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All that lives, and this includes the religions, have a springtime, a time of maturity, of harvest and a winter-time. Then religion becomes barren, a lifeless adherence to the letter uninformed by the spirit, and man's spiritual life declines. When we look at religious history, we see that God has spoken to men precisely at times when thy have reached the nadir of their degradation and cultural decadence. Moses came to Israel when it was languishing under the Pharaoh's yoke, Christ appeared at a time when the Jewish Faith had lost its power and the culture of antiquity was in its death throes. Muhammad came to a people who lived in barbaric ignorance at the lowest level of culture and into a world in which the former religions had strayed far away from their origins and nearly lost their identity. The Bab addressed Himself to a people who had irretrievably lost their former grandeur and who found themselves in a state of hopeless decadence. Baha'u'llah came to a humanity which was approaching the most critical phase of its history.
(24:2)
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