Continuation of the explanation of the athar of Ibn Mas'ud regarding the impermissibility of using pebbles for dhikr.

The Shaykh :"And how many are there who seek good but do not attain it. Indeed, Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) informed us:

Indeed, there are people who recite the Qur'an, but it does not go beyond their throats—meaning: it does not reach their hearts—they slip out of the religion as an arrow slips out of its bow.

إنّ أقوامًا يقرؤون القرآن لا يجاوز حناجرهم، -أي: لا يصل إلى قلوبهم- يمرقون من الدين كما يمرق السهم من الرمية

", said the narrator of this story, and here is the limit of the lesson: "And we have indeed seen those people—meaning the people of the dhikr circles—fighting us on the Day of al-Nahrawan": meaning they became among the Khawarij who rebelled against the Rightly Guided Caliph 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him and the rest of the Companions). So I derived from this a benefit by analogy to the saying of the scholars: "Minor sins are the herald of major sins". I derived from this story something similar to their saying, and I said: "Minor innovations are the herald of major innovations". Therefore, the lesson from these marfu' hadiths, mawquf athars, and this story in particular is: that a Muslim should not belittle any bid'ah (religious innovation) by saying, "What is the harm in it?" This is what the mubtadi' (innovator) says when we discuss with them and tell them, "Fear Allah and do not invent in the religion of Allah what was not there," and we mention to them some of these hadiths. They say, for example, "What is the harm in it?" They belittle the bid'ah, looking at it with their minds and approving it, so they never realize that they are falling into a type of 'azimah (the default ruling) [Note: likely a transcription error in source for 'I'tizal or similar, but translated as per text context of Mu'tazilah below], for the Mu'tazilah, in what they truly opposed the people of the Sunnah and the community, is their saying regarding the rationalization of good and evil. The scholars know this from the misguidances of the Mu'tazilah. They mean by this phrase that the Mu'tazilah say that good and evil are determined by reason, meaning that the Mu'tazilah say: what the intellect judges to be good is good, and what the intellect judges to be evil is evil. As for the people of the Sunnah, all of them without disagreement among them, say: the good is what the Wise Lawgiver has made good, and the evil is what the Wise Lawgiver has made evil, so there is no room for introducing the intellect into matters of defining good and evil.
The Exalted [Allah] tests His servants to see them in reality: will they disbelieve or will they be grateful?