If we wish to pray, we must have some object on which to
concentrate. If we turn to God, we must direct our hearts to a certain center.
If man worships God otherwise than through His Manifestation, he must first
form a conception of God, and that conception is created by his own mind. As
the finite cannot comprehend the Infinite, so God is not to be comprehended in
this fashion. That which man conceives with his own mind he comprehends. That
which he can comprehend is not God. That conception of God which a man forms
for himself is but a phantasm, an image, an imagination, an illusion. There is
no connection between such a conception and the Supreme Being.
If a man wishes to know God, he must find Him in the perfect
mirror, Christ or Bahá'u'lláh. In either of these mirrors he will see reflected
the Sun of Divinity. As we know the physical sun by its splendor, by its light
and heat, so we know God, the Spiritual Sun, when He shines forth from the
temple of Manifestation, by His attributes of perfection, by the beauty of His
qualities and by the splendor of His light.
- ‘Abdu’l-Baha (Words of 'Abdu'l-Baha to Percy Woodcock, at 'Akká, 1909, cited in ‘Baha’u’llah and the New Era’)
