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But now in the sixth chapter, and "in the year that king Uzziah died," a wondrous vision of the pre-existent Christ, "sitting upon a throne high and lifted up" and the seraphim crying one to another "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts," was vouchsafed to the prophet.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Fourth Gospel once, and once only, identifies this Word with the pre-existent nature of Jesus, in the concluding words of the same exordium: "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we behold His Glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
Their rank, however, in the angel world will not be uniform, but will vary according to the excellence of their life on earth. Jesus therefore, because of his unique purity of life, must necessarily be the most highly exalted of all such angels. And so, in point of fact, he is. Of all angels, only he has ever been admitted to a position of co-equality with the pre-existent Son.
According to common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary accident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the pre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace. It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves. Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence.
At this moment intellect has seized upon the seven-league boots of the fable, which fitted every body who drew them on, and strides over the universe. How soon, as on the decay of the Roman empire, may all the piles of learning which human endeavours would rear as a tower of Babel to scale the heavens, disappear, leaving but fragments to future generations, as proofs of pre-existent knowledge!
It is that degree of the spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H. Myers, "of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that pre-existent and limitless power.
It is in fact a negation, which must prësuppose a matter once in being and possible to be denied; it is an abstraction, which cannot happen unless there be somewhat to be taken away; the idea of vacuity must be posterior to that of fullness; the idea of no tree is incompetent to be conceived without the previous idea of a tree; the idea of nonentity suggests, ex vi termini, a pre-existent entity; the idea of Nothing, of necessity, prësupposes Something.
Meanwhile what actually DOES count for true to any individual trower, whether he be philosopher or common man, is always a result of his APPERCEPTIONS. If a novel experience, conceptual or sensible, contradict too emphatically our pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is treated as false.
I say "seems," for I am not sure how far it really is so. We never saw something come out of nothing, that is to say, we never saw a beginning of anything except as the beginning of a new phase of something pre-existent.
Moreover, as a further testimony to the majestic unfoldment and progressive consolidation of the stupendous undertaking launched by Bahá’u’lláh on that holy mountain, may be mentioned the selection of a portion of the school property situated in the precincts of the Shrine of the Báb as a permanent resting-place for the Greatest Holy Leaf, the “well-beloved” sister of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the “Leaf that hath sprung” from the “Pre-existent Root,” the “fragrance” of Bahá’u’lláh’s “shining robe,” elevated by Him to a “station such as none other woman hath surpassed,” and comparable in rank to those immortal heroines such as Sarah, Ásíyih, the Virgin Mary, Fátimih and Táhirih, each of whom has outshone every member of her sex in previous Dispensations.
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