The Pen That Never Rested: The Outpouring of the Revelation

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, which draws on the eyewitness chronicle of Nabíl and on the testimony of Bahá'u'lláh's companions. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

When we speak of the glory of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, we usually think of its teachings, or of the lives it transformed. But there is a plainer wonder that the early believers witnessed with their own eyes, and that Shoghi Effendi sets down in God Passes By as one of the surest signs of that glory: the sheer, oceanic abundance of the Word that flowed from Him.

For forty years, through exile after exile and prison after prison, Bahá'u'lláh revealed verses. Not occasionally, not in carefully husbanded measure, but in a torrent that astonished all who saw it. Shoghi Effendi describes the volume of His writings as immense — outstripping, in bulk, the sacred scriptures of the religions that had gone before. Tablets to kings and to commoners; books of laws and of certitude; prayers, meditations, commentaries, letters to individual believers answering the particular cares of their hearts — they poured from Him in Persian and in Arabic, and the stream did not slacken with age or with suffering.

The companions who were present at the times of revelation left their testimony, and the histories preserve it. When the spirit of revelation descended upon Bahá'u'lláh, the words came faster than a human hand could capture them. His amanuensis — most often Mírzá Áqá Ján — would take up reed pen and paper and write at desperate speed, and even so could scarcely follow. The verses, one witness recalled, streamed forth "as in a copious rain." So swift was the dictation that what was first set down had afterward to be transcribed again at leisure, because the original, taken at the speed of the descending Word, was very nearly illegible.

And here Shoghi Effendi records a detail that staggers the mind. So vast was the outpouring that a great portion of what was revealed was never even preserved. At Bahá'u'lláh's own bidding, much of it was not written down at all, or, once written, was obliterated. The river ran so full that the world was not permitted to keep all of it. What survives — itself a treasury beyond reckoning, more than a hundred volumes — is only the portion that was meant to remain.

There is a particular majesty in where this abundance came from. By every outward measure Bahá'u'lláh had been rendered powerless: stripped of His wealth, banished from His homeland, watched by guards, walled into a penal city, His name a byword for sedition among the very governments He addressed as their equal. From that condition of utter dispossession came a wealth of revealed Scripture greater than any single Messenger of the past had left behind. The emptier His outward circumstances, the fuller the river ran.

The believers understood what they were seeing. To sit in His presence at such an hour was, by their own accounts, to feel the very room transformed — the walls, the air, every object seeming to come alive and to listen. They knew that no human learning could produce such a thing; that no scholar, however gifted, composes flawless verse without pause or correction, hour upon hour, year upon year, in two languages, on every subject from the laws of a future civilization to the consolation of a single grieving heart. The torrent itself was the testimony. It bore witness to its own Source.

Shoghi Effendi gathers all of this not as a marvel to be wondered at and set aside, but as evidence of the station of the One from whom it flowed. The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, he writes, is distinguished above all that preceded it by its range, its volume, and its potency. The Pen of the Most High did not rest. For four decades it poured out upon a turning, indifferent world a bounty the world could not even contain — and that ceaseless, overflowing generosity of the Word is, in itself, a sign of the Glory whose name He bore.

The verses descended so swiftly that the pen of the recorder could scarcely keep pace with the voice that revealed them. Such was the abundance of the Glory of God, poured out from the depths of a prison upon all the peoples of the earth.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/