#mslim

As this traveller through the cosmos proceeded on his meditative journey, with increased eagerness and a bouquet of gnosis and faith, itself like a spring, gathered from the garden of the spring, there opened before his truth-perceiving intellect, his cognitive reason, the gate to the animal and bird realm. With hundreds of thousands of different voices and various tongues, he was invited to enter. Entering, he saw that all the animals and birds, in their different species, groups and nations, were proclaiming, silently and aloud, “There is no god but He,” and had thus turned the face of the earth into a vast place of invocation, an expansive assembly for the proclamation of God’s glory. He saw each of them to be like an ode dedicated to God, a word proclaiming His glory, a letter indicating His mercy, each of them describing the Maker and offering Him thanks and encomium. It was as if the senses, powers, members and instruments of those animals and birds were orderly and balanced words, or perfect and disciplined expressions. He observed three great and comprehensive truths indicating, in decisive form, their offering of thanks to the Creator and Provider and their testimony to His unity.

The First: Their being brought into existence with wisdom and purpose and their creation full of art in a fashion that in no way can be attributed to chance, to blind force or inanimate nature; their being created and composed in purposive and knowledgeable manner; their animation and being given life in a way that displays in twenty aspects the manifestation of knowledge, wisdom, and will - all of this is a truth that bears witness to the Necessary Existence of the Eternally Living and Self-Subsistent, His seven attributes and unity, a witness repeated to the number of all animate beings.

The Second: There appears from the distinction made among those infinite beings and from their adornment and decoration in a fashion by which their features are different, their shapes adorned, their proportions measured and symmetrical, and their forms well-ordered - there appears from this a truth so vast and powerful that none other than the One Powerful over all things, the One Knowledgeable of all things, could lay claim to it, this comprehensive act which displays in every respect thou sands of wonders and instances of wisdom; it is impossible and precluded that anything other than such a one could lay claim to it.

The Third: The emergence and unfolding of those countless creatures, in their hundreds of thousands of different shapes and forms, each of which is a miracle of wisdom, their emergence from eggs and drops of water called sperm that are identical with each other or closely resemble each other, and are limited and finite in number, all this in the most orderly, symmetrical and unfailing fashion, is so brilliant a truth as to be illumined with proofs and evidences as numerous as the animals themselves.

By the consensus of these three truths, all the species of animals are engaged together in testifying that “There is no god but He.” It is as if the whole earth, like a great man, were saying “There is no god but He” in a manner befitting its vastness, and conveying its testimony to the dwellers of the heaven. The traveller saw this and understood it perfectly. In expression of these truths, we said in the Seventh Degree of the First Station: