are unceasingly flowing in the river of time; they are being sent from the World of the Unseen; they are being clothed in external existence in the Manifest world; then they are being poured in orderly fashion into the World of the Unseen, and it is there that they alight. At their Sustainer’s command, they continuously come from the future, stop by in passing pausing for a breath, and are poured into the past.
This flood of creatures is being made from top to bottom with instances of wisdom, benefits, results, and aims within the sphere of a most wise mercy and munificence; as is this constant travelling, within the sphere of a most knowledgeable wisdom and orderliness; and this current, within the sphere of a most compassionate solicitude and equilibrium. That is to say, an All-Powerful One of Glory, an All-Wise One of Perfection, is continuously giving life to and employing the families of beings, and the individuals within each family, and the worlds that those families form. Then, with His wisdom He discharges them, manifests death and despatches them to the World of the Unseen. He transfers them from the realm of power to the realm of knowledge.
Is it then at all possible that one who does not have the ability to administer the universe in its totality, whose authority does not stretch throughout time, whose power is not sufficient to make the world manifest life and death like a single individual, who cannot bestow life on the spring as though it were a single flower, attach it to the face of the earth and then pluck it from it with death and gather it up, could such a one be the owner of death and the granter of death? Yes, the death of the lowliest animate being, even, like its life, must necessarily occur according to the law of the Glorious One in whose hand are all the truths of life and varieties of death, and with His permission, and at His command, and through His power, and with His knowledge.
THE EIGHTH PHRASE: “And He is living and dies not”
That is, His life is perpetual, it is pre-eternal and post-eternal. Death and evanescence, non-existence and cessation, cannot befall Him. He who is pre-eternal must certainly be post-eternal. He who is sempiternal must certainly be eternally enduring. He who is necessarily existent, must certainly be without beginning or end. How could non-existence touch a life of which all existence, in all its varieties, is its shadow? Non-existence and ephemerality and cessation could in no way encroach on a life through whose manifestation all lives continuously come into being, on which all the stable truths of the universe are dependent, and through which they subsist.