he wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand. And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate, set up, there shall be a thousand, two hundred and ninety days. The advent of the Messiah shall take 1290 years after the abrogation of the Daily Sacrifice. A day, in the language of the Prophecy, sometimes means a year and sometimes a
-thousand years of our human reckoning. Turn over Chapter 4, of the Book of Prophet Ezekiel, and read verse 6: I have appointed thee each day for a year. The Jews made burnt offering at the altar. They slaughtered lambs before the tabernacle and consigned them to flames. This practice the Jews for. sook in the sixth century C.E. which synchronized with the time of the advent -of the Prophet of Arabia. Daniel prophesied that the Messiah shall re-appear 1290 years after the abolition of the Daily Sacrifice, i. e. 1290 years after the Holy Prophet Muhammad. Compare what Hadzrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement, wrote in his famous Book, Haqiqat-ul- Wahy, page HlO: It is wonderful indeed, and I look upon it as a sign from God, that this humble servant had been blessed with Divine Communion precisely in the year 1920 A.H. (i. e. 1290 years after the Holy Prophet). Let us, for the statisfaction of our Bahai friend assume that Bahaullah, and not Hadzrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was the Messiah who was to appear in the present age. Now the -queetion naturally arises. Has Bahaullah performed and fulfilled the mission ordained
for the Promised Messiah? The prime purpose of the advent of the Messiah, as stated in the sacred scriptures, was to overturn the Religion of Cross, and rectify and reform the errors that had crept into the simple, monotheistic faith preached by Prophet Jesus, son of Mary. That Jesus was the heavenly Son of God who did not belong to earthly humanity; who came to this: world assuming human form in order to atone for the sins of human race by his own blood on the Cross : who rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven to take his seat on the right hand of the Most High God: this was the basic belief where the super-structure of the Church Christianity was constructed. But the Religion of the Church was entirely distinct from the Religion of Jesus. Jesus was nothing more than a Hebrew Prophet who laid stress on the fulfilment of the law and the Prophets; but the Religion of the Church had depicted him as a deity of the ancient world who was crucified like other sun-goods for the sins of human race, who rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven. Jesus had come to demolish Paganism and not to reproduce it under his own name. The Holy Quran had denounced this Mystery Cult of the Church in strong terms. But it was for the Promised Messiah to give it the final overthrow.
Bahaullah, instead of setting himself against this polytheistic teaching of the Church, gave" it a new strength by making a similar claimhimself, that the Most High God had assumed human form in the flesh of Bahaullah, as Hehad done previously in the shape of Jesus, to propitiate for the sins of human race. Wrotehe in his Kitab al-Aqdas :
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"Allah, speaking from the great prison, bears witness to the fact that there is no god but he. He is, of a truth, the Creator of all things and all names. He has suffered all these troubles to atone for the sins of human race, and give them new, eternal life." Is it not the same doctrine of Atonement on which stands the whole fabric of the Church teaching? We read in the well-known Bahai book, Bahaullah and theNew Era: ·'.Jesus was a mediator, and the Christians were certainly on the right in believing that his advent was indeed the advent of the Most High God. In his face they saw the face of the Divine Being, and through his lips they heard the voice of the Supreme Being, Bahaullah has said that by the coming of the Lord of Hosts, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, which is to take place in the last age'
according to the teachings of all prophets, is m