To Be Left Without a Question

Someone may imagine that the examination can be got past in silence: he sits, does not answer, and is let through. Revelation denies this outright:

So the matter is not declaring where you belong, but proving it by what you do. Trial, in truth, is a test of the servant's obedience to his Lord, and of how far he keeps to the teaching of the two revelations in every part of his life. The one who passes it is the one who has the insight to see past the outward look of the hall and its passing ornament to what lies beneath, certain that every pleasure that comes to him and every affliction that strikes him is a question asking for an immediate answer: either a step upward among the grateful, or a holding of ground in the trenches of those who endure. And this is the very thing the Prophet ﷺ marvelled at:

On the other side, heedlessness of all this, and sinking into luxury and ruinous rivalry over things, is a scattering that leaves the heart with diseases: love of this world, envy of others, boasting, and conceit. And such a man does not lose because he got the answer wrong, but because he never knew he was in an examination.

And from here you understand the counsel that sums up the way of the one sitting in the hall:

A stranger does not build himself a house in a railway station, and a traveller passing through does not quarrel over a seat he will leave in an hour. And the narrower this world becomes for the believer, the wider the other hall grows in his eyes, until the description is true of him:

There is no belittling of the earth in this, and no blame for building it up; the hall is entered and what is in it is used, its water is drunk and its provision eaten and its building raised. The point is only that the one sitting there should remember that the desk in front of him is not his home, and that what was put on it was put there to be asked about, not merely to be owned.

Two Men in the Hall

Broadly, people in the greater hall are of two kinds. A man who thinks he is at rest, and behaves like a man at rest: he spreads out in his seat, argues over the place, measures himself against his neighbour, and is angry if someone reaches a window before him. And a man who knows he is in a sitting, and behaves like a man being examined: he is sparing with the minute, the noise of the room does not distract him, he is not pleased by one seat nor grieved by another, because his eye is on the line he is writing and not on the chair he is sitting on. There is no difference between the two men in luck or in cleverness. The difference is one sentence that one of them says to himself every morning: I am in an examination now.