who aforetime had forgotten it shall say, 'The prophets of our Lord did indeed bring the truth; shall we have any intercessor to intercede for us? or can we be sent back? then would we do other works than what we did.' But they have ruined their souls, and (the imaginary deities) that they were devising have fled from them." See also Surat Women, 163, "Apostles, preachers, warners, so that men should have no argument (of excuse) against God after the Apostles (had been sent)."
O men, does it not appear from all this that each man is held responsible for his own works and that the acts of others will neither harm nor injure, raise or lower; he who is saved is saved by his deeds, and he who perishes perishes by his own. Sad to say, all men on the face of the earth are sinners, those that you see to be better than their fellows were once evil doers, but repented, and are not, even now, entirely free from slips, nor immune from mistakes, or even the " greater " sins. Sura Bee, 62 says, "If God should punish men for their wrongdoing, He would not leave a moving thing on earth."
Since, then, men are only able to be saved by their own deeds,[1] and, as you have seen, all men's deeds are faulty, consequently the whole race would be doomed to perish in hell; but the all-merciful God intervened in man's private matter and planned for him a legal way of imputing to himself the deed of someone else as though it was his own, by which he could be saved!
Now, what can this plan be? Are you able to improvise it from your human intellects? I think not.
God, however, has revealed it in His Holy Book, and commissioned us to tell all men of it. It is this—that He has provided for fallen human nature an agent, or rather a legal representative; this being the only possible plan whereby one could stand in the place of another, transfering not only his acts but his very person as though it were himself. To make this good tidings clearer I will quote a case familiar to you from your own books of Islamic Sharee'a (Law).
Suppose a father dies, leaving an inheritance to a
- ↑ i.e., No human intercession is available.
