’lláh, gives once again the ancient glad tidings—tidings of a halipiness poured forth from heaven on all men everywhere in even greater abundance, yes, in far, far greater abundance than ever in the history of the p'ast—a happiness’the bright and eager intensity of which can only be measured, if at all, by the bitterness of our need and by the extremity of our humiliation and our suffering. Exultation and victory ring in every sentence of His proclamation of the AllGlorious Advent of God. The ancient promise, He cries, is fulfilled. God’s mercy and generosity have overcome at last the apathy and dullness of His creatures. His Name has conquered the earth. He has exposed to man’s knowledge the futility and the stupidity

ll HAPPINESS IS OUR birthright: it is ours to take, to hold, to

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of strife. The long power of delusion is broken. The reign of violence and misery is doomed. The time has come for man to attain a new understanding, new ideals, a new life which will deliver him permanently from the glooms and superstitions of ignorance and will make possible that serene divine happiness which he was created to enjoy. The earth (throughout its entire length and breadth) ought now to be filled with songs of praise and thanksgiving; and the only reason it is not so is that the opacity of man’s pride has shut out from his knowledge the light of the joy of heaven that is beating upon him.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá taught that one of the nine marks by which the True Messenger of God was to be identified was His being “a joy bringer and the herald of the kingdom of happiness.” Bahá’u’lláh in the midst of dire afflictions showed forth a spirit of serenity and acceptance radiating in others that deep steadfast joy that filled His own heaxt. He taught men to think of God as a God of Bliss—as one “by whose name the sea of joy moveth and the fragrances of happiness are wafted.” He bade men if they wished for happiness to pray for it to God.

“Vouchsafe me of Thy bounty that which will brighten my eyes and gladden my heart . . .” “Grant me the joy of beholding Thy eternal Being, O Thou who dwellest in my inmost heart . . .” “Send down upon me the fragrant breezes of Thy joy.”

He bade men receive His message as a summons to happiness. “O Son of Spirit! with the joyful tidings of light I hail thee: rejoice ! . . . The spirit of holiness beareth unto thee joyful tidings of reunion; wherefore dost thou grieve P O Son of man ! Rejoice in the gladness of thine heart, that thou mayest be worthy to meet Me and to mirror Forth My Beauty.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá brought to the world the message of the New Revelation as Glad Tidings. “If,” He would say, “this does not make you happy, what is there that will make you happy .9” A man ought to be happy because if he were not he could not be in the frame of mind to receive the bounties poured forth from on high.

When He gave a direction to the English Bahá’ís for the keeping of the day of the Báb, “the day of the dawning of the heaven of Guidance,” His words were: “Be happy—be happy—be full of

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joy I” On another occasion, He said, “T he people must be so attracted to you that they will exclaim, ‘What happiness exist: among you P’ and will see in your faces the lights of the Kingdom; then in wonderment they will turn to you and seek the cause of your happiness.”

When asked to describe how true believers ought to live, His first direction was that they should cause no one any unhappiness 5 and He closed His adjuration with a kindred thought—“Be a cause of healing for every sick one, a comforter for every sorrowful one, a pleasant water for every thirsty one, a star to every horizon, a lzght for every lamp, a herald to every one who yearns for the Kingdom of God.”

In the days of persecution in Persia, so great a spirit of happiness pervaded the Bahá’ís that it was said one could not take tea with them without wishing to join their society; and so strong was their personal influence that their enemies believed them to be possessed of some unholy magic by which they won the hearts of men to believe in the new doctrine. We have for so long sought happiness by secular or even pagan ways that although these are leading us to a dead end, we find it hard to admit that we have been travelling altogether in the wrong direction. Religion (for all the honours we instinctively pay it) has in the hands of traditionalists and formalists proved itself so impotent, a cause of so much division and discord, that when once again for the first time in hundreds and hundreds of years a Divine Prophet stands in our midst and in the name of God offers deliverance and peace of heart and blessedness we can hardly believe our eyes or our ears.

We refuse to recognise that a clue to the most precious of all lost secrets has been put into our hands and that the mystery of a perfect love has been opened to us. The very lavishness and immensity of the gift bewilders us, almost stupefies us ; as though a beggar had asked a crust and was given a kingdom. The timeliness of the gift still further enhances its value and magnifies our astonishment.

Religion has become more and more discredited. Its results have not seemed at all worth its disciplines. Its views on life have grown antiquated and do not fit nor illumine modern conditions

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of society. Those who appeared as the protagonists of religion have not stood out as models of happiness or broad sympathies: they have not been able to give men any clear guidance in the moral mazes of modern existence nor to impart comfort or strength in the frustrations that beset our efforts at stablising the social order.

Men have found many excuses for letting their faith grow cold and their religious sense become atrophied by disuse. Ordinary everyday human life has become so varied, so rich, so full of change and of movement and of novelty that it seems to be quite full and satisfying in itself and to stand in no need of religion. Men find full employment and room for intense and engrossing activities in purely secular and mundane interests. Never have they acquired so much to gratify their pride; never have they been so equipped to refine and elaborate their pleasures. They sought happiness altogether in the material things that lay to their hand.

And to a large extent—they found it!

God is kind and generous. He has made it easier for man to be happy than to be unhappy. He has scattered some kind or other of pleasantness for us everywhere. No one can miss it all! Songs of celestial delight, fragrances from the Gardens of Paradise, rays of some beatific Beauty are home to earth on all the winds of heaven and cause some echo, however brief, some reflection, dim or faint; or find some home in the hearts of men wherein to rest.

We sharpened our intellects, cast away our superstitions and'

obscurations of the past, unearthed the secrets of nature, appropriated her powers and extended our control over the world about us in a manner in which our ancestors, even a century ago, would never have imagined to be possible. Never had so complex and so forceful a civilisation been reared upon the face of the earth. And if we were compelled to feel there was something incomplete and insecure about it all; if we realised the tiger and the ape in us had not been outgrown, and if we saw that in spite of ourselves we were sinking back to the primitive ways of the jungle; nevertheless, no earlier generation of men had found so much in the world to amuse and divert and flatter and gratify them, or to

d

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prove so clearly their supremacy over all the lower forms of creation. If all civilised beings were not supermen they were assuredly superanimals and had at command a thousand kinds of intellectual entertainment which were peculiarly human and their own. Men explored the resources of humanism and bathed their souls and their sense in its delights. Intellectuals discounted that part of our tradition which is derived from Israel and emphasised more and more that which has come down to us from Greece. They turned, not their hearts only, but their minds, too, from their religious inheritance to an inheritance that was definitely not religious but artistic and literary. The Greeks carved statues of their gods which remain to this day models of taste and skill and are the envy and admiration of the world: but these gods were assuredly not made to be worshipped. The Greeks reared the Parthenon and countless temples, which are in their kind masterpieces as perfect as their works of sculpture. But these temples do not suggest the unseen world; they do not carry with them an air of mystery, of awe, of exultation. Contrast them With a Christian cathedral—with that sense of distance, with that ' sublimity and aspiration which the soaring lines of Gothic awake in the spectator’s soul—and the limitation of the Greek architect at once is betrayed. A Greek temple with its flat lines is of the earth, earthy: “A table on four legs: a dull thing,” as William Morris is said to have exclaimed of the Parthenon: and he was no belittler of the beauty of the past.

No one would disparage the glory that was Greece nor yet the splendour that was Rome. All the encomiums passed upon them recently by scholars are no doubt as just as they are enthusiastic. But the most significant thing about the revival of Greek influence is that its champions attribute that revival to the fact that the Greek world was non—religious and purely humanistic and that its aflinity which connects our age with theirs lies in the common limitations of both. In neither does the spiritual seek to find expression. Revelation was unknown to the Greeks and is unacceptable to the modern: hence they' say in our outlook on life we are akin.

One of the greatest authorities on Greek humanism, Professor

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R. W. Livingstone, a brilliant and charming writer, puts the point quite clearly in his book Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us. “Let us sum up,” he says, “the reasons of our approximation to Greece. First is Greek humanism. .The Greek set himself to answer the question how with no revelation from God to guide him. .man should live. It has been a tendency in our own age either to deny that heaven has revealed to us in any way how we ought to behave or to find such a revelation in human nature itself. In either case we are thrown back on ourselves and obliged to seek our guide there. That is why the influence of Greece has grown so much. The Greeks are the only people who have conceived the problem similarly; their answer the only one that has yet been made.”

That is very clear. But who will affirm that the masterpieces inspired by the Christian religion are less splendid than those of Greek humanism? Who will deny that Christian literature and art, in all its branches, the work of men as various as Michael Angelo and Milton, and Dante and da Vinci, has a beauty and a power and a richness and a majesty even superior to that of Greeks—and to what is this due but manifestly and confessedly to a spiritual revelation?

Whatever masterpieces of humanistic art and craftsmanship the Greeks may have left us, did they bequeath to posterity any secret of happiness—of a happiness that really satisfies, leaving no hunger, a happiness that endures producing no satiety and not ending at the last in something that is not happiness P And those academicians who drank deeply of the fountain of Greek wisdom, have they been able to save us from this self—stultification of intellectualism P

Is there to be found in Greek literature or art anything comparable to that high, noble, courageous, invincible joy that vibrates in a book which formally is by no means a Greeklike masterpiece of artistic skill or genius—the New Testament P

It was the Greeks who handed down to us the story of the Skeleton at the Feast and told how before the banquet closed a servant would bring a skeleton and bid the guests “eat, drink and be merry for to-morrow you die.” It was the Greeks who said no

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man should be called happy till his death, and they certainly did not promise him much happiness beyond it. Not to live long, they thought, was best; those whom the gods loved died young. The most wonderful and famous of their literary works gave no message of glory and hope and triumph, but were tragedies, written frequently around themes of a sombre, terrifying and even gruesome cast.

Scholars have remarked that an undertone of sadness seemed to run through the great literature of Greece. The reason is that it is humanistic—and nothing more. For when humanism thinks deeply, it thinks sadly. Our English Renaissance was not so secular as was the culture of ancient Greece: far from it. England was a Christian country with a Christian tradition and the Authorised Version was produced at the same time as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. But the accent of its Renaissance was on the human not the spiritual side, and Shakespeare in this was a true exponent of it. Broad as his sympathies were, if there be any character he could not have understood nor have put sympathetically into a drama, it is such a one as Shelley. You will find many notes in Shakespeare’s singing; but not the note of the poetry of Blake. Shakespeare’s world was far from being as Revelationless as that of ancient Greece; but the mystical aspect of things is not brought into his picture.

He, too, when he thought deeply, thought sadly. His greatest works are not his comedies, brilliant as these are. Even in these there is a shadow: not only in The Merchant of Venice but even in the gayest of all, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, and still more in The Tempest. (Poor Prospero: at the end he must bury his art—not carry it on to happier fulfilment!) But his greatest works were his tragedies and his fame rests on them.

How mighty and vigorous, how confident, adventurous, and triumphant was the England of those days, the England of Queen Elizabeth! Y et that eager and self-sufficient age did not through its most eloquent spokesmen speak the fullest happiness. Could any illustration show more conclusively the inadequacy of humanism to meet the needs of humanity P

However gay, delightful, praiseworthy, the happiness that

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humanism fathers, it must in the nature of things be qualified. It cannot be complete. Humanism can only bid us make the best of things—to look on the bright side and take the rough with the smooth. But sorrow and suffermg cannot be ignored or evaded. They Will insistently intrude themselves. It is not the stoic who has overcome the world and is able to bequeath his joy to others when he is gone. No, sorrow and suffering must be faced and included within the scheme of happiness: there is no device by which they can be left on the outside of life and induced to remain there! And if this alternation of shadow and light, this chequered and inconstant happiness be the best that life can give; if our well-being be the sport of circumstance and the plaything of fate, then, indeed, one can hardly escape from pessimism. The birds of the air who neither have to sow nor reap are happier than we!

It is religion which teaches us that pessimism is utterly wrong; that pessimism is the product of a circumscribed and limited experience. It is religion which for the first time opens up to man’s vision the height and depth, the range and the reality of God’s munificence to His creatures.

God has created man other sources of pleasure and happiness Which lie beyond those of reason and the senses; He has created. solaces, delights, raptures which arise out of the activity of higher powers, higher faculties, and belong to man’s moral nature, to the inmost and most real sphere of his being. The sphere of conscience, of the sense of right and wrong, of spiritual perception, has been affirmed by God and is felt instinctively by man to be of greater value and dignity, to be farther from earth and nearer to heaven, than the realm of sensibility or ratiocinadon; and the content, the tranquility, the happiness, the ecstasy that attach to it (like, too, its pains) are more deeply set and more vital than those which derive from the lower ranges of man’s consciousness. The common everyday experience of every mortal being bears witness to this truth; and the long, glorious story of those who in every age have laboured to advance civilisation, to promote moral progress, to establish the practice of true religion, is rich in proofs of it.

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II

Of a surety God is Joy! This is the creed, the experience, the message of religion. Not only high poets through their intuition, but the seers, the saints, the prophets, one and all, have recognised this all—explanatory, this all-animating truth. The hopes and dreams of suffering, longing mankind have been as a mirror reflecting a great reality. There is—there is a Being whose name is Bliss—changeless, throned above vicissitude and all shadow, without beginning or ending, the Eternal One, the Master of all Life, radiant, beautiful, beloved!

Had they not known this Being, the F ounders of the Religious could never have thought or spoken or endeavoured as they did: they would have had no message of comfort to give to sorrowing mankind and they could not have promised that all tears would be wiped away and only happiness would remain. Christ Himself possessed inalienably this joy; and the immortal prospect Which He held before those who died in the faith was that of sharing in eternity the joy of God. One of His express gifts to His disciples on earth was joy. “These things I have spoken unto you that my joy may be within you and your joy complete.” He said that the joy of the true believer was so great that for joy he would sell all he had to gain the object of his love! And He assured His disciples that nothing would ever take this joy away from them. The disciples are described as being filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. Paul described the Kingdom of God as “joy in the Holy Ghost,” and bade those to whom he wrote to “Rejoice in the Lord,” and “evermore to give thanks.” The New Testament, not only in the Gospels, but from the Acts to the Apocalypse, is alive with the spirit of a pervading and inviolable joy.

Not in the New Testament only but in the higher reaches of the Old Testament the same song of happiness is heard: “Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous: for praise is comely for the righteous.” “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God.”

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Had not the early Christians been animated with an invincible confidence and an amazing power of attraction, they could never have overcome indifference and persecution and won the hearts of the world to submission to Christ.

One striking proof of this spirit meets one in the early works of Christian art. This art was largely a sepulchral art, found in me catacombs or associated with death and often with martyrdom; and it was produced in time of tribulation and struggle. Yet images of sorrow and suffering are systematically excluded from it, nor is there in it any expression of bitterness or complaint. Pictures such as that of Daniel unharmed among the lions or the three children unscathed amid the flames, are the sole indication of the dreadful persecutions raging at the time. There are few representations of martyrdom, and none (as it seems) till a late date. Instead, one finds emblems of beauty and happinesspictures of the miracles of mercy, sweet emblems of immortality, and even joyous images borrowed from the mythology of the pagans.

Centuries passed away before this brave and tender note ceased to be dominant in Christian art and another and very

different mood took its place. . In distant India, long before the time of Christ, the Gita had

borne witness to their Eternal Joy and had opened to men the way to realise it.

“For persons free from desire or hatred, for the persons who have controlled their mind and who have realised the Self everywhere is found the bliss of Brahman.”

And again, “To persons who have known the Self, the bliss Of Brahman lies everywhere.”

Buddha uttered statements similar to those of Christ on His possession and His gift of happiness. He said of Himself that He “lived in the pure land of eternal bliss even while he was still in the body and he preached the laws of religion to you and the whole world that you and your brethren may attain the same peace and the same happiness.”

He set forth five meditations through the use of which the devotee might reach the land of bliss, the first of love, the second

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of pity, “the third of joy in which you think of the prosperity of others and rejoice with their reioicings.”

Buddha taught insistently that misery and fear were caused by error, and that knowledge of truth conferred a complete and undying 10y even here on earth.

“There is misery in the wm Id of birth and death: there is much misery and pain. But greater than all the misery is the bliss of truth . . . Blessed is he who has become an embodiment of truth and loving kindness. He conquers though he may be wounded; he is glorious and happy, although he may suffer . . .”

“This is the sign that a man follows the right path: U prightness is his delight and he sees danger in the least of the things which he should avoid. He trains himself in the commands of morality, he encompasseth himself with holiness in word and deed . . . mindful and self-possessed, he is altogether happy.” And again: “A brother who with firm determination walks in the noble path is sure to come forth in the light, sure to reach up to the higher wisdom, sure to attain to the highest bliss of enlightenment.”

But all theFounders of Religion have taught that the way to truth and the joy of truth is narrow and difficult. The Divine Being who is the Soul of Bliss is hard to find, hard to attain t0. Objects of earthly ambition are not gained without perseverance and labour: how much more effort will then be needed to achieve this blissful union which is the most precious and the final goal of all human endeavour! This divine joy is closely hidden, jealously concealed from the casual observation of man—but it is not hidden by distance. 011 the contrary, it lies close at hand and if it cannot be seen, this is because it is so very near. Not only is it, as the poet said of God, “nearer to us than breathing, closer than hands and feet” (that would be wonderful enough); but it is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is in human nature always a possibility that a man’s superstition or self-illusion will hang a veil between himself and his heart so that he will be in blank ignorance of that which lies at the centre of his own being.

“Their superstitions have become veils between them and their own hearts and kept them from the path of God, the Exalted, the Great. ”*

‘Bahá’u’lláh: Tablet 0/ Ahmad

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The psychological make-up of a man may be likened to a figure consisting of three or four concentric circles, the outer representing his body and the senses, the neiit representing the mental realm, the next the moral realm, and the innermost circle standing for the realm of the spiritual which is the essential part of man, the heart of his heart, and soul of his soul. It is possible for a man to live and move and spend his whole existence in the outer fringes of his being, to shut away from his experience the finer activities of thought and feeling and to have his nobler and most vital faculties misused. He may occupy his time in this or that pursuit yet never effect an entry into the sphere of conscience, of faith, or of spirit.

Such men, said Christ, are dead. Though they walk about and work and wield earthly influence, though they govern a province or preside at a Sanhedrin, they are only rational animals, men in an embryonic stage, unfit to be dignified by the title “man” in the fullness of its meaning. Such men cannot be happy. Their minds are operating in a sphere Where a stable and satisfying happiness is not to be had. They are unconscious of that finer and inner realm of being in which happiness is to be sought and found. Not to such men but to His disciples did Jesus leave His peace and His joy.

This communion with God through which a man finds Bliss is a communion of love, a meeting of like with like.

“I have breathed within thee a breath of my own spirit, that thou mayest be my lover.” *

When the veils of illusion which hide a man’s own heart from himself are drawn aside, When after purgation he comes to himself and attains self—knowledge and sees himself as he truly is, then at the same moment and by the same act of knowledge he beholds there in his own heart His Father Who has patiently awaited His son’s return.

Only through this act of self—completion, through this conclusion of the journey which begins in the kingdom of the senses and leads inward through the kingdom of the moral to end in that of the spiritual, does real happiness become possible. Now

‘Blhé’u’lláh: The Hidden Word:

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for the first time a man’s whole being can be integrated, and a harmony of all his faculties be established. Through his union with the Divine Spirit he has found the secret of the unifying of his own being. He who is the Breath of Joy becomes the animating principle of his existence. Man knows the Peace of God.

This union with God is the only happiness which the Prophets one and all affirm as worthy of the name. It does not belong to the accidents of life and is in no degree the product of imagination or illusion. It is independent of all contingencies. It rests on direct perception, on immediate union between the creature and his Creator. It is shared with God in its essence and is therefore imperishable and secure. The world did not give it and the world cannot take it away. Afflictions may add to its strength and intensity, as winds will blow a glowing fire to a flame ; but they cannot violate it. It does not deny the other and lesser pleasures which God in His generosity has bestowed upon His creatures. It does not subsist on their mortification. It is compatible with them all. It does not demand asceticism. The ministry of Jesus began with a marriage feast and His enemies accused Him of being a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber. The Great Ones of the Bahá’í Revelation lived, so far as conditions permitted, normal human lives. As sons and brothers, as husbands and fathers, and friends and men of business and affairs, they set examples which men may look to as they follow the ordinary course of social life. Bahá’u’lláh expressly discouraged ascetic habits: “take what God has given you,” He said. He permitted men by definite injunction to enjoy the comforts and comelinesses and even the luxuries of life so long as these did not wean their hearts from servitude to God and the informing spirit of sacrifice. The ordinary pleasures of life, material and intellectual, are to be taken as they come, neither being sought nor avoided but left to fall into their appropriate places.

There is only one peace of mind, one joy, one happiness which in itself deserves to be an object of contemplation and desire. The Great Prophets are not content merely to bear Witness to the reality of this, or to describe its nature. They do more ; they bear it into the world as a gift; they bring it within men’s reach, urge

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and encourage them to seek for it till they find it. The imperative which they lay on men: “Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven . . .” is not a mere counsel of perfection, not (God forbid) an unkind command to seek a goal Which men cannot attain (—-will God mock His creatures ?). It is a promise of success. “Seek and ye shall find: knock and it shall be opened to you”; which is as if He said, “You have only to strive and you will attain.”

“The heavens of Thy mercy and the oceans of T hy bounty are so vast Thou has never disappointed those who will come to Thee.” *

The poet does much when he testifies that God is Joy and when he, with inspired vision, paints scenes of elysian beatitude that await the aspiring soul of man. The High-Prophet does yet more. He opens not a vision, but the truth itself. He brings the truth down into the world among men. He imparts to those ready to receive it, the power to know the truth and become one with it.

Tragically every Prophet in religious history has found only a very few persons ready to accept Him and faithfiilly to follow out His directions. Neither in His life—time, nor in the life-time of the religion which He founds, though this be centuries long, are there many disciples who will really put His commandments to the test, will persevere in whole-hearted and exact obedience and continue in spite of discouragements in the way He has marked out till they reach the goal. Spiritual lassitude, moral compromise, the substitution of the formal for the essential, have been the rule in the history of all religions. In consequence the general effect of the teaching of the Prophets has only been a fraction of what it might have been. The possibilities of religion, as affirmed by those to whom the religions owe their origin, have never been developed. The proportion of informed and determined followers to the total population was never considerable enough to produce large historic results. There never have been many who sought their happiness in the spiritual sphere and found that road to inward. bliss which their Prophet had trodden and had left open Wide for them to walk in. The efforts of men and nations, even too often of churches, have been bent in other directions and

‘Bahá’u’lláh: A Prayer

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their energies have been spent on less immaterial objects. In consequence, human history all the world over has been darkened with troubles and vicissitudes that need never have been, and has never been blessed with the hope, the vision, the sense of proportion, or with anything better than the least suggestion of the well being and happiness which the Prophet had brought within human reach.

Not only the facts of history but the recorded forecasts of the Prophets in their lifetime bear witness to this. Moses and Jesus both foresaw the failures and the sufferings of their followers. No Scripture seems to show such premonitions of future disasters and calamities or contains so many and such grave warnings of faithlessness and of tribulation to come as the Gospel. But even in our own Age Bahá’u’lláh Himself warned men of dire retribution at hand:

“0 Ye Peoples of the World ! Know verily that an unforeseen calamity is following you and that grievous retribution awaz'tethyou. Think not the deeds ye have committeed have been blotted from My sight.” But if the great world never yet has grasped or perceived its blessings and if the Prophets have foreseen and foretold these ineptitudes and failures, the Prophets with one consent from the first to the last, from the mythic times of Adam to the present ere have assured mankind in no uncertain tones that this frustration and misery would not last forever. The day would come when the religious and social conviction of mankind would be changed, when the reality of spiritual happiness would be appreciated, if not by the whole human race, at least by great and prevailing multitudes and when it would become the possession not of. a very, very few, but of very many.

From the beginning, the date of this Event has been fixed by the providence of the Creator. From the beginning, the certainty of its future advent has been foretold to man in every Revelation. A symbolic reference to it is recorded in the first chapter of the Bible, when the seventh or final day of creation is shown as different from all the earlier days, as distinctively the Day of completeness and of divine rest, the Day of God. Only one Prophet—among all the Prophets—has not foretold this future

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Day of Fulfilment and Happiness: Bahá’u’lláh. His pronouncement is more triumphant and happy, far more than that of any Who preceded Him—for His Glad Tidings is that the Promised Day of Happiness has come! God has come in the plenitude of His power and the Lord of Bliss has established His kingdom on earth. At last God’s love for His creatures has prevailed over man’s resistance. God’s Name has conquered the earth. Man is to lift his eyes from mundane levels and to look up towards heavenly places. His consciousness is to expand. The fires of love are to be kindled in his heart and spiritual impulses are to stir and move his soul. He is to become aware of the spiritual realms that have lain unexplored in the recesses of his own heart and mind. He is to turn his eyes within, upon himself, and to find God Himself standing there powerful, mighty, supreme—the Lord of Joy.

To-day is the end of man’s long journey. The prodigal after his wanderings and his humiliations has come to himself. He knows at last what he is 3 and whence he came. He has returned to the Father Who has left His own Home and come to meet the beloved on the way. It is the Day of Reunion; the Day of God’s fulfilment, the Day of Joy. And that Blissful Being with whom ' man is now joined again, is found not to have absented Himself from man, not to have hidden Himself, in the heights nor in the depths, but to have been at hand, radiant and glorious in the recesses of man’s own spiritual being.