Yet it may be that you will consume, destroy, your soul, because of the intensity of the ecstasy [?] and grief over their turning away and rejection, and that is because compassion for God's creatures and mercifulness towards them is one of the concomitants and results of the love of God. And since he [Muḥammad], may God bless him and grant him peace, was the beloved of God, and one of the concomitants of his being beloved [by Him] was his love of God - as in His saying whom He loves and who love Him [Q. 5:54] and the stronger his love for the Truth, the greater his compassion and mercifulness towards His creatures, since compassion towards them constituted the shadow of his love of God - so his sympathy for them was great, for they are [to him] as his children and his kin, nay, as his organs and limbs in the real presential vision, which is why he was extremely grief-stricken over them, so much so that he almost destroyed himself; and so he also realised that when a lover fortifies himself with his Beloved through the continuing effort to [achieve] arrival [at knowledge of God], the acceptance of Him becomes manifest in the hearts by virtue of God's love of him [the Prophet]. Hence when they failed to believe in the QurÌān, he [the Prophet] became conscious of a remnant of his soul and sensed a deficiency in his state whereupon he was overcome by ecstasy and resolved to vanquish his soul totally in pursuit of that goal. That was because of his extreme compassion for them and his perfect manners before God, for he attributed their non-belief to the weakness of his state and not to the lack of preparedness on their part, which is why He then gave him solace with the words: