He was, at any rate, harmless in Cyprus,
and had no further opportunity for religious assassination. One
cannot help regretting that his sun went down so stormily. I return
therefore to the question of the honorific names of Mirza Yah??ya,
after which I shall refer to the singular point of the crystal coffin
and to the moral character of S??ubh??-i-Ezel.
Among the names and titles which the Ezelite book called _Eight
Paradises_ declares to have been conferred by the Ba?„b on his
young disciple are S??ubh??-i-Ezel (or Azal), Baha-'ullah, and the
strange title _Mir'at_ (Mirror). The two former--'Dawn of
Eternity' and 'Splendour of God'--are referred to elsewhere. The third
properly belongs to a class of persons inferior to the 'Letters of the
Living,' and to this class S??ubh??-i-Ezel, by his own admission,
belongs. The title Mir'at, therefore, involves some limitation of
Ezel's dignity, and its object apparently is to prevent
S??ubh??-i-Ezel from claiming to be 'He whom God will make manifest.'
That is, the Ba?„b in his last years had an intuition that the eternal
day would not be ushered into existence by this impractical nature.
How, then, came the Ba?„b to give Mirza Yah??ya such a name? Purely
from cabbalistic reasons which do not concern us here. It was a
mistake which only shows that the Ba?„b was not infallible. Mirza
Yah??ya had no great part to play in the ushering-in of the new
cycle.
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