to comprehend and embrace all things is itself a form of unity that leaves no room for the assignation of partners to God. Just as the nineteen Truths of the First Chapter bearing witness to the necessary existence of God also attest the existence of the Creator through their own existence, so too they bear witness to His unity through their comprehensiveness. Our traveller then saw the following Second Truth in the Third Stopping-Place:

THE SECOND TRUTH: the Truth of Mercifulness

We see with our own eyes that there is one who has covered the face of the earth with thousands of gifts of mercy, and made it into a feasting-place. He has laid out a spread of hundreds of thousands of the different delicious foods of Mercifulness, and made the inside of the earth a storehouse containing thousands of precious bounties of compassionateness and wisdom. That Being sends to us also the earth, in its yearly rotation, like a ship or a train, laden with the finest of the hundreds of thousands of vital human necessities, proceeding from the World of the Unseen; and He sends to us too the spring, like a waggon carrying food and clothing for us. Thus does he nurture us, with utmost compassion. In order for us to profit from those gifts and bounties, He has moreover given us hundreds and thousands of appetities, needs, feelings, sensations and senses.