A new version of the Bahá’í Reference Library is now available. This ‘old version’ of the Bahá’í Reference Library will be replaced at a later date.
The new version of the Bahá’i Reference Library can be accessed here »
A new version of the Bahá’í Reference Library is now available. This ‘old version’ of the Bahá’í Reference Library will be replaced at a later date.
The new version of the Bahá’i Reference Library can be accessed here »
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Necessity for a Mediator |
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A mediator is necessary between man and the Creator—one who receives the full light of the Divine Splendor
and radiates it over the human world, as the earth’s
atmosphere receives and diffuses the warmth of the
sun’s rays. 91 If we wish to pray, we must have some object on which to concentrate. If we turn to God, we must direct our hearts to a certain center. If man worships God otherwise than through His Manifestation, he must first form a conception of God, and that conception is created by his own mind. As the finite cannot comprehend the Infinite, so God is not to be comprehended in this fashion. That which man conceives with his own mind he comprehends. That which he can comprehend is not God. That conception of God which a man forms for himself is but a phantasm, an image, an imagination, an illusion. There is no connection between such a conception and the Supreme Being. If a man wishes to know God, he must find Him in the perfect mirror, Christ or Bahá’u’lláh. In either of these mirrors he will see reflected the Sun of Divinity. As we know the physical sun by its splendor, by its light and heat, so we know God, the Spiritual Sun, when He shines forth from the temple of Manifestation, by His attributes of perfection, by the beauty of His qualities and by the splendor of His light. (from a talk to Mr. Percy Woodcock, at ‘Akká, 1909). |
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Unless the Holy Spirit become intermediary, one cannot
attain directly to the bounties of God. Do not overlook
the obvious truth, for it is self-evident that a child
cannot be instructed without a teacher, and knowledge is
one of the bounties of God. The soil is not covered with
grass and vegetation without the rain of the cloud; therefore
the cloud is the intermediary between the divine
bounties and the soil. … The light hath a center and if
one desire to seek it otherwise than from the center, one
can never attain to it. … Turn thine attention to the
days of Christ; some people imagine that without the
Messianic outpourings it was possible to attain to truth,
but this very imagination became the cause of the
deprivation.
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