Though distant in body, these heroic souls [Letters of the
Living] are engaged in daily communion with their Beloved, partake of the
bounty of His utterance, and share the supreme privilege of His companionship.
Otherwise how could Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Kázim have known of the Báb? How
could they have perceived the significance of the secret which lay hidden in
Him? How could the Báb Himself, how could Quddús, His beloved disciple, have
written in such terms, had not the mystic bond of the spirit linked their souls
together? Did not the Báb, in the earliest days of His Mission, allude, in the
opening passages of the Qayyúmu’l-Asmá, His commentary on the Súrih of Joseph,
to the glory and significance of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh? Was it not His
purpose, by dwelling upon the ingratitude and malice which characterised the
treatment of Joseph by his brethren, to predict what Bahá’u’lláh was destined
to suffer at the hands of His brother and kindred? Was not Quddús, although
besieged within the fort of Shaykh Tabarsí by the battalions and fire of a
relentless enemy, engaged, both in the daytime and in the night-season, in the
completion of his eulogy of Bahá’u’lláh—that immortal commentary on the Sád of
Samad which had already assumed the dimensions of five hundred thousand verses?
Every verse of the Qayyúmu’l-Asmá, every word of the aforementioned commentary
of Quddús, will, if dispassionately examined, bear eloquent testimony to this
truth.
(Chapter 3, ‘The Dawn-Breakers’)
