The doctrine of the Manifestations is the faith's distinctive contribution and it does specific work. The Manifestations are not God incarnate and they are not merely inspired human beings; the recurring image is a polished mirror facing the sun, which shows the sun perfectly while the sun never enters the glass. Each possesses two stations — a station of essential unity with the others, in which they can say what none of them says as an individual, and a station of individuality in which they differ in name, era and law. This apparatus resolves a set of inherited problems at once: it lets Jesus say both that he and the Father are one and that the Father is greater than he, referring to different stations; it explains why the founders of different religions made incompatible-sounding claims; and it makes the differences between religions differences of dispensation rather than of truth. The named list includes Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh, with the writings stating that others existed whose names are lost.