leave the making of the clock to the lifeless hands of those machines? Is that not beyond the bounds of possibility? Come on, you judge with your unfair reason, and say!
And is it easier for a scribe to collect ink, pen and paper, and then using them proceed to write out a book himself? Or is it easier for him to create in the paper, pen and ink a writing-machine that requires more art and trouble than the book, and can be used only for that book, and then tell the unconscious machine: “Come on, you write it!”, and himself not interfere? Is that not a hundred times more difficult than writing it himself?
I f y o u s a y : Yes, it is a hundred times more difficult to create a machine that writes a book rather than writing it out oneself. But is it not in a way easier, because the machine is a means of producing numerous copies of the same book?
T h e A n s w e r : Through His limitless power, the Pre-Eternal Inscriber continuously renews the infinite manifestations of His names so as to display them in ever-differing ways. And through this constant renewal, He creates the identities and special features in things in such a manner that no missive of the Eternally Besought One or dominical book can be the same as any other book. In any case, each will have different features in order to express different meanings.
If you have eyes, look at the human face: you will see that from the time of Adam until today, indeed, until post-eternity, together with the conformity of its essential organs, each face has a distinguishing mark in relation to all the others; this is a definite fact. Therefore, each face may be thought of as a different book. Only, for the artwork to be set out, different writing-sets, arrangements, and compositions are required. And in order to both collect and situate the materials, and to include everything necessary for the existence of each, a completely different workshop will be required.
Now, knowing it to be impossible, we thought of nature as a printing-press. But apart from the composition and printing, which concern the printing-press, that is, setting up the type in a specific order, the substances that form an animate being’s body, the creation of which is a hundred times more difficult than that of the composition and ordering, must be created in specific proportions and particular order, brought from the furthest corners of the cosmos, and placed in the hands of the printing-press. But in order to do all these things, there is still need for the power and will of the Absolutely Powerful One, who creates the printing-press. That is to say, this hypothesis of the printing-press is a totally meaningless superstition.
Thus, like the comparisons of the clock and the book, the All-Glorious Maker, who is powerful over all things, has created causes, and so too does