Preface

The fundamental principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh
… is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine
Revelation is a continuous and progressive process, that all the
great religions of the world are divine in origin, that their basic
principles are in complete harmony, that their aims and purposes are
one and the same, that their teachings are but facets of one truth,
that their functions are complementary, that they differ only in the
nonessential aspects of their doctrines, and that their missions
represent successive stages in the spiritual evolution of human
society….

…His mission is to proclaim that the ages of the
infancy and of the childhood of the human race are past, that the
convulsions associated with the present stage of its adolescence are
slowly and painfully preparing it to attain the stage of manhood, and
are heralding the approach of that Age of Ages when swords will be
beaten into plowshares, when the Kingdom promised by Jesus Christ
will have been established, and the peace of the planet definitely
and permanently ensured. Nor does Bahá’u’lláh
claim finality for His own Revelation, but rather stipulates that a
fuller measure of the truth He has been commissioned by the Almighty
to vouchsafe to humanity, at so critical a juncture in its fortunes,
must needs be disclosed at future stages in the constant and
limitless evolution of mankind.

The Bahá’í Faith upholds the unity
of God, recognizes the unity of His Prophets, and inculcates the
principle of the oneness and wholeness of the entire human race. It
proclaims the necessity and the inevitability of the unification of
mankind, asserts that it is gradually approaching, and claims that
nothing short of the transmuting spirit of God, working through His
chosen Mouthpiece in this day, can ultimately succeed in bringing it
about. It, moreover, enjoins upon its followers the primary duty of
an unfettered search after truth, condemns all manner of prejudice
and superstition, declares the purpose of religion to be the
promotion of amity and concord, proclaims its essential harmony with
science, and recognizes it as the foremost agency for the
pacification and the orderly progress of human society….

Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí,
surnamed Bahá’u’lláh (the Glory of God), a
native of Mázindarán, Whose advent the Báb
[Herald and Forerunner of Bahá’u’lláh] had
foretold, … was imprisoned in Ṭihrán, was banished, in
1852, from His native land to Baghdád, and thence to
Constantinople and Adrianople, and finally to the prison city of
Akká, where He remained incarcerated for no less than
twenty-four years, and in whose neighborhood He passed away in 1892.
In the course of His banishment, and particularly in Adrianople and
Akká, He formulated the laws and ordinances of His
Dispensation, expounded, in over a hundred volumes, the principles of
His Faith, proclaimed His Message to the kings and rulers of both the
East and the West, both Christian and Muslim, addressed the Pope, the
Caliph of Islám, the Chief Magistrates of the Republics of the
American continent, the entire Christian sacerdotal order, the
leaders of Shí’ih and Sunní Islám,
and the high priests of the Zoroastrian religion. In these writings
He proclaimed His Revelation, summoned those whom He addressed to
heed His call and espouse His Faith, warned them of the consequences
of their refusal, and denounced, in some cases, their arrogance and
tyranny….

The Faith which this order serves, safeguards and
promotes is … essentially supernatural, supranational, entirely
non-political, non-partisan, and diametrically opposed to any policy
or school of thought that seeks to exalt any particular race, class
or nation. It is free from any form of ecclesiasticism, has neither
priesthood nor rituals, and is supported exclusively by voluntary
contributions made by its avowed adherents. Though loyal to their
respective governments, though imbued with the love of their own
country, and anxious to promote at all times, its best interests, the
followers of the Bahá’í Faith, nevertheless,
viewing mankind as one entity, and profoundly attached to its vital
interests, will not hesitate to subordinate every particular
interest, be it personal, regional or national, to the over-riding
interests of the generality of mankind, knowing full well that in a
world of interdependent peoples and nations the advantage of the part
is best to be reached by the advantage of the whole, and that no
lasting result can be achieved by any of the component parts if the
general interests of the entity itself are neglected….

—Shoghi Effendi

The Promised Day Is Come

Friends and fellow-heirs of the Kingdom of Bahá’u’lláh:

A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable
in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably
glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the
face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in
range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is
increasing with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches
of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its
resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its
significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and
helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God invading the
remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations,
deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the
homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its
kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming
its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.

“The time for the destruction of the world and its
people,” Bahá’u’lláh’s
prophetic pen has proclaimed, “hath arrived.” “The
hour is approaching,” He specifically affirms, “when the
most great convulsion will have appeared.” “The promised
day is come, the day when tormenting trials will have surged above
your heads, and beneath your feet, saying: ‘Taste ye what your
hands have wrought!’” “Soon shall the blasts of His
chastisement beat upon you, and the dust of hell enshroud you.”
And again: “And when the appointed hour is come, there shall
suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to
quake.” “The day is approaching when its [civilization’s]
flame will devour the cities, when the Tongue of Grandeur will
proclaim: ‘The Kingdom is God’s, the Almighty, the
All-Praised!’” “The day will soon come,” He,
referring to the foolish ones of the earth, has written, “whereon
they will cry out for help and receive no answer.” “The
day is approaching,” He moreover has prophesied, “when
the wrathful anger of the Almighty will have taken hold of them. He,
verily, is the Omnipotent, the All-Subduing, the Most Powerful. He
shall cleanse the earth from the defilement of their corruption, and
shall give it for an heritage unto such of His servants as are nigh
unto Him.”

“As to those who deny Him Who is the Sublime Gate
of God,” the Báb, for His part, has affirmed in the
Qayyúm-i-Asmá, “for them We have prepared, as
justly decreed by God, a sore torment. And He, God, is the Mighty,
the Wise.” And further, “O peoples of the earth! I swear
by your Lord! Ye shall act as former generations have acted. Warn ye,
then, yourselves of the terrible, the most grievous vengeance of God.
For God is, verily, potent over all things.” And again: “By
My glory! I will make the infidels to taste, with the hands of My
power, retributions unknown of anyone except Me, and will waft over
the faithful those musk-scented breaths which I have nursed in the
midmost heart of My throne.”

Dear friends! The powerful operations of this titanic
upheaval are comprehensible to none except such as have recognized
the claims of both Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb.
Their followers know full well whence it comes, and what it will
ultimately lead to. Though ignorant of how far it will reach, they
clearly recognize its genesis, are aware of its direction,
acknowledge its necessity, observe confidently its mysterious
processes, ardently pray for the mitigation of its severity,
intelligently labor to assuage its fury, and anticipate, with
undimmed vision, the consummation of the fears and the hopes it must
necessarily engender.

This Judgment of God

This judgment of God, as viewed by those who have
recognized Bahá’u’lláh as His Mouthpiece
and His greatest Messenger on earth, is both a retributory calamity
and an act of holy and supreme discipline. It is at once a visitation
from God and a cleansing process for all mankind. Its fires punish
the perversity of the human race, and weld its component parts into
one organic, indivisible, world-embracing community. Mankind, in
these fateful years, which at once signalize the passing of the first
century of the Bahá’í Era and proclaim the
opening of a new one, is, as ordained by Him Who is both the Judge
and the Redeemer of the human race, being simultaneously called upon
to give account of its past actions, and is being purged and prepared
for its future mission. It can neither escape the responsibilities of
the past, nor shirk those of the future. God, the Vigilant, the Just,
the Loving, the All-Wise Ordainer, can, in this supreme Dispensation,
neither allow the sins of an unregenerate humanity, whether of
omission or of commission, to go unpunished, nor will He be willing
to abandon His children to their fate, and refuse them that
culminating and blissful stage in their long, their slow and painful
evolution throughout the ages, which is at once their inalienable
right and their true destiny.

“Bestir yourselves, O people,” is, on the
one hand, the ominous warning sounded by Bahá’u’lláh
Himself, “in anticipation of the days of Divine Justice, for
the promised hour is now come.” “Abandon that which ye
possess, and seize that which God, Who layeth low the necks of men,
hath brought. Know ye of a certainty that if ye turn not back from
that which ye have committed, chastisement will overtake you on every
side, and ye shall behold things more grievous than that which ye
beheld aforetime.” And again: “We have fixed a time for
you, O people! If ye fail, at the appointed hour, to turn towards
God, He, verily, will lay violent hold on you, and will cause
grievous afflictions to assail you from every direction. How severe
indeed is the chastisement with which your Lord will then chastise
you!” And again: “God assuredly dominateth the lives of
them that wronged Us, and is well aware of their doings. He will most
certainly lay hold on them for their sins. He, verily, is the
fiercest of Avengers.” And finally: “O ye peoples of the
world! Know verily that an unforeseen calamity is following you and
that grievous retribution awaiteth you. Think not the deeds ye have
committed have been blotted from My sight. By My Beauty! All your
doings hath My pen graven with open characters upon tablets of
chrysolite.”

“The whole earth,” Bahá’u’lláh,
on the other hand, forecasting the bright future in store for a world
now wrapt in darkness, emphatically asserts, “is now in a state
of pregnancy. The day is approaching when it will have yielded its
noblest fruits, when from it will have sprung forth the loftiest
trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the most heavenly blessings.”
“The time is approaching when every created thing will have
cast its burden. Glorified be God Who hath vouchsafed this grace that
encompasseth all things, whether seen or unseen!” “These
great oppressions,” He, moreover, foreshadowing humanity’s
golden age, has written, “are preparing it for the advent of
the Most Great Justice.” This Most Great Justice is indeed the
Justice upon which the structure of the Most Great Peace can alone,
and must eventually, rest, while the Most Great Peace will, in turn,
usher in that Most Great, that World Civilization which shall remain
forever associated with Him Who beareth the Most Great Name.

Beloved friends! Well nigh a hundred years have elapsed
since the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh dawned
upon the world—a Revelation, the nature of which, as affirmed
by Himself, “none among the Manifestations of old, except to a
prescribed degree, hath ever completely apprehended.” For a
whole century God has respited mankind, that it might acknowledge the
Founder of such a Revelation, espouse His Cause, proclaim His
greatness, and establish His Order. In a hundred volumes, the
repositories of priceless precepts, mighty laws, unique principles,
impassioned exhortations, reiterated warnings, amazing prophecies,
sublime invocations, and weighty commentaries, the Bearer of such a
Message has proclaimed, as no Prophet before Him has done, the
Mission with which God had entrusted Him. To emperors, kings, princes
and potentates, to rulers, governments, clergy and peoples, whether
of the East or of the West, whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, or
Zoroastrian, He addressed, for well-nigh fifty years, and in the most
tragic circumstances, these priceless pearls of knowledge and wisdom
that lay hid within the ocean of His matchless utterance. Forsaking
fame and fortune, accepting imprisonment and exile, careless of
ostracism and obloquy, submitting to physical indignities and cruel
deprivations, He, the Vicegerent of God on earth, suffered Himself to
be banished from place to place and from country to country, till at
length He, in the Most Great Prison, offered up His martyred son as a
ransom for the redemption and unification of all mankind. “We
verily,” He Himself has testified, “have not fallen short
of Our duty to exhort men, and to deliver that whereunto I was bidden
by God, the Almighty, the All-Praised. Had they hearkened unto Me,
they would have beheld the earth another earth.” And again: “Is
there any excuse left for anyone in this Revelation? No, by God, the
Lord of the Mighty Throne! My signs have encompassed the earth, and
My power enveloped all mankind, and yet the people are wrapped in a
strange sleep!”

What Response to His Call?

How—we may well ask ourselves—has the world,
the object of such Divine solicitude, repaid Him Who sacrificed His
all for its sake? What manner of welcome did it accord Him, and what
response did His call evoke? A clamor, unparalleled in the history of
Shí’ih Islám, greeted, in the land of its
birth, the infant light of the Faith, in the midst of a people
notorious for its crass ignorance, its fierce fanaticism, its
barbaric cruelty, its ingrained prejudices, and the unlimited sway
held over the masses by a firmly entrenched ecclesiastical hierarchy.
A persecution, kindling a courage which, as attested by no less
eminent an authority than the late Lord Curzon of Kedleston, has been
unsurpassed by that which the fires of Smithfield evoked, mowed down,
with tragic swiftness, no less than twenty thousand of its heroic
adherents, who refused to barter their newly born faith for the
fleeting honors and security of a mortal life.

To the bodily agonies inflicted upon these sufferers,
the charges, so unmerited, of Nihilism, occultism, anarchism,
eclecticism, immorality, sectarianism, heresy, political
partisanship—each conclusively disproved by the tenets of the
Faith itself and by the conduct of its followers—were added,
swelling thereby the number of those who, unwittingly or maliciously,
were injuring its cause.

Unmitigated indifference on the part of men of eminence
and rank; unrelenting hatred shown by the ecclesiastical dignitaries
of the Faith from which it had sprung; the scornful derision of the
people among whom it was born; the utter contempt which most of those
kings and rulers who had been addressed by its Author manifested
towards it; the condemnations pronounced, the threats hurled, and the
banishments decreed by those under whose sway it arose and first
spread; the distortion to which its principles and laws were
subjected by the envious and the malicious, in lands and among
peoples far beyond the country of its origin—all these are but
the evidences of the treatment meted out by a generation sunk in
self-content, careless of its God, and oblivious of the omens,
prophecies, warnings and admonitions revealed by His Messengers.

The blows so heavily dealt the followers of so precious,
so glorious, so potent a Faith failed, however, to assuage the
animosity that inflamed its persecutors. Nor did the deliberate and
mischievous misrepresentations of its fundamental teachings, its aims
and purposes, its hopes and aspirations, its institutions and
activities, suffice to stay the hand of the oppressor and the
calumniator, who sought by every means in their power to abolish its
name and extirpate its system. The hand which had struck down so vast
a number of its blameless and humble lovers and servants was now
raised to deal its Founders the heaviest and cruelest blows.

The Báb—“the Point,” as
affirmed by Bahá’u’lláh, “round Whom
the realities of the Prophets and Messengers revolve”—was
the One first swept into the maelstrom which engulfed His supporters.
Sudden arrest and confinement in the very first year of His short and
spectacular career; public affront deliberately inflicted in the
presence of the ecclesiastical dignitaries of Shíráz;
strict and prolonged incarceration in the bleak fastnesses of the
mountains of Ádhirbayján; a contemptuous
disregard and a cowardly jealousy evinced respectively by the Chief
Magistrate of the realm and the foremost minister of his government;
the carefully staged and farcical interrogatory sustained in the
presence of the heir to the Throne and the distinguished divines of
Tabríz; the shameful infliction of the bastinado in the prayer
house, and at the hands of the Shaykhu’l-Islám
of that city; and finally suspension in the barrack-square of Tabríz
and the discharge of a volley of above seven hundred bullets at His
youthful breast under the eyes of a callous multitude of about ten
thousand people, culminating in the ignominious exposure of His
mangled remains on the edge of the moat without the city gate—these
were the progressive stages in the tumultuous and tragic ministry of
One Whose age inaugurated the consummation of all ages, and Whose
Revelation fulfilled the promise of all Revelations.

“I swear by God!” the Báb Himself in
His Tablet to Muḥammad Sháh has written,
“Shouldst thou know the things which in the space of these four
years have befallen Me at the hands of thy people and thine army,
thou wouldst hold thy breath from fear of God…. Alas, alas, for the
things which have touched Me!… I swear by the Most Great Lord! Wert
thou to be told in what place I dwell, the first person to have mercy
on Me would be thyself. In the heart of a mountain is a fortress
[Mákú] … the inmates of which are confined to two
guards and four dogs. Picture, then, My plight…. In this mountain I
have remained alone, and have come to such a pass that none of those
gone before Me have suffered what I have suffered, nor any
transgressor endured what I have endured!”

“How veiled are ye, O My creatures,” He,
speaking with the voice of God, has revealed in the Bayán,
“…who, without any right, have consigned Him unto a mountain
[Mákú], not one of whose inhabitants is worthy of
mention…. With Him, which is with Me, there is no one except him
who is one of the Letters of the Living of My Book. In His presence,
which is My Presence, there is not at night even a lighted lamp! And
yet, in places [of worship] which in varying degrees reach out unto
Him, unnumbered lamps are shining! All that is on earth hath been
created for Him, and all partake with delight of His benefits, and
yet they are so veiled from Him as to refuse Him even a lamp!”

What of Bahá’u’lláh, the germ
of Whose Revelation, as attested by the Báb, is endowed with a
potency superior to the combined forces of the Bábí
Dispensation? Was He not—He for Whom the Báb had
suffered and died in such tragic and miraculous circumstances—made,
for nearly half a century and under the domination of the two most
powerful potentates of the East, the object of a systematic and
concerted conspiracy which, in its effects and duration, is scarcely
paralleled in the annals of previous religions?

“The cruelties inflicted by My oppressors,”
He Himself in His anguish has cried out, “have bowed Me down,
and turned My hair white. Shouldst thou present thyself before My
throne, thou wouldst fail to recognize the Ancient Beauty, for the
freshness of His countenance is altered and its brightness hath
faded, by reason of the oppression of the infidels. I swear by God!
His heart, His soul, and His vitals are melted!” “Wert
thou to hear with Mine ear,” He also declares, “thou
wouldst hear how ‘Alí [the Báb] bewaileth Me in
the presence of the Glorious Companion, and how Muḥammad
weepeth over Me in the all-highest Horizon, and how the Spirit
[Jesus] beateth Himself upon the head in the heaven of My decree, by
reason of what hath befallen this Wronged One at the hands of every
impious sinner.” “Before Me,” He elsewhere has
written, “riseth up the Serpent of wrath with jaws stretched to
engulf Me, and behind Me stalketh the lion of anger intent on tearing
Me in pieces, and above Me, O My Well-Beloved, are the clouds of Thy
decree, raining upon Me the showers of tribulations, whilst beneath
Me are fixed the spears of misfortune, ready to wound My limbs and My
body.” “Couldst thou be told,” He further affirms,
“what hath befallen the Ancient Beauty, thou wouldst flee into
the wilderness, and weep with a great weeping. In thy grief, thou
wouldst smite thyself on the head, and cry out as one stung by the
sting of the adder…. By the righteousness of God! Every morning I
arose from My bed I discovered the hosts of countless afflictions
massed behind My door, and every night when I lay down, lo! My heart
was torn with agony at what it had suffered from the fiendish cruelty
of its foes. With every piece of bread the Ancient Beauty breaketh is
coupled the assault of a fresh affliction, and with every drop He
drinketh is mixed the bitterness of the most woeful of trials. He is
preceded in every step He taketh by an army of unforeseen calamities,
while in His rear follow legions of agonizing sorrows.”

Was it not He Who, at the early age of twenty-seven,
spontaneously arose to champion, in the capacity of a mere follower,
the nascent Cause of the Báb? Was He not the One Who by
assuming the actual leadership of a proscribed and harrassed sect
exposed Himself, and His kindred, and His possessions, and His rank,
and His reputation to the grave perils, the bloody assaults, the
general spoliation and furious defamations of both government and
people? Was it not He—the Bearer of a Revelation, Whose day
“every Prophet hath announced,” for which “the soul
of every Divine Messenger hath thirsted,” and in which “God
hath proved the hearts of the entire company of His Messengers and
Prophets”—was not the Bearer of such a Revelation, at the
instigation of Shí’ih ecclesiastics and by order
of the Sháh himself forced, for no less than four
months, to breathe, in utter darkness, whilst in the company of the
vilest criminals and freighted down with galling chains, the
pestilential air of the vermin-infested subterranean dungeon of
Ṭihrán—a place which, as He Himself subsequently
declared, was mysteriously converted into the very scene of the
annunciation made to Him by God of His Prophethood?

“We were consigned,” He wrote in His
“Epistle to the Son of the Wolf,” “for four months
to a place foul beyond comparison. As to the dungeon in which this
Wronged One and others similarly wronged were confined, a dark and
narrow pit were preferable…. The dungeon was wrapped in thick
darkness, and Our fellow prisoners numbered nearly a hundred and
fifty souls: thieves, assassins, and highwaymen. Though crowded, it
had no other outlet than the passage by which We entered. No pen can
depict that place, nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell. Most
of these men had neither clothes nor bedding to lie on. God alone
knoweth what befell Us in that most foul-smelling and gloomy place!”
“‘Abdu’l-Bahá,” writes Dr. J.E.
Esslemont, “tells how one day He was allowed to enter the
prison-yard to see His beloved Father when He came out for His daily
exercise. Bahá’u’lláh was terribly altered,
so ill He could hardly walk. His hair and beard unkempt, His neck
galled and swollen from the pressure of a heavy steel collar, His
body bent by the weight of His chains.” “For three days
and three nights,” Nabíl has recorded in his chronicle,
“no manner of food or drink was given to Bahá’u’lláh.
Rest and sleep were both impossible to Him. The place was infested
with vermin, and the stench of that gloomy abode was enough to crush
the very spirits of those who were condemned to suffer its horrors.”
“Such was the intensity of His suffering that the marks of that
cruelty remained imprinted upon His body all the days of His life.”

And what of the other tribulations which, before and
immediately after this dreadful episode, touched Him? What of His
confinement in the home of one of the kad-khudás of
Ṭihrán? What of the savage violence with which He was
stoned by the angry people in the neighborhood of the village of
Níyálá? What of His incarceration by the
emissaries of the army of the Sháh in Mázindarán,
and His receiving the bastinado by order, and in the presence, of the
assembled siyyids and mujtahids into whose hands He had been
delivered by the civil authorities of Ámul? What of the howls
of derision and abuse with which a crowd of ruffians subsequently
pursued Him? What of the monstrous accusation brought against Him by
the Imperial household, the Court and the people, when the attempt
was made on the life of Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh?
What of the infamous outrages, the abuse and ridicule heaped on Him
when He was arrested by responsible officers of the government, and
conducted from Níyávarán “on foot and in
chains, with bared head and bare feet,” and exposed to the
fierce rays of the midsummer sun, to the Síyáh-Chál
of Ṭihrán? What of the avidity with which corrupt
officials sacked His house and carried away all His possessions and
disposed of His fortune? What of the cruel edict that tore Him from
the small band of the Báb’s bewildered, hounded, and
shepherdless followers, separated Him from His kinsmen and friends,
and banished Him, in the depth of winter, despoiled and defamed, to
‘Iráq?

Severe as were these tribulations which succeeded one
another with bewildering rapidity as a result of the premeditated
attacks and the systematic machinations of the court, the clergy, the
government and the people, they were but the prelude to a harrowing
and extensive captivity which that edict had formally initiated.
Extending over a period of more than forty years, and carrying Him
successively to ‘Iráq, Sulaymáníyyih,
Constantinople, Adrianople and finally to the penal colony of Akká,
this long banishment was at last ended by His death, at the age of
over three score years and ten, terminating a captivity which, in its
range, its duration and the diversity and severity of its
afflictions, is unexampled in the history of previous Dispensations.

No need to expatiate on the particular episodes which
cast a lurid light on the moving annals of those years. No need to
dwell on the character and actions of the peoples, rulers and divines
who have participated in, and contributed to heighten the poignancy
of the scenes of this, the greatest drama in the world’s
spiritual history.

Features of This Moving Drama

To enumerate a few of the outstanding features of this
moving drama will suffice to evoke in the reader of these pages,
already familiar with the history of the Faith, the memory of those
vicissitudes which it has experienced, and which the world has until
now viewed with such frigid indifference. The forced and sudden
retirement of Bahá’u’lláh to the mountains
of Sulaymáníyyih, and the distressing consequences that
flowed from His two years’ complete withdrawal; the incessant
intrigues indulged in by the exponents of Shí’ih
Islám in Najaf and Karbilá, working in close and
constant association with their confederates in Persia; the
intensification of the repressive measures decreed by Sulṭán
‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz which brought to a head the
defection of certain prominent members of the exiled community; the
enforcement of yet another banishment by order of that same Sulṭán,
this time to that far off and most desolate of cities, causing such
despair as to lead two of the exiles to attempt suicide; the
unrelaxing surveillance to which they were subjected upon their
arrival in Akká, by hostile officials, and the insufferable
imprisonment for two years in the barracks of that town; the
interrogatory to which the Turkish páshá
subsequently subjected his Prisoner at the headquarters of the
government; His confinement for no less than eight years in a humble
dwelling surrounded by the befouled air of that city, His sole
recreation being confined to pacing the narrow space of His
room—these, as well as other tribulations, proclaim, on the one
hand, the nature of the ordeal and the indignities He suffered, and
point, on the other, the finger of accusation at those mighty ones of
the earth who had either so sorely maltreated Him, or deliberately
withheld from Him their succor.

No wonder that from the Pen of Him Who bore this anguish
with such sublime patience these words should have been revealed: “He
Who is the Lord of the seen and unseen is now manifest unto all men.
His blessed Self hath been afflicted with such harm that if all the
seas, visible and invisible, were turned into ink, and all that dwell
in the kingdom into pens, and all that are in the heavens and all
that are on earth into scribes, they would, of a certainty, be
powerless to record it.” And again: “I have been, most of
the days of My life, even as a slave, sitting under a sword hanging
on a thread, knowing not whether it would fall soon or late upon
him.” “All this generation,” He affirms, “could
offer Us were wounds from its darts, and the only cup it proffered to
Our lips was the cup of its venom. On Our neck We still bear the scar
of chains, and upon Our body are imprinted the evidences of an
unyielding cruelty.” “Twenty years have passed, O kings!”
He, addressing the kings of Christendom, at the height of His
mission, has written, “during which We have, each day, tasted
the agony of a fresh tribulation. No one of them that were before Us
hath endured the things We have endured. Would that ye could perceive
it! They that rose up against Us have put Us to death, have shed Our
blood, have plundered Our property, and violated Our honor. Though
aware of most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to
stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to
restrain the tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with
your subjects, that your high sense of justice may be fully
demonstrated to all mankind?”

Who is the ruler, may it not be confidently asked,
whether of the East or of the West, who, at any time since the dawn
of so transcendent a Revelation, has been prompted to raise his voice
either in its praise or against those who persecuted it? Which people
has, in the course of so long a captivity, felt urged to arise and
stem the tide of such tribulations? Who is the sovereign, excepting a
single woman, shining in solitary glory, who has, in however small a
measure, felt impelled to respond to the poignant call of
Bahá’u’lláh? Who amongst the great ones of
the earth was inclined to extend this infant Faith of God the benefit
of his recognition or support? Which one of the multitudes of creeds,
sects, races, parties and classes and of the highly diversified
schools of human thought, considered it necessary to direct its gaze
towards the rising light of the Faith, to contemplate its unfolding
system, to ponder its hidden processes, to appraise its weighty
message, to acknowledge its regenerative power, to embrace its
salutary truth, or to proclaim its eternal verities? Who among the
worldly wise and the so-called men of insight and wisdom can justly
claim, after the lapse of nearly a century, to have disinterestedly
approached its theme, to have considered impartially its claims, to
have taken sufficient pains to delve into its literature, to have
assiduously striven to separate facts from fiction, or to have
accorded its cause the treatment it merits? Where are the preeminent
exponents, whether of the arts or sciences, with the exception of a
few isolated cases, who have lifted a finger, or whispered a word of
commendation, in either the defense or the praise of a Faith that has
conferred upon the world so priceless a benefit, that has suffered so
long and so grievously, and which enshrines within its shell so
enthralling a promise for a world so woefully battered, so manifestly
bankrupt?

To the mounting tide of trials which laid low the Báb,
to the long-drawn-out calamities which rained on Bahá’u’lláh,
to the warnings sounded by both the Herald and the Author of the
Bahá’í Revelation, must be added the sufferings
which, for no less than seventy years, were endured by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,
as well as His pleas, and entreaties, uttered in the evening of His
life, in connection with the dangers that increasingly threatened the
whole of mankind. Born in the very year that witnessed the inception
of the Bábí Revelation; baptized with the initial fires
of persecution that raged around that nascent Cause; an eyewitness,
when a boy of eight, of the violent upheavals that rocked the Faith
which His Father had espoused; sharing with Him, the ignominy, the
perils, and rigors consequent upon the successive banishments from
His native-land to countries far beyond its confines; arrested and
forced to support, in a dark cell, the indignity of imprisonment soon
after His arrival in Akká; the object of repeated
investigations and the target of continual assaults and insults under
the despotic rule of Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd,
and later under the ruthless military dictatorship of the suspicious
and merciless Jamál Páshá—He, too,
the Center and Pivot of Bahá’u’lláh’s
peerless Covenant and the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, was made
to taste, at the hands of potentates, ecclesiastics, governments and
peoples, the cup of woe which the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh,
as well as so many of their followers, had drained.

With the warnings which both His pen and voice have
given in countless Tablets and discourses, during an almost lifelong
incarceration and in the course of His extended travels in both the
European and American continents, they who labor for the spread of
His Father’s Faith in the Western world are sufficiently
acquainted. How often and how passionately did He appeal to those in
authority and to the public at large to examine dispassionately the
precepts enunciated by His Father? With what precision and emphasis
He unfolded the system of the Faith He was expounding, elucidated its
fundamental verities, stressed its distinguishing features, and
proclaimed the redemptive character of its principles? How
insistently did He foreshadow the impending chaos, the approaching
upheavals, the universal conflagration which, in the concluding years
of His life, had only begun to reveal the measure of its force and
the significance of its impact on human society?

A co-sharer in the woeful trials and momentary
frustrations afflicting the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh;
reaping a harvest in His lifetime wholly incommensurate to the
sublime, the incessant and strenuous efforts He had exerted;
experiencing the initial perturbations of the world-shaking
catastrophe in store for an unbelieving humanity; bent with age, and
with eyes dimmed by the gathering storm which the reception accorded
by a faithless generation to His Father’s Cause was raising,
and with a heart bleeding over the immediate destiny of God’s
wayward children—He, at last, sank beneath a weight of troubles
for which they who had imposed them upon Him, and upon those gone
before Him, were soon to be summoned to a dire reckoning.

“Hasten, O my God!” He cried, at a time when
adversity had sore beset Him, “the days of my ascension unto
Thee, and of my coming before Thee, and of my entry into Thy
presence, that I may be delivered from the darkness of the cruelty
inflicted by them upon me, and may enter the luminous atmosphere of
Thy nearness, O my Lord, the All-Glorious, and may rest under the
shadow of Thy most great mercy.” “Yá Bahá’u’l-Abhá
[O Thou the Glory of Glories]!” He wrote in a Tablet revealed
during the last week of His life, “I have renounced the world
and the people thereof, and am heartbroken and sorely afflicted
because of the unfaithful. In the cage of this world I flutter even
as a frightened bird, and yearn every day to take my flight unto Thy
Kingdom. Yá Bahá’u’l-Abhá! Make me
to drink of the cup of sacrifice, and set me free. Relieve me from
these woes and trials, from these afflictions and troubles.”

Dear friends! Alas, a thousand times alas, that a
Revelation so incomparably great, so infinitely precious, so mightily
potent, so manifestly innocent, should have received, at the hands of
a generation so blind and so perverse, so infamous a treatment! “O
My servants!” Bahá’u’lláh Himself
testifies, “The one true God is My witness! This most great,
this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto
you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the
twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of
this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible
gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.”

A World Receded from Him

After a revolution of well nigh one hundred years what
is it that the eye encounters as one surveys the international scene
and looks back upon the early beginnings of Bahá’í
history? A world convulsed by the agonies of contending systems,
races and nations, entangled in the mesh of its accumulated
falsities, receding farther and farther from Him Who is the sole
Author of its destinies, and sinking deeper and deeper into a
suicidal carnage which its neglect and persecution of Him Who is its
Redeemer have precipitated. A Faith, still proscribed, yet bursting
through its chrysalis, emerging from the obscurity of a century-old
repression, face to face with the awful evidences of God’s
wrathful anger, and destined to arise above the ruins of a smitten
civilization. A world spiritually destitute, morally bankrupt,
politically disrupted, socially convulsed, economically paralyzed,
writhing, bleeding and breaking up beneath the avenging rod of God. A
Faith Whose call remained unanswered, Whose claims were rejected,
Whose warnings were brushed aside, Whose followers were mowed down,
Whose aims and purposes were maligned, Whose summons to the rulers of
the earth were ignored, Whose Herald drained the cup of martyrdom,
over the head of Whose Author swept a sea of unheard-of tribulations,
and Whose Exemplar sank beneath the weight of lifelong sorrows and
dire misfortunes. A world that has lost its bearings, in which the
bright flame of religion is fast dying out, in which the forces of a
blatant nationalism and racialism have usurped the rights and
prerogatives of God Himself, in which a flagrant secularism—the
direct offspring of irreligion—has raised its triumphant head
and is protruding its ugly features, in which the “majesty of
kingship” has been disgraced, and they who wore its emblems
have, for the most part, been hurled from their thrones, in which the
once all-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies of Islám, and to
a lesser extent those of Christianity, have been discredited, and in
which the virus of prejudice and corruption is eating into the vitals
of an already gravely disordered society. A Faith Whose
institutions—the pattern and crowning glory of the age which is
to come—have been ignored and in some instances trampled upon
and uprooted, Whose unfolding system has been derided and partly
suppressed and crippled, Whose rising Order—the sole refuge of
a civilization in the embrace of doom—has been spurned and
challenged, Whose Mother-Temple has been seized and misappropriated,
and Whose “House”—the “cynosure of an adoring
world”—has, through a gross miscarriage of justice, as
witnessed by the world’s highest tribunal, been delivered into
the hands of, and violated by, its implacable enemies.

We are indeed living in an age which, if we would
correctly appraise it, should be regarded as one which is witnessing
a dual phenomenon. The first signalizes the death pangs of an order,
effete and godless, that has stubbornly refused, despite the signs
and portents of a century-old Revelation, to attune its processes to
the precepts and ideals which that Heaven-sent Faith proffered it.
The second proclaims the birth pangs of an Order, divine and
redemptive, that will inevitably supplant the former, and within
Whose administrative structure an embryonic civilization,
incomparable and world-embracing, is imperceptibly maturing. The one
is being rolled up, and is crashing in oppression, bloodshed, and
ruin. The other opens up vistas of a justice, a unity, a peace, a
culture, such as no age has ever seen. The former has spent its
force, demonstrated its falsity and barrenness, lost irretrievably
its opportunity, and is hurrying to its doom. The latter, virile and
unconquerable, is plucking asunder its chains, and is vindicating its
title to be the one refuge within which a sore-tried humanity, purged
from its dross, can attain its destiny.

“Soon,” Bahá’u’lláh
Himself has prophesied, “will the present-day order be rolled
up, and a new one spread out in its stead.” And again: “By
Myself! The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world
and all that is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead.”
“The day is approaching when God will have raised up a people
who will call to remembrance Our days, who will tell the tale of Our
trials, who will demand the restitution of Our rights, from them who,
without a tittle of evidence, have treated Us with manifest
injustice.”

Dear friends! For the trials which have afflicted the
Faith of Bahá’u’lláh a responsibility
appalling and inescapable rests upon those into whose hands the reins
of civil and ecclesiastical authority were delivered. The kings of
the earth and the world’s religious leaders alike must
primarily bear the brunt of such an awful responsibility. “Everyone
well knoweth,” Bahá’u’lláh Himself
testifies, “that all the kings have turned aside from Him, and
all the religions have opposed Him.” “From time
immemorial,” He declares, “they who have been outwardly
invested with authority have debarred men from setting their faces
towards God. They have disliked that men should gather together
around the Most Great Ocean, inasmuch as they have regarded, and
still regard, such a gathering as the cause of, and the motive for,
the disruption of their sovereignty.” “The kings,”
He moreover has written, “have recognized that it was not in
their interest to acknowledge Me, as have likewise the ministers and
the divines, notwithstanding that My purpose hath been most
explicitly revealed in the Divine Books and Tablets, and the True One
hath loudly proclaimed that this Most Great Revelation hath appeared
for the betterment of the world and the exaltation of the nations.”
“Gracious God!” writes the Báb in the
Dalá’il-i-Sab‘ih (Seven Proofs) with reference to
the “seven powerful sovereigns ruling the world” in His
day, “None of them hath been informed of His [the Báb’s]
Manifestation, and if informed, none hath believed in Him. Who
knoweth, they may leave this world below full of desire, and without
having realized that the thing for which they were waiting had come
to pass. This is what happened to the monarchs that held fast unto
the Gospel. They awaited the coming of the Prophet of God [Muḥammad],
and when He did appear, they failed to recognize Him. Behold how
great are the sums which these sovereigns expend without even the
slightest thought of appointing an official charged with the task of
acquainting them in their own realms with the Manifestation of God!
They would thereby have fulfilled the purpose for which they have
been created. All their desires have been and are still fixed upon
leaving behind them traces of their names.” The Báb,
moreover, in that same treatise, censuring the failure of the
Christian divines to acknowledge the truth of Muḥammad’s
mission, makes this illuminating statement: “The blame falleth
upon their doctors, for if these had believed, they would have been
followed by the mass of their countrymen. Behold then, that which
hath come to pass! The learned men of Christendom are held to be
learned by virtue of their safeguarding the teaching of Christ, and
yet consider how they themselves have been the cause of men’s
failure to accept the Faith and attain unto salvation!”

Recipients of the Message

It should not be forgotten that it was the kings of the
earth and the world’s religious leaders who, above all other
categories of men, were made the direct recipients of the Message
proclaimed by both the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh.
It was they who were deliberately addressed in numerous and historic
Tablets, who were summoned to respond to the Call of God, and to whom
were directed, in clear and forcible language, the appeals, the
admonitions and warnings of His persecuted Messengers. It was they
who, when the Faith was born, and later when its mission was
proclaimed, were still, for the most part, wielding unquestioned and
absolute civil and ecclesiastical authority over their subjects and
followers. It was they who, whether glorying in the pomp and
pageantry of a kingship as yet scarcely restricted by constitutional
limitations, or entrenched within the strongholds of a seemingly
inviolable ecclesiastical power, assumed ultimate responsibility for
any wrongs inflicted by those whose immediate destinies they
controlled. It would be no exaggeration to say that in most of the
countries of the European and Asiatic continents absolutism, on the
one hand, and complete subservience to ecclesiastical hierarchies, on
the other, were still the outstanding features of the political and
religious life of the masses. These, dominated and shackled, were
robbed of the necessary freedom that would enable them to either
appraise the claims and merits of the Message proffered to them, or
to embrace unreservedly its truth.

Small wonder, then, that the Author of the Bahá’í
Faith, and to a lesser degree its Herald, should have directed at the
world’s supreme rulers and religious leaders the full force of
Their Messages, and made them the recipients of some of Their most
sublime Tablets, and invited them, in a language at once clear and
insistent, to heed Their call. Small wonder that They should have
taken the pains to unroll before their eyes the truths of Their
respective Revelations, and should have expatiated on Their woes and
sufferings. Small wonder that They should have stressed the
preciousness of the opportunities which it was in the power of these
rulers and leaders to seize, and should have warned them in ominous
tones of the grave responsibilities which the rejection of God’s
Message would entail, and should have predicted, when rebuffed and
refused, the dire consequences which such a rejection involved. Small
wonder that He Who is the King of kings and Vicegerent of God Himself
should, when abandoned, contemned and persecuted, have uttered this
epigrammatic and momentous prophecy: “From two ranks amongst
men power hath been seized: kings and ecclesiastics.”

As to the kings and emperors who not only symbolized in
their persons the majesty of earthly dominion but who, for the most
part, actually held unchallengeable sway over the multitudes of their
subjects, their relation to the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh
constitutes one of the most illuminating episodes in the history of
the Heroic and Formative Ages of that Faith. The Divine summons which
embraced within its scope so large a number of the crowned heads of
both Europe and Asia; the theme and language of the Messages that
brought them into direct contact with the Source of God’s
Revelation; the nature of their reaction to so stupendous an impact;
and the consequences which ensued and can still be witnessed today
are the salient features of a subject upon which I can but
inadequately touch, and which will be fully and befittingly treated
by future Bahá’í historians.

The Emperor of the French, the most powerful ruler of
his day on the European continent, Napoleon III; Pope Pius IX, the
supreme head of the highest church in Christendom, and wielder of the
scepter of both temporal and spiritual authority; the omnipotent Czar
of the vast Russian Empire, Alexander II; the renowned Queen
Victoria, whose sovereignty extended over the greatest political
combination the world has witnessed; William I, the conqueror of
Napoleon III, King of Prussia and the newly acclaimed monarch of a
unified Germany; Francis Joseph, the autocratic king-emperor of the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the heir of the far-famed Holy Roman
Empire; the tyrannical ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, the
embodiment of the concentrated power vested in the Sultanate and the
Caliphate; the notorious Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh,
the despotic ruler of Persia and the mightiest potentate of Shí’ih
Islám—in a word, most of the preeminent embodiments of
power and of sovereignty in His day became, one by one, the object of
Bahá’u’lláh’s special attention, and
were made to sustain, in varying degrees, the weight of the force
communicated by His appeals and warnings.

It should be borne in mind, however, that Bahá’u’lláh
has not restricted the delivery of His Message to a few individual
sovereigns, however potent the scepters they severally wielded, and
however vast the dominions which they ruled. All the kings of the
earth have been collectively addressed by His Pen, appealed to, and
warned, at a time when the star of His Revelation was mounting its
zenith, and whilst He lay a prisoner in the hands, and in the
vicinity of the court, of His royal enemy. In a memorable Tablet,
designated as the Súriy-i-Mulúk (Súrih of Kings)
in which the Sulṭán himself and his ministers, and the
kings of Christendom, and the French and Persian Ambassadors
accredited to the Sublime Porte, and the Muslim ecclesiastical
leaders in Constantinople, and its wise men and its inhabitants, and
the people of Persia, and the philosophers of the world have been
specifically addressed and admonished, He thus directs His words to
the entire company of the monarchs of East and West:

Tablets to the Kings

“O kings of the earth! Give ear unto the Voice of
God, calling from this sublime, this fruit-laden Tree, that hath
sprung out of the Crimson Hill, upon the holy Plain, intoning the
words: ‘There is none other God but He, the Mighty, the
All-Powerful, the All-Wise.’… Fear God, O concourse of kings,
and suffer not yourselves to be deprived of this most sublime grace.
Fling away, then, the things ye possess, and take fast hold on the
Handle of God, the Exalted, the Great. Set your hearts towards the
Face of God, and abandon that which your desires have bidden you to
follow, and be not of those who perish. Relate unto them, O servant,
the story of ‘Alí [the Báb], when He came unto
them with truth, bearing His glorious and weighty Book, and holding
in His hands a testimony and proof from God, and holy and blessed
tokens from Him. Ye, however, O kings, have failed to heed the
Remembrance of God in His days and to be guided by the lights which
arose and shone forth above the horizon of a resplendent Heaven. Ye
examined not His Cause when so to do would have been better for you
than all that the sun shineth upon, could ye but perceive it. Ye
remained careless until the divines of Persia—those cruel
ones—pronounced judgment against Him, and unjustly slew Him.
His spirit ascended unto God, and the eyes of the inmates of Paradise
and the angels that are nigh unto Him wept sore by reason of this
cruelty. Beware that ye be not careless henceforth as ye have been
careless aforetime. Return, then, unto God, your Maker, and be not of
the heedless…. My face hath come forth from the veils, and shed its
radiance upon all that is in heaven and on earth; and yet, ye turned
not towards Him, notwithstanding that ye were created for Him, O
concourse of kings! Follow, therefore, that which I speak unto you,
and hearken unto it with your hearts, and be not of such as have
turned aside. For your glory consisteth not in your sovereignty, but
rather in your nearness unto God and your observance of His command
as sent down in His holy and preserved Tablets. Should any one of you
rule over the whole earth, and over all that lieth within it and upon
it, its seas, its lands, its mountains, and its plains, and yet be
not remembered by God, all these would profit him not, could ye but
know it…. Arise, then, and make steadfast your feet, and make ye
amends for that which hath escaped you, and set then yourselves
towards His holy Court, on the shore of His mighty Ocean, so that the
pearls of knowledge and wisdom, which God hath stored up within the
shell of His radiant heart, may be revealed unto you…. Beware lest
ye hinder the breeze of God from blowing over your hearts, the breeze
through which the hearts of such as have turned unto Him can be
quickened….”

“Lay not aside the fear of God, O kings of the
earth,” He, in that same Tablet has revealed, “and beware
that ye transgress not the bounds which the Almighty hath fixed.
Observe the injunctions laid upon you in His Book, and take good heed
not to overstep their limits. Be vigilant, that ye may not do
injustice to anyone, be it to the extent of a grain of mustard seed.
Tread ye the path of justice, for this, verily, is the straight path.
Compose your differences, and reduce your armaments, that the burden
of your expenditures may be lightened, and that your minds and hearts
may be tranquilized. Heal the dissensions that divide you, and ye
will no longer be in need of any armaments except what the protection
of your cities and territories demandeth. Fear ye God, and take heed
not to outstrip the bounds of moderation, and be numbered among the
extravagant. We have learned that you are increasing your outlay
every year, and are laying the burden thereof on your subjects. This,
verily, is more than they can bear, and is a grievous injustice.
Decide justly between men, and be ye the emblems of justice amongst
them. This, if ye judge fairly, is the thing that behooveth you, and
beseemeth your station.

“Beware not to deal unjustly with anyone that
appealeth to you, and entereth beneath your shadow. Walk ye in the
fear of God, and be ye of them that lead a godly life. Rest not on
your power, your armies, and treasures. Put your whole trust and
confidence in God, Who hath created you, and seek ye His help in all
your affairs. Succor cometh from Him alone. He succoreth whom He
willeth with the hosts of the heavens and of the earth.

“Know ye that the poor are the trust of God in
your midst. Watch that ye betray not His trust, that ye deal not
unjustly with them and that ye walk not in the ways of the
treacherous. Ye will most certainly be called upon to answer for His
trust on the day when the Balance of Justice shall be set, the day
when unto everyone shall be rendered his due, when the doings of all
men, be they rich or poor, shall be weighed.

“If ye pay no heed unto the counsels which, in
peerless and unequivocal language, We have revealed in this Tablet,
Divine chastisement shall assail you from every direction, and the
sentence of His justice shall be pronounced against you. On that day
ye shall have no power to resist Him, and shall recognize your own
impotence. Have mercy on yourselves and on those beneath you, and
judge ye between them according to the precepts prescribed by God in
His most holy and exalted Tablet, a Tablet wherein He hath assigned
to each and every thing its settled measure, in which He hath given,
with distinctness, an explanation of all things, and which is in
itself a monition unto them that believe in Him.

“Examine Our Cause, inquire into the things that
have befallen Us, and decide justly between Us and Our enemies, and
be ye of them that act equitably towards their neighbors. If ye stay
not the hand of the oppressor, if ye fail to safeguard the rights of
the downtrodden, what right have ye then to vaunt yourselves among
men? What is it of which ye can rightly boast? Is it on your food and
your drink that ye pride yourselves, on the riches ye lay up in your
treasuries, on the diversity and the cost of the ornaments with which
ye deck yourselves? If true glory were to consist in the possession
of such perishable things, then the earth on which ye walk must needs
vaunt itself over you, because it supplieth you, and bestoweth upon
you, these very things, by the decree of the Almighty. In its bowels
are contained, according to what God hath ordained, all that ye
possess. From it, as a sign of His mercy, ye derive your riches.
Behold then your state, the thing in which ye glory! Would that ye
could perceive it! Nay! By Him Who holdeth in His grasp the kingdom
of the entire creation! Nowhere doth your true and abiding glory
reside except in your firm adherence unto the precepts of God, your
wholehearted observance of His laws, your resolution to see that they
do not remain unenforced, and to pursue steadfastly the right
course….”

And again in that same Tablet: “Twenty years have
passed, O kings, during which We have, each day, tasted the agony of
a fresh tribulation. No one of them that were before Us hath endured
the things We have endured. Would that ye could perceive it! They
that rose up against Us, have put Us to death, have shed Our blood,
have plundered Our property, and violated Our honor. Though aware of
most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to stay the
hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to restrain the
tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with your subjects,
that your high sense of justice may be fully demonstrated to all
mankind?

“God hath committed into your hands the reins of
the government of the people, that ye may rule with justice over
them, safeguard the rights of the downtrodden, and punish the
wrongdoers. If ye neglect the duty prescribed unto you by God in His
Book, your names shall be numbered with those of the unjust in His
sight. Grievous, indeed, will be your error. Cleave ye to that which
your imaginations have devised, and cast behind your backs the
commandments of God, the Most Exalted, the Inaccessible, the
All-Compelling, the Almighty? Cast away the things ye possess, and
cling to that which God hath bidden you observe. Seek ye His grace,
for he that seeketh it treadeth His straight Path.

“Consider the state in which We are, and behold ye
the ills and troubles that have tried Us. Neglect Us not, though it
be for a moment, and judge ye between Us and Our enemies with equity.
This will, surely, be a manifest advantage unto you. Thus do We
relate to you Our tale, and recount the things that have befallen Us,
that ye might take off Our ills and ease Our burden. Let him who
will, relieve Us from Our trouble; and as to him that willeth not, my
Lord is assuredly the best of Helpers.

“Warn and acquaint the people, O Servant, with the
things We have sent down unto Thee, and let the fear of no one dismay
Thee, and be Thou not of them that waver. The day is approaching when
God will have exalted His Cause and magnified His testimony in the
eyes of all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth.
Place, in all circumstances, Thy whole trust in Thy Lord, and fix Thy
gaze upon Him, and turn away from all them that repudiate His truth.
Let God, Thy Lord, be Thy sufficing Succorer and Helper. We have
pledged Ourself to secure Thy triumph upon earth and to exalt Our
Cause above all men, though no king be found who would turn his face
towards Thee….”

In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book), that
priceless treasury enshrining for all time the brightest emanations
of the mind of Bahá’u’lláh, the Charter of
His World Order, the chief repository of His laws, the Harbinger of
His Covenant, the Pivotal Work containing some of His noblest
exhortations, weightiest pronouncements, and portentous prophecies,
and revealed during the full tide of His tribulations, at a time when
the rulers of the earth had definitely forsaken Him—in such a
Book we read the following:

“O kings of the earth! He Who is the sovereign
Lord of all is come. The Kingdom is God’s, the omnipotent
Protector, the Self-Subsisting. Worship none but God, and, with
radiant hearts, lift up your faces unto your Lord, the Lord of all
names. This is a Revelation to which whatever ye possess can never be
compared, could ye but know it. We see you rejoicing in that which ye
have amassed for others, and shutting out yourselves from the worlds
which naught except My Guarded Tablet can reckon. The treasures ye
have laid up have drawn you far away from your ultimate objective.
This ill beseemeth you, could ye but understand it. Wash your hearts
from all earthly defilements, and hasten to enter the Kingdom of your
Lord, the Creator of earth and heaven, Who caused the world to
tremble, and all its peoples to wail, except them that have renounced
all things and clung to that which the Hidden Tablet hath
ordained….”

The Most Great Law Revealed

And further: “O kings of the earth! The Most Great
Law hath been revealed in this Spot, this Scene of transcendent
splendor. Every hidden thing hath been brought to light, by virtue of
the Will of the Supreme Ordainer, He Who hath ushered in the Last
Hour, through Whom the Moon hath been cleft, and every irrevocable
decree expounded.

“Ye are but vassals, O kings of the earth! He Who
is the King of Kings hath appeared, arrayed in His most wondrous
glory, and is summoning you unto Himself, the Help in Peril, the
Self-Subsisting. Take heed lest pride deter you from recognizing the
Source of Revelation; lest the things of this world shut you out as
by a veil from Him Who is the Creator of heaven. Arise, and serve Him
Who is the Desire of all nations, Who hath created you through a word
from Him, and ordained you to be, for all time, the emblems of His
sovereignty.

“By the righteousness of God! It is not Our wish
to lay hands on your kingdoms. Our mission is to seize and possess
the hearts of men. Upon them the eyes of Bahá are fastened. To
this testifieth the Kingdom of Names, could ye but comprehend it.
Whoso followeth his Lord, will renounce the world and all that is
therein; how much greater, then, must be the detachment of Him Who
holdeth so august a station! Forsake your palaces, and haste ye to
gain admittance into His Kingdom. This, indeed, will profit you both
in this world and in the next. To this testifieth the Lord of the
realm on high, did ye but know it.

“How great is the blessedness that awaiteth the
king who will arise to aid My Cause in My Kingdom, who will detach
himself from all else but Me! Such a king is numbered with the
companions of the Crimson Ark, the Ark which God hath prepared for
the people of Bahá. All must glorify his name, must reverence
his station, and aid him to unlock the cities with the keys of My
Name, the omnipotent Protector of all that inhabit the visible and
invisible kingdoms. Such a king is the very eye of mankind, the
luminous ornament on the brow of creation, the fountainhead of
blessings unto the whole world. Offer up, O people of Bahá,
your substance, nay your very lives, for his assistance.”

And further, this evident arraignment in that same Book:
“We have asked nothing from you. For the sake of God We,
verily, exhort you, and will be patient as We have been patient in
that which hath befallen Us at your hands, O concourse of kings!”

Moreover, in His Tablet to Queen Victoria Bahá’u’lláh
thus addresses all the kings of the earth, summoning them to cleave
to the Lesser Peace, as distinct from that Most Great Peace which
those who are fully conscious of the power of His Revelation and
avowedly profess the tenets of His Faith can alone proclaim and must
eventually establish:

“O kings of the earth! We see you increasing every
year your expenditures, and laying the burden thereof on your
subjects. This, verily, is wholly and grossly unjust. Fear the sighs
and tears of this Wronged One, and lay not excessive burdens on your
peoples. Do not rob them to rear palaces for yourselves; nay rather
choose for them that which ye choose for yourselves. Thus We unfold
to your eyes that which profiteth you, if ye but perceive. Your
people are your treasures. Beware lest your rule violate the
commandments of God, and ye deliver your wards to the hands of the
robber. By them ye rule, by their means ye subsist, by their aid ye
conquer. Yet, how disdainfully ye look upon them! How strange, how
very strange!

“Now that ye have refused the Most Great Peace,
hold ye fast unto this, the Lesser Peace, that haply ye may in some
degree better your own condition and that of your dependents.

“O rulers of the earth! Be reconciled among
yourselves, that ye may need no more armaments save in a measure to
safeguard your territories and dominions. Beware lest ye disregard
the counsel of the All-Knowing, the Faithful.

“Be united, O kings of the earth, for thereby will
the tempest of discord be stilled amongst you, and your peoples find
rest, if ye be of them that comprehend. Should anyone among you take
up arms against another, rise ye all against him, for this is naught
but manifest justice.”

To the Christian kings Bahá’u’lláh,
moreover, particularly directs His words of censure, and, in a
language that cannot be mistaken, He discloses the true character of
His Revelation:

“O kings of Christendom! Heard ye not the saying
of Jesus, the Spirit of God, ‘I go away, and come again unto
you’? Wherefore, then, did ye fail, when He did come again unto
you in the clouds of heaven, to draw nigh unto Him, that ye might
behold His face, and be of them that attained His Presence? In
another passage He saith: ‘When He, the Spirit of Truth, is
come, He will guide you into all truth.’ And yet, behold how,
when He did bring the truth, ye refused to turn your faces towards
Him, and persisted in disporting yourselves with your pastimes and
fancies. Ye welcomed Him not, neither did ye seek His Presence, that
ye might hear the verses of God from His own mouth, and partake of
the manifold wisdom of the Almighty, the All-Glorious, the All-Wise.
Ye have, by reason of your failure, hindered the breath of God from
being wafted over you, and have withheld from your souls the
sweetness of its fragrance. Ye continue roving with delight in the
valley of your corrupt desires. Ye and all ye possess shall pass
away. Ye shall, most certainly, return to God, and shall be called to
account for your doings in the presence of Him Who shall gather
together the entire creation….”

The Báb, moreover, in the Qayyúm-i-Asmá,
His celebrated commentary on the Súrih of Joseph, revealed in
the first year of His Mission, and characterized by Bahá’u’lláh
as “the first, the greatest, and mightiest of all books”
in the Bábí Dispensation, has issued this stirring call
to the kings and princes of the earth:

“O concourse of kings and of the sons of kings!
Lay aside, one and all, your dominion which belongeth unto God….
Vain indeed is your dominion, for God hath set aside earthly
possessions for such as have denied Him…. O concourse of kings!
Deliver with truth and in all haste the verses sent down by Us to the
peoples of Turkey and of India, and beyond them, with power and with
truth, to lands in both the East and the West…. By God! If ye do
well, to your own behoof will ye do well; and if ye deny God and His
signs, We, in very truth, having God, can well dispense with all
creatures and all earthly dominion.”

And again: “Fear ye God, O concourse of kings,
lest ye remain afar from Him Who is His Remembrance [the Báb],
after the Truth hath come unto you with a Book and signs from God, as
spoken through the wondrous tongue of Him Who is His Remembrance.
Seek ye grace from God, for God hath ordained for you, after ye have
believed in Him, a Garden the vastness of which is as the vastness of
the whole of Paradise.”

So much for the epoch-making counsels and warnings
collectively addressed by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh
to the sovereigns of the earth, and more particularly directed to the
kings of Christendom. I would be failing to do justice to my theme
were I to ignore, or even to dismiss briefly, those audacious,
fate-laden apostrophes to individual monarchs who, whether as kings
or emperors, have either viewed with cold indifference the
tribulations, or rejected with contempt the warnings, of the twin
Founders of our Faith. I can neither quote as fully as I should from
the two thousand and more verses that have streamed from the pen of
Bahá’u’lláh and, to a lesser extent, from
that of the Báb, addressed to individual monarchs in Europe
and Asia, nor is it my purpose to expatiate upon the circumstances
that have provoked, or the consequences that have flowed from, those
astounding utterances. The historian of the future, viewing more
widely and in fuller perspective the momentous happenings of the
Apostolic and Formative Ages of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh,
will no doubt be able to evaluate accurately and to describe in a
circumstantial manner the causes, the implications and the effects of
these Divine Messages which, in their scope and effectiveness, have
certainly no parallel in the religious annals of mankind.

To the French Emperor, Napoleon III, Bahá’u’lláh
addressed these words: “O King of Paris! Tell the priest to
ring the bells no longer. By God, the True One! The Most Mighty Bell
hath appeared in the form of Him Who is the Most Great Name, and the
fingers of the will of thy Lord, the Most Exalted, the Most High,
toll it out in the heaven of Immortality, in His Name, the
All-Glorious. Thus have the mighty verses of thy Lord been again sent
down unto thee, that thou mayest arise to remember God, the Creator
of earth and heaven, in these days when all the tribes of the earth
have mourned, and the foundations of the cities have trembled, and
the dust of irreligion hath enwrapped all men, except such as thy
Lord, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise, was pleased to spare…. Give
ear, O King, unto the Voice that calleth from the Fire which burneth
in this Verdant Tree, upon this Sinai which hath been raised above
the hallowed and snow-white Spot, beyond the Everlasting City:
‘Verily, there is none other God but Me, the Ever-Forgiving,
the Most Merciful!’ We, in truth, have sent Him Whom We aided
with the Holy Spirit [Jesus], that He may announce unto you this
Light that hath shone forth from the horizon of the will of your
Lord, the Most Exalted, the All-Glorious, and Whose signs have been
revealed in the West, that ye may set your faces towards Him
[Bahá’u’lláh], on this Day which God hath
exalted above all other days, and whereon the All-Merciful hath shed
the splendor of His effulgent glory upon all who are in heaven and
all who are on earth. Arise thou to serve God and help His Cause. He,
verily, will assist thee with the hosts of the seen and unseen, and
will set thee king over all that whereon the sun riseth. Thy Lord, in
truth, is the All-Powerful, the Almighty…. Attire thy temple with
the ornament of My Name, and thy tongue with remembrance of Me, and
thine heart with love for Me, the Almighty, the Most High. We have
desired for thee naught except that which is better for thee than
what thou dost possess and all the treasures of the earth. Thy Lord,
verily, is knowing, informed of all….

“O King! We heard the words thou didst utter in
answer to the Czar of Russia, concerning the decision made regarding
the war [Crimean War]. Thy Lord, verily, knoweth, is informed of all.
Thou didst say: ‘I lay asleep upon my couch, when the cry of
the oppressed, who were drowned in the Black Sea, wakened me.’
This is what we heard thee say, and, verily, thy Lord is witness unto
what I say. We testify that that which wakened thee was not their
cry, but the promptings of thine own passions, for We tested thee,
and found thee wanting. Comprehend the meaning of My words, and be
thou of the discerning…. Hadst thou been sincere in thy words, thou
wouldst have not cast behind thy back the Book of God, when it was
sent unto thee by Him Who is the Almighty, the All-Wise. We have
proved thee through it, and found thee other than that which thou
didst profess. Arise, and make amends for that which escaped thee.
Erelong the world and all that thou possessest will perish, and the
kingdom will remain unto God, thy Lord and the Lord of thy fathers of
old. It behooveth thee not to conduct thine affairs according to the
dictates of thy desires. Fear the sighs of this Wronged One, and
shield Him from the darts of such as act unjustly. For what thou hast
done, thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion, and thine empire
shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment for that which thou hast
wrought. Then wilt thou know how thou hast plainly erred. Commotions
shall seize all the people in that land, unless thou arisest to help
this Cause, and followest Him Who is the Spirit of God [Jesus] in
this, the straight Path. Hath thy pomp made thee proud? By My Life!
It shall not endure; nay, it shall soon pass away, unless thou
holdest fast by this firm Cord. We see abasement hastening after
thee, while thou art of the heedless…. Abandon thy palaces to the
people of the graves, and thine empire to whosoever desireth it, and
turn, then, unto the Kingdom. This, verily, is what God hath chosen
for thee, wert thou of them that turn unto Him…. Shouldst thou
desire to bear the weight of thy dominion, bear it then to aid the
Cause of thy Lord. Glorified be this station which whoever attaineth
thereunto hath attained unto all good that proceedeth from Him Who is
the All-Knowing, the All-Wise…. Exultest thou over the treasures
thou dost possess, knowing they shall perish? Rejoicest thou in that
thou rulest a span of earth, when the whole world, in the estimation
of the people of Bahá, is worth as much as the black in the
eye of a dead ant? Abandon it unto such as have set their affections
upon it, and turn thou unto Him Who is the Desire of the world.
Whither are gone the proud and their palaces? Gaze thou into their
tombs, that thou mayest profit by this example, inasmuch as We made
it a lesson unto every beholder. Were the breezes of Revelation to
seize thee, thou wouldst flee the world, and turn unto the Kingdom,
and wouldst expend all thou possessest, that thou mayest draw nigh
unto this sublime Vision.”

Revealed to the Pope

To Pope Pius IX, Bahá’u’lláh
revealed the following: “O Pope! Rend the veils asunder. He Who
is the Lord of Lords is come overshadowed with clouds, and the decree
hath been fulfilled by God, the Almighty, the Unrestrained…. He,
verily, hath again come down from Heaven even as He came down from it
the first time. Beware that thou dispute not with Him even as the
Pharisees disputed with Him [Jesus] without a clear token or proof.
On His right hand flow the living waters of grace, and on His left
the choice Wine of justice, whilst before Him march the angels of
Paradise, bearing the banners of His signs. Beware lest any name
debar thee from God, the Creator of earth and heaven. Leave thou the
world behind thee, and turn towards thy Lord, through Whom the whole
earth hath been illumined…. Dwellest thou in palaces whilst He Who
is the King of Revelation liveth in the most desolate of abodes?
Leave them unto such as desire them, and set thy face with joy and
delight towards the Kingdom…. Arise in the name of thy Lord, the
God of Mercy, amidst the peoples of the earth, and seize thou the Cup
of Life with the hands of confidence, and first drink thou therefrom,
and proffer it then to such as turn towards it amongst the peoples of
all faiths….

“Call thou to remembrance Him Who was the Spirit
[Jesus], Who, when He came, the most learned of His age pronounced
judgment against Him in His own country, whilst he who was only a
fisherman believed in Him. Take heed, then, ye men of understanding
heart! Thou, in truth, art one of the suns of the heaven of His
names. Guard thyself, lest darkness spread its veils over thee, and
fold thee away from His light…. Consider those who opposed the Son
[Jesus], when He came unto them with sovereignty and power. How many
the Pharisees who were waiting to behold Him, and were lamenting over
their separation from Him! And yet, when the fragrance of His coming
was wafted over them, and His beauty was unveiled, they turned aside
from Him and disputed with Him…. None save a very few, who were
destitute of any power amongst men, turned towards His face. And yet
today every man endowed with power and invested with sovereignty
prideth himself on His Name! In like manner, consider how numerous,
in these days, are the monks who, in My Name, have secluded
themselves in their churches, and who, when the appointed time was
fulfilled, and We unveiled Our beauty, knew Us not, though they call
upon Me at eventide and at dawn….

“The Word which the Son concealed is made
manifest. It hath been sent down in the form of the human temple in
this day. Blessed be the Lord Who is the Father! He, verily, is come
unto the nations in His most great majesty. Turn your faces towards
Him, O concourse of the righteous! …This is the day whereon the
Rock [Peter] crieth out and shouteth, and celebrateth the praise of
its Lord, the All-Possessing, the Most High, saying: ‘Lo! The
Father is come, and that which ye were promised in the Kingdom is
fulfilled!…’ My body longeth for the cross, and Mine head
waiteth the thrust of the spear, in the path of the All-Merciful,
that the world may be purged from its transgressions….

“O Supreme Pontiff! Incline thine ear unto that
which the Fashioner of moldering bones counseleth thee, as voiced by
Him Who is His Most Great Name. Sell all the embellished ornaments
thou dost possess, and expend them in the path of God, Who causeth
the night to return upon the day, and the day to return upon the
night. Abandon thy kingdom unto the kings, and emerge from thy
habitation, with thy face set towards the Kingdom, and, detached from
the world, then speak forth the praises of thy Lord betwixt earth and
heaven. Thus hath bidden thee He Who is the Possessor of Names, on
the part of thy Lord, the Almighty, the All-Knowing. Exhort thou the
kings and say: ‘Deal equitably with men. Beware lest ye
transgress the bounds fixed in the Book.’ This indeed becometh
thee. Beware lest thou appropriate unto thyself the things of the
world and the riches thereof. Leave them unto such as desire them,
and cleave unto that which hath been enjoined upon thee by Him Who is
the Lord of creation. Should anyone offer thee all the treasures of
the earth, refuse to even glance upon them. Be as thy Lord hath been.
Thus hath the Tongue of Revelation spoken that which God hath made
the ornament of the book of creation…. Should the inebriation of
the wine of My verses seize thee, and thou determinest to present
thyself before the throne of thy Lord, the Creator of earth and
heaven, make My love thy vesture, and thy shield remembrance of Me,
and thy provision reliance upon God, the Revealer of all power….
Verily, the day of ingathering is come, and all things have been
separated from each other. He hath stored away that which He chose in
the vessels of justice, and cast into fire that which befitteth it.
Thus hath it been decreed by your Lord, the Mighty, the Loving, in
this promised Day. He, verily, ordaineth what He pleaseth. There is
none other God save He, the Almighty, the All-Compelling.”

In the Tablet addressed to the Czar of Russia, Alexander
II, we read: “O Czar of Russia! Incline thine ear unto the
voice of God, the King, the Holy, and turn thou unto Paradise, the
Spot wherein abideth He Who, among the Concourse on high, beareth the
most excellent titles, and Who, in the kingdom of creation, is called
by the name of God, the Effulgent, the All-Glorious. Beware lest thy
desire deter thee from turning towards the face of thy Lord, the
Compassionate, the Most Merciful. We, verily, have heard the thing
for which thou didst supplicate thy Lord, whilst secretly communing
with Him. Wherefore, the breeze of My loving-kindness wafted forth,
and the sea of My mercy surged, and We answered thee in truth. Thy
Lord, verily, is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise. Whilst I lay chained
and fettered in the prison, one of thy ministers extended Me his aid.
Wherefore hath God ordained for thee a station which the knowledge of
none can comprehend except His knowledge. Beware lest thou barter
away this sublime station…. Beware lest thy sovereignty withhold
thee from Him Who is the Supreme Sovereign. He, verily, is come with
His Kingdom, and all the atoms cry aloud: ‘Lo! The Lord is come
in His great majesty!’ He Who is the Father is come, and the
Son [Jesus], in the holy vale, crieth out: ‘Here am I, here am
I, O Lord, My God!’, whilst Sinai circleth round the House, and
the Burning Bush calleth aloud: ‘The All-Bounteous is come
mounted upon the clouds! Blessed is he that draweth nigh unto Him,
and woe betide them that are far away.’

“Arise thou amongst men in the name of this
all-compelling Cause, and summon, then, the nations unto God, the
Exalted, the Great. Be thou not of them who called upon God by one of
His names, but who, when He Who is the Object of all names appeared,
denied Him and turned aside from Him, and, in the end, pronounced
sentence against Him with manifest injustice. Consider and call thou
to mind the days whereon the Spirit of God [Jesus] appeared, and
Herod gave judgment against Him. God, however, aided Him with the
hosts of the unseen, and protected Him with truth, and sent Him down
unto another land, according to His promise. He, verily, ordaineth
what He pleaseth. Thy Lord truly preserveth whom He willeth, be he in
the midst of the seas, or in the maw of the serpent, or beneath the
sword of the oppressor….

“Again I say: Hearken unto My voice that calleth
from My prison, that it may acquaint thee with the things that have
befallen My Beauty, at the hands of them that are the manifestations
of My glory, and that thou mayest perceive how great hath been My
patience, notwithstanding My might, and how immense My forebearance,
notwithstanding My power. By My life! Couldst thou but know the
things sent down by My Pen, and discover the treasures of My Cause,
and the pearls of My mysteries which lie hid in the seas of My names
and in the goblets of My words, thou wouldst, in thy love for My
name, and in thy longing for My glorious and sublime Kingdom, lay
down thy life in My path. Know thou that though My body be beneath
the swords of My foes, and My limbs be beset with incalculable
afflictions, yet My spirit is filled with a gladness with which all
the joys of the earth can never compare.

“Set thine heart towards Him Who is the Point of
adoration for the world, and say: O peoples of the earth! Have ye
denied the One in Whose path He Who came with the truth, bearing the
announcement of your Lord, the Exalted, the Great, suffered
martyrdom? Say: This is an Announcement whereat the hearts of the
Prophets and Messengers have rejoiced. This is the One Whom the heart
of the world remembereth, and is promised in the Books of God, the
Mighty, the All-Wise. The hands of the Messengers were, in their
desire to meet Me, upraised towards God, the Mighty, the
Glorified…. Some lamented in their separation from Me, others
endured hardships in My path, and still others laid down their lives
for the sake of My Beauty, could ye but know it. Say: I, verily, have
not sought to extol Mine Own Self, but rather God Himself, were ye to
judge fairly. Naught can be seen in Me except God and His Cause,
could ye but perceive it. I am the One Whom the tongue of Isaiah hath
extolled, the One with Whose name both the Torah and the Evangel were
adorned. …Blessed be the king whose sovereignty hath withheld him
not from his Sovereign, and who hath turned unto God with his heart.
He, verily, is accounted of those that have attained unto that which
God, the Mighty, the All-Wise, hath willed. Erelong will such a one
find himself numbered with the monarchs of the realms of the Kingdom.
Thy Lord is, in truth, potent over all things. He giveth what He
willeth to whomsoever He willeth, and withholdeth what He pleaseth
from whomsoever He willeth. He, verily, is the All-Powerful, the
Almighty.”

To Queen Victoria Bahá’u’lláh
has written: “O Queen in London! Incline thine ear unto the
voice of thy Lord, the Lord of all mankind, calling from the Divine
Lote-Tree: Verily, no God is there but Me, the Almighty, the
All-Wise! Cast away all that is on earth, and attire the head of thy
kingdom with the crown of the remembrance of thy Lord, the
All-Glorious. He, in truth, hath come unto the world in His most
great glory, and all that hath been mentioned in the Gospel hath been
fulfilled. The land of Syria hath been honored by the footsteps of
its Lord, the Lord of all men, and north and south are both
inebriated with the wine of His presence. Blessed is the man that
inhaled the fragrance of the Most Merciful, and turned unto the
Dawning-Place of His Beauty, in this resplendent Dawn. The Mosque of
Aqsá vibrateth through the breezes of its Lord, the
All-Glorious, whilst Bathá [Mecca] trembleth at the voice of
God, the Exalted, the Most High. Whereupon every single stone of them
celebrateth the praise of the Lord, through this Great Name.

“Lay aside thy desire, and set then thine heart
towards thy Lord, the Ancient of Days. We make mention of thee for
the sake of God, and desire that thy name may be exalted through thy
remembrance of God, the Creator of earth and heaven. He, verily, is
witness unto that which I say. We have been informed that thou hast
forbidden the trading in slaves, both men and women. This, verily, is
what God hath enjoined in this wondrous Revelation. God hath, truly,
destined a reward for thee, because of this. He, verily, will pay the
doer of good his due recompense, wert thou to follow what hath been
sent unto thee by Him Who is the All-Knowing, the All-Informed. As to
him who turneth aside, and swelleth with pride, after that the clear
tokens have come unto him, from the Revealer of signs, his work shall
God bring to naught. He, in truth, hath power over all things. Man’s
actions are acceptable after his having recognized [the
Manifestation]. He that turneth aside from the True One is indeed the
most veiled amongst His creatures. Thus hath it been decreed by Him
Who is the Almighty, the Most Powerful.

“We have also heard that thou hast entrusted the
reins of counsel into the hands of the representatives of the people.
Thou, indeed, hast done well, for thereby the foundations of the
edifice of thine affairs will be strengthened, and the hearts of all
that are beneath thy shadow, whether high or low, will be
tranquilized. It behooveth them, however, to be trustworthy among His
servants, and to regard themselves as the representatives of all that
dwell on earth. This is what counseleth them, in this Tablet, He Who
is the Ruler, the All-Wise…. Blessed is he that entereth the
assembly for the sake of God, and judgeth between men with pure
justice. He, indeed, is of the blissful….

“Turn thou unto God and say: O my Sovereign Lord!
I am but a vassal of Thine, and Thou art, in truth, the King of
kings. I have lifted my suppliant hands unto the heaven of Thy grace
and Thy bounties. Send down, then, upon me from the clouds of Thy
generosity that which will rid me of all save Thee, and draw me nigh
unto Thyself. I beseech Thee, O my Lord, by Thy name, which Thou hast
made the king of names and the manifestation of Thyself to all who
are in heaven and on earth, to rend asunder the veils that have
intervened between me and my recognition of the Dawning-Place of Thy
signs and the Dayspring of Thy Revelation. Thou art, verily, the
Almighty, the All-Powerful, the All-Bounteous. Deprive me not, O my
Lord, of the fragrances of the Robe of Thy mercy in Thy days, and
write down for me that which Thou hast written down for Thy
handmaidens who have believed in Thee and in Thy signs, and have
recognized Thee, and set their hearts towards the horizon of Thy
Cause. Thou art truly the Lord of the worlds and of those who show
mercy the Most Merciful. Assist me, then, O my God, to remember Thee
amongst Thy handmaidens, and to aid Thy Cause in Thy lands. Accept,
then, that which hath escaped me when the light of Thy countenance
shone forth. Thou, indeed, hast power over all things. Glory be to
Thee, O Thou in Whose hand is the kingdom of the heavens and of the
earth.”

In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, His Most Holy Book,
Bahá’u’lláh thus addresses the German
Emperor, William I: “Say: O King of Berlin! Give ear unto the
Voice calling from this manifest Temple: Verily, there is none other
God but Me, the Everlasting, the Peerless, the Ancient of Days. Take
heed lest pride debar thee from recognizing the Dayspring of Divine
Revelation, lest earthly desires shut thee out, as by a veil, from
the Lord of the Throne above and of the earth below. Thus counseleth
thee the Pen of the Most High. He, verily, is the Most Gracious, the
All-Bountiful. Do thou remember the one whose power transcended thy
power [Napoleon III], and whose station excelled thy station. Where
is he? Whither are gone the things he possessed? Take warning, and be
not of them that are fast asleep. He it was who cast the Tablet of
God behind him, when We made known unto him what the hosts of tyranny
had caused Us to suffer. Wherefore, disgrace assailed him from all
sides, and he went down to dust in great loss. Think deeply, O King,
concerning him, and concerning them who, like unto thee, have
conquered cities and ruled over men. The All-Merciful brought them
down from their palaces to their graves. Be warned, be of them who
reflect.”

And further, in that same Book, this remarkable
prophecy: “O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with
gore, inasmuch as the swords of retribution were drawn against you;
and you shall have another turn. And We hear the lamentations of
Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous glory.”

Again in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas these words, directed
to Emperor Francis Joseph, are recorded: “O Emperor of Austria!
He who is the Dayspring of God’s Light dwelt in the prison of
Akká, at the time when thou didst set forth to visit the Aqsá
Mosque [Jerusalem]. Thou passed Him by, and inquired not about Him,
by Whom every house is exalted, and every lofty gate unlocked. We,
verily, made it [Jerusalem] a place whereunto the world should turn,
that they might remember Me, and yet thou hast rejected Him Who is
the Object of this remembrance, when He appeared with the Kingdom of
God, thy Lord and the Lord of the worlds. We have been with thee at
all times, and found thee clinging unto the Branch and heedless of
the Root. Thy Lord, verily, is a witness unto what I say. We grieved
to see thee circle round Our Name, whilst unaware of Us, though We
were before thy face. Open thine eyes, that thou mayest behold this
glorious Vision, and recognize Him Whom thou invokest in the daytime
and in the night season, and gaze on the Light that shineth above
this luminous Horizon.”

In the Súriy-i-Mulúk Sulṭán
‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz is addressed in the following
terms: “Hearken, O king, to the speech of Him that speaketh the
truth, Him that doth not ask thee to recompense Him with the things
God hath chosen to bestow upon thee, Him Who unerringly treadeth the
straight Path. He it is Who summoneth thee unto God, thy Lord, Who
showeth thee the right course, the way that leadeth to true felicity,
that haply thou mayest be of them with whom it shall be well…. He
that giveth up himself wholly to God, God shall, assuredly, be with
him; and he that placeth his complete trust in God, God shall,
verily, protect him from whatsoever may harm him, and shield him from
the wickedness of every evil plotter.

“Wert thou to incline thine ear unto My speech and
observe My counsel, God would exalt thee to so eminent a position
that the designs of no man on the whole earth could ever touch or
hurt thee. Observe, O king, with thine inmost heart and with thy
whole being, the precepts of God, and walk not in the paths of the
oppressor. Seize thou, and hold firmly within the grasp of thy might,
the reins of the affairs of thy people, and examine in person
whatever pertaineth unto them. Let nothing escape thee, for therein
lieth the highest good.

“Render thanks unto God for having chosen thee out
of the whole world, and made thee king over them that profess thy
faith. It well beseemeth thee to appreciate the wondrous favors with
which God hath favored thee, and to magnify continually His name.
Thou canst best praise Him if thou lovest His loved ones, and dost
safeguard and protect His servants from the mischief of the
treacherous, that none may any longer oppress them. Thou shouldst,
moreover, arise to enforce the law of God amongst them, that thou
mayest be of those who are firmly established in His law.

“Shouldst thou cause rivers of justice to spread
their waters amongst thy subjects, God would surely aid thee with the
hosts of the unseen and of the seen, and would strengthen thee in
thine affairs. No God is there but Him. All creation and its empire
are His. Unto Him return the works of the faithful.

“Place not thy reliance on thy treasures. Put thy
whole confidence in the grace of God, thy Lord. Let Him be thy trust
in whatever thou doest, and be of them that have submitted themselves
to His Will. Let Him be thy helper and enrich thyself with His
treasures, for with Him are the treasuries of the heavens and of the
earth. He bestoweth them upon whom He will, and from whom He will He
withholdeth them. There is none other God but Him, the
All-Possessing, the All-Praised. All are but paupers at the door of
His mercy; all are helpless before the revelation of His sovereignty,
and beseech His favors.

“Overstep not the bounds of moderation, and deal
justly with them that serve thee. Bestow upon them according to their
needs, and not to the extent that will enable them to lay up riches
for themselves, to deck their persons, to embellish their homes, to
acquire the things that are of no benefit unto them, and to be
numbered with the extravagant. Deal with them with undeviating
justice, so that none among them may either suffer want, or be
pampered with luxuries. This is but manifest justice. Allow not the
abject to rule over and dominate them who are noble and worthy of
honor, and suffer not the high-minded to be at the mercy of the
contemptible and worthless, for this is what We observed upon Our
arrival in the City [Constantinople], and to it We bear witness….

“Set before thine eyes God’s unerring
Balance and, as one standing in His Presence, weigh in that balance
thine actions every day, every moment of thy life. Bring thyself to
account ere thou art summoned to a reckoning, on the Day when no man
shall have strength to stand for fear of God, the Day when the hearts
of the heedless ones shall be made to tremble….

“Thou art God’s shadow on earth. Strive,
therefore, to act in such a manner as befitteth so eminent, so august
a station. If thou dost depart from following the things We have
caused to descend upon thee and taught thee, thou wilt, assuredly, be
derogating from that great and priceless honor. Return, then, and
cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and
all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter
and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every
trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its
radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart.
This, verily, hath been decreed and written down in His ancient Book.
And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it
behooveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and
undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine
heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of anyone besides
Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His
unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness….

Let the Oppressor Desist

“Let thine ear be attentive, O King, to the words
We have addressed thee. Let the oppressor desist from his tyranny,
and cut off the perpetrators of injustice from among them that
profess thy faith. By the righteousness of God! The tribulations We
have sustained are such that any pen that recounteth them cannot but
be overwhelmed with anguish. No one of them that truly believe and
uphold the unity of God can bear the burden of their recital. So
great have been Our sufferings that even the eyes of our enemies have
wept over Us, and beyond those of every discerning person. And to all
these trials have We been subjected, in spite of Our action in
approaching thee, and in bidding the people to enter beneath thy
shadow, that thou mightest be a stronghold unto them that believe in
and uphold the unity of God.

“Have I, O King, ever disobeyed thee? Have I, at
any time, transgressed any of thy laws? Can any of thy ministers that
represent thee in ‘Iráq produce any proof that can
establish My disloyalty to thee? No, by Him Who is the Lord of all
worlds! Not for one short moment did We rebel against thee, or
against any of thy ministers. Never, God willing, shall We revolt
against thee, though We be exposed to trials more severe than any We
suffered in the past. In the daytime and in the night season, at even
and at morn, We pray to God on thy behalf, that He may graciously aid
thee to be obedient unto Him and to observe His commandments, that He
may shield thee from the hosts of the evil ones. Do, therefore, as it
pleaseth thee, and treat Us as befitteth thy station and beseemeth
thy sovereignty. Be not forgetful of the law of God in whatever thou
desirest to achieve, now or in the days to come. Say: Praise be to
God, the Lord of all worlds!”

Moreover, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, is this vehement
apostrophe to Constantinople: “O Spot that art situate on the
shores of the two seas! The throne of tyranny hath, verily, been
stablished upon thee, and the flame of hatred hath been kindled
within thy bosom, in such wise that the Concourse on high and they
who circle around the Exalted Throne have wailed and lamented. We
behold in thee the foolish ruling over the wise, and darkness
vaunting itself against the light. Thou art indeed filled with
manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious?
By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy
daughters and thy widows and all the kindreds that dwell within thee
shall lament. Thus informeth thee the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.”

As to Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh,
the Lawḥ-i-Sulṭán, despatched to him from Akká
and constituting Bahá’u’lláh’s
lengthiest Epistle to any single sovereign, proclaims: “O King!
I was but a man like others, asleep upon My couch, when lo, the
breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me, and taught Me the
knowledge of all that hath been. This thing is not from Me, but from
One Who is Almighty and All-Knowing. And He bade Me lift up My voice
between earth and heaven, and for this there befell Me what hath
caused the tears of every man of understanding to flow. The learning
current amongst men I studied not; their schools I entered not. Ask
of the city wherein I dwelt, that thou mayest be well assured that I
am not of them who speak falsely. This is but a leaf which the winds
of the will of thy Lord, the Almighty, the All-Praised, have stirred.
Can it be still when the tempestuous winds are blowing? Nay, by Him
Who is the Lord of all Names and Attributes! They move it as they
list. The evanescent is as nothing before Him Who is the
Ever-Abiding. His all-compelling summons hath reached Me, and caused
Me to speak His praise amidst all people. I was indeed as one dead
when His behest was uttered. The hand of the will of thy Lord, the
Compassionate, the Merciful, transformed Me. Can anyone speak forth
of his own accord that for which all men, both high and low, will
protest against him? Nay, by Him Who taught the Pen the eternal
mysteries, save him whom the grace of the Almighty, the All-Powerful,
hath strengthened. The Pen of the Most High addresseth Me saying:
Fear not. Relate unto His Majesty the Sháh that which
befell thee. His heart, verily, is between the fingers of thy Lord,
the God of Mercy, that haply the sun of justice and bounty may shine
forth above the horizon of his heart. Thus hath the decree been
irrevocably fixed by Him Who is the All-Wise.

“Look upon this Youth, O King, with the eyes of
justice; judge thou, then, with truth concerning what hath befallen
Him. Of a verity, God hath made thee His shadow amongst men, and the
sign of His power unto all that dwell on earth. Judge thou between Us
and them that have wronged Us without proof and without an
enlightening Book. They that surround thee love thee for their own
sakes, whereas this Youth loveth thee for thine own sake, and hath
had no desire except to draw thee nigh unto the seat of grace, and to
turn thee toward the right hand of justice. Thy Lord beareth witness
unto that which I declare.

“O King! Wert thou to incline thine ear unto the
shrill of the Pen of Glory and the cooing of the Dove of Eternity
which, on the branches of the Lote-Tree beyond which there is no
passing, uttereth praises to God, the Maker of all names and Creator
of earth and heaven, thou wouldst attain unto a station from which
thou wouldst behold in the world of being naught save the effulgence
of the Adored One, and wouldst regard thy sovereignty as the most
contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning it to whosoever might
desire it, and setting thy face toward the Horizon aglow with the
light of His countenance. Neither wouldst thou ever be willing to
bear the burden of dominion save for the purpose of helping thy Lord,
the Exalted, the Most High. Then would the Concourse on high bless
thee. O how excellent is this most sublime station, couldst thou
ascend thereunto through the power of a sovereignty recognized as
derived from the Name of God!…

“O King of the age! The eyes of these refugees are
turned towards and fixed upon the mercy of the Most Merciful. No
doubt is there whatever that these tribulations will be followed by
the outpourings of a supreme mercy, and these dire adversities be
succeeded by an overflowing prosperity. We fain would hope, however,
that His Majesty the Sháh will himself examine these
matters, and bring hope to the hearts. That which We have submitted
to thy Majesty is indeed for thine highest good. And God, verily, is
a sufficient witness unto Me….

“O would that thou wouldst permit Me, O Sháh,
to send unto thee that which would cheer the eyes, and tranquilize
the souls, and persuade every fair-minded person that with Him is the
knowledge of the Book…. But for the repudiation of the foolish and
the connivance of the divines, I would have uttered a discourse that
would have thrilled and carried away the hearts unto a realm from the
murmur of whose winds can be heard: ‘No God is there but
He!’…

“I have seen, O Sháh, in the path of
God what eye hath not seen nor ear heard…. How numerous the
tribulations which have rained, and will soon rain, upon Me! I
advance with My face set towards Him Who is the Almighty, the
All-Bounteous, whilst behind Me glideth the serpent. Mine eyes have
rained down tears until My bed is drenched. I sorrow not for Myself,
however. By God! Mine head yearneth for the spear out of love for its
Lord. I never passed a tree, but Mine heart addressed it saying: ‘O
would that thou wert cut down in My name, and My body crucified upon
thee, in the path of My Lord!’… By God! Though weariness lay
Me low, and hunger consume Me, and the bare rock be My bed, and My
fellows the beasts of the field, I will not complain, but will endure
patiently as those endued with constancy and firmness have endured
patiently, through the power of God, the Eternal King and Creator of
the nations, and will render thanks unto God under all conditions. We
pray that, out of His bounty—exalted be He—He may
release, through this imprisonment, the necks of men from chains and
fetters, and cause them to turn, with sincere faces, towards His
Face, Who is the Mighty, the Bounteous. Ready is He to answer
whosover calleth upon Him, and nigh is He unto such as commune with
Him.”

In the Qayyúm-i-Asmá the Báb, for
His part, thus addresses Muḥammad Sháh: “O
King of Islám! Aid thou, with the truth, after having aided
the Book, Him Who is Our Most Great Remembrance, for God hath, in
very truth, destined for thee, and for such as circle round thee, on
the Day of Judgment, a responsible position in His Path. I swear by
God, O Sháh! If thou showest enmity unto Him Who is His
Remembrance, God will, on the Day of Resurrection, condemn thee,
before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very truth,
find on that Day any helper except God, the Exalted. Purge thou, O
Sháh, the Sacred Land [Ṭihrán] from such
as have repudiated the Book, ere the day whereon the Remembrance of
God cometh, terribly and of a sudden, with His potent Cause, by the
leave of God, the Most High. God, verily, hath prescribed to thee to
submit unto Him Who is His Remembrance, and unto His Cause, and to
subdue, with the truth and by His leave, the countries, for in this
world thou hast been mercifully invested with sovereignty, and will,
in the next, dwell, nigh unto the Seat of Holiness, with the inmates
of the Paradise of His good pleasure. Let not thy sovereignty deceive
thee, O Sháh, for ‘every soul shall taste of
death,’ and this, in very truth, hath been written down as a
decree of God.”

In His Tablet to Muḥammad Sháh the
Báb, moreover, has revealed: “I am the Primal Point from
which have been generated all created things. I am the Countenance of
God Whose splendor can never be obscured, the Light of God Whose
radiance can never fade…. All the keys of heaven God hath chosen to
place on My right hand, and all the keys of hell on My left…. I am
one of the sustaining pillars of the Primal Word of God. Whosoever
hath recognized Me, hath known all that is true and right, and hath
attained all that is good and seemly…. The substance wherewith God
hath created Me is not the clay out of which others have been formed.
He hath conferred upon Me that which the worldly-wise can never
comprehend, nor the faithful discover….

“By My life! But for the obligation to acknowledge
the Cause of Him Who is the Testimony of God … I would not have
announced this unto thee…. In that same year [year 60] I despatched
a messenger and a book unto thee, that thou mightest act towards the
Cause of Him Who is the Testimony of God as befitteth the station of
thy sovereignty….

“I swear by the truth of God! Were he who hath
been willing to treat Me in such a manner to know who it is whom he
hath so treated, he, verily, would never in his life be happy. Nay—I,
verily, acquaint thee with the truth of the matter—it is as if
he hath imprisoned all the Prophets, and all the men of truth, and
all the chosen ones…. Woe betide him from whose hands floweth evil,
and blessed the man from whose hands floweth good….

“I swear by God! I seek no earthly goods from
thee, be it as much as a mustard seed…. I swear by the truth of
God! Wert thou to know that which I know, thou wouldst forego the
sovereignty of this world and of the next, that thou mightest attain
My good pleasure, through thine obedience unto the True One…. Wert
thou to refuse, the Lord of the world would raise up one who will
exalt His Cause, and the Command of God will, verily, be carried into
effect.”

God’s Vicar on Earth

Dear friends! How vast a panorama these gemlike, these
soul-searching divinely uttered pronouncements outspread before our
eyes! What memories they evoke! How sublime the principles they
inculcate! What hopes they engender! What apprehensions they excite!
And yet how fragmentary must these above-quoted words, suited as they
are to the immediate purpose of my theme, appear when compared with
the torrential majesty which only the reading of the full text can
disclose! He Who was God’s Vicar on earth, addressing, at the
most critical moment when His Revelation was attaining its zenith,
those who concentrated in their persons the splendor, the
sovereignty, and the strength of earthly dominion, could certainly
not subtract one jot or tittle from the weight and force which the
presentation of so historic a Message demanded. Neither the perils
which were fast closing in upon Him, nor the formidable power with
which the doctrine of absolute sovereignty invested, at that time,
the emperors of the West and the potentates of the East, could
restrain the Exile and Prisoner of Adrianople from communicating the
full blast of His Message to His twin imperial persecutors as well as
to the rest of their fellow-sovereigns.

The magnitude and diversity of the theme, the cogency of
the argument, the sublimity and audacity of the language, arrest our
attention and astound our minds. Emperors, kings and princes,
chancellors and ministers, the Pope himself, priests, monks and
philosophers, the exponents of learning, parliamentarians and
deputies, the rich ones of the earth, the followers of all religions,
and the people of Bahá—all are brought within the
purview of the Author of these Messages, and receive, each according
to their merits, the counsels and admonitions they deserve. No less
amazing is the diversity of the subjects touched upon in these
Tablets. The transcendent majesty and unity of an unknowable and
unapproachable God is extolled, and the oneness of His Messengers
proclaimed and emphasized. The uniqueness, the universality and
potentialities of the Bahá’í Faith are stressed,
and the purpose and character of the Bábí Revelation
unfolded. The significance of Bahá’u’lláh’s
sufferings and banishments is disclosed, and the tribulations rained
down upon His Herald and upon His Namesake recognized and lamented.
His own yearning for the crown of martyrdom, which they both so
mysteriously won, is voiced, and the ineffable glories and wonders in
store for His own Dispensation foreshadowed. Episodes, at once moving
and marvelous, at various stages of His ministry, are recounted, and
the transitoriness of worldly pomp, fame, riches, and sovereignty,
repeatedly and categorically asserted. Appeals for the application of
the highest principles in human and international relations are
forcibly and insistently made, and the abandonment of discreditable
practices and conventions, detrimental to the happiness, the growth,
the prosperity and the unity of the human race, enjoined. Kings are
censured, ecclesiastical dignitaries arraigned, ministers and
plenipotentiaries condemned, and the identification of His advent
with the coming of the Father Himself unequivocally admitted and
repeatedly announced. The violent downfall of a few of these kings
and emperors is prophesied, two of them are definitely challenged,
most are warned, all are appealed to and exhorted.

In the Lawḥ-i-Sulṭán (Tablet to the
Sháh of Persia) Bahá’u’lláh
declares: “Would that the world-adorning wish of His Majesty
might decree that this Servant be brought face to face with the
divines of the age, and produce proofs and testimonies in the
presence of His Majesty the Sháh! This Servant is
ready, and taketh hope in God, that such a gathering may be convened
in order that the truth of the matter may be made clear and manifest
before His Majesty the Sháh. It is then for thee to
command, and I stand ready before the throne of thy sovereignty.
Decide, then, for Me or against Me.”

And moreover, in the Lawḥ-i-Ra’ís,
Bahá’u’lláh, recalling His conversation
with the Turkish officer charged with the task of enforcing His
banishment to the fortress-town of Akká, has written: “There
is a matter, which, if thou findest it possible, I request thee to
submit to His Majesty the Sulṭán, that for ten minutes
this Youth be enabled to meet him, so that he may demand whatsoever
he deemeth as a sufficient testimony and regardeth as proof of the
veracity of Him Who is the Truth. Should God enable Him to produce
it, let him, then, release these wronged ones, and leave them to
themselves.” “He promised,” Bahá’u’lláh
adds in that Tablet, “to transmit this message, and to give Us
his reply. We received, however, no news from him. Although it
becometh not Him Who is the Truth to present Himself before any
person, inasmuch as all have been created to obey Him, yet in view of
the condition of these little children and the large number of women
so far removed from their friends and countries, We have acquiesced
in this matter. In spite of this nothing hath resulted. Umar himself
is alive and accessible. Inquire from him, that the truth may be made
known unto you.”

Referring to these Tablets addressed to the sovereigns
of the earth, and which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has acclaimed
as a “miracle,” Bahá’u’lláh has
written: “Each one of them hath been designated by a special
name. The first hath been named ‘The Rumbling,’ the
second, ‘The Blow,’ the third, ‘The Inevitable,’
the fourth, ‘The Plain,’ the fifth, ‘The
Catastrophe,’ and the others, ‘The Stunning Trumpet
Blast,’ ‘The Near Event,’ ‘The Great Terror,’
‘The Trumpet,’ ‘The Bugle,’ and their like,
so that all the peoples of the earth may know, of a certainty, and
may witness, with outward and inner eyes, that He Who is the Lord of
Names hath prevailed, and will continue to prevail, under all
conditions, over all men…. Never since the beginning of the world
hath the Message been so openly proclaimed…. Glorified be this
Power which hath shone forth and compassed the worlds! This act of
the Causer of Causes hath, when revealed, produced two results. It
hath at once sharpened the swords of the infidels, and unloosed the
tongues of such as have turned towards Him in His remembrance and
praise. This is the effect of the fertilizing winds, mention of which
hath been made aforetime in the Lawḥ-i-Haykal. The whole earth
is now in a state of pregnancy. The day is approaching when it will
have yielded its noblest fruits, when from it will have sprung forth
the loftiest trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the most heavenly
blessings. Immeasurably exalted is the breeze that wafteth from the
garment of thy Lord, the Glorified! For lo, it hath breathed its
fragrance and made all things new! Well it is with them that
comprehend. It is indubitably clear and evident that in these things
He Who is the Lord of Revelation hath sought nothing for Himself.
Though aware that they would lead to tribulations, and be the cause
of troubles and afflictive trials, He, solely as a token of His
loving-kindness and favor, and for the purpose of quickening the dead
and of manifesting the Cause of the Lord of all Names and Attributes,
and of redeeming all who are on earth, hath closed His eyes to His
own well-being and borne that which no other person hath borne or
will bear.”

The most important of His Tablets addressed to
individual sovereigns Bahá’u’lláh ordered
to be written in the form of a pentacle, symbolizing the temple of
man, including therein, as a conclusion, the following words which
reveal the importance He attached to those Messages, and indicate
their direct association with the prophecy of the Old Testament:
“Thus have We built the Temple with the hands of power and
might, could ye but know it. This is the Temple promised unto you in
the Book. Draw ye nigh unto it. This is that which profiteth you,
could ye but comprehend it. Be fair, O peoples of the earth! Which is
preferable, this, or a temple which is built of clay? Set your faces
towards it. Thus have ye been commanded by God, the Help in Peril,
the Self-Subsisting. Follow ye His bidding, and praise ye God, your
Lord, for that which He hath bestowed upon you. He, verily, is the
Truth. No God is there but He. He revealeth what He pleaseth, through
His words ‘Be and it is.’”

Referring to this same subject, He, in one of His
Tablets, thus addresses the followers of Jesus Christ: “O
concourse of the followers of the Son! Verily, the Temple hath been
built with the hands of the will of your Lord, the Almighty, the
All-Bounteous. Bear, then, witness, O people, unto that which I say:
Which is preferable, that which is built of clay, or that which is
built by the hands of your Lord, the Revealer of verses? This is the
Temple promised unto you in the Tablets. It calleth aloud: ‘O
followers of religions! Haste ye to attain unto Him Who is the Source
of all causes, and follow not every infidel and doubter.’”

It should not be forgotten that, apart from these
specific Tablets in which the kings of the earth are severally and
collectively addressed, Bahá’u’lláh has
revealed other Tablets—the Lawḥ-i-Ra’ís
being an outstanding example—and interspersed the mass of His
voluminous writings with unnumbered passages, in which direct
addresses, as well as references, have been made to ministers,
governments, and their accredited representatives. I am not
concerned, however, with such addresses and references, which, vital
as they are, cannot be regarded as being endowed with that peculiar
pregnancy which direct and specific messages, voiced by the
Manifestation of God and directed to the world’s Chief
Magistrates in His day, must possess.

Dear friends! Enough has been said to portray the
tribulations which, for so long a time, overwhelmed the Founders of
so preeminent a Revelation, and which the world has so disastrously
ignored. Sufficient attention has also been directed to the Messages
addressed to those sovereign rulers who, either in the exercise of
their unconditioned authority, have deliberately provoked these
sufferings, or could have, in the plenitude of their power, arisen to
mitigate their effect or deflect their tragic course. Let us now
consider the consequences that have ensued. The reaction of these
monarchs was, as already stated, varied and unmistakable and, as the
march of events has gradually unfolded, disastrous in its
consequences. One of the most outstanding amongst these sovereigns
treated the Divine Summons with gross disrespect, dismissing it with
a curt and insolent reply, written by one of his ministers. Another
laid violent hold on the bearer of the Message, tortured, branded,
and brutally slew him. Others preferred to maintain a contemptuous
silence. All failed completely in their duty to arise and extend
their assistance. Two of them, in particular, prompted by the dual
impulse of fear and anger, tightened their grip on the Cause they had
jointly resolved to uproot. The one condemned his Divine Prisoner to
yet another banishment, to “the most unsightly of cities in
appearance, the most detestable in climate, and the foulest in
water,” whilst the other, powerless to lay hands on the Prime
Mover of a hated Faith, subjected its adherents under his sway to
abject and savage cruelties. The recital of Bahá’u’lláh’s
sufferings, embodied in those Messages, failed to evoke compassion in
their hearts. His appeals, the like of which neither the annals of
Christianity nor even those of Islám have recorded, were
disdainfully rejected. The dark warnings He uttered were haughtily
scorned. The bold challenges He issued were ignored. The
chastisements He predicted they derisively brushed aside.

What, then—might we not consider—has, in the
face of so complete and ignominious a rejection, happened, and is
still happening, in the course, and particularly in the closing
years, of this, the first Bahá’í century, a
century fraught with such tumultuous sufferings and violent outrages
for the persecuted Faith of Bahá’u’lláh?
Empires fallen in dust, kingdoms subverted, dynasties extinguished,
royalty besmirched, kings assassinated, poisoned, driven into exile,
subjugated in their own realms, whilst the few remaining thrones are
trembling with the repercussions of the fall of their fellows.

This process, so gigantic, so catastrophic, may be said
to have had its inception on that memorable night when, in an obscure
corner of Shíráz, the Báb, in the
presence of the First Letter to believe in Him, revealed the first
chapter of His celebrated commentary on the Súrih of Joseph
(The Qayyúm-i-Asmá), in which He trumpeted His Call to
the sovereigns and princes of the earth. It passed from incubation to
visible manifestation when Bahá’u’lláh’s
prophecies, enshrined for all time in the Súriy-i-Haykal, and
uttered before Napoleon III’s dramatic downfall and the
self-imposed imprisonment of Pope Pius IX in the Vatican, were
fulfilled. It gathered momentum when, in the days of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,
the Great War extinguished the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, and
Hapsburg dynasties, and converted powerful time-honored monarchies
into republics. It was further accelerated, soon after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s
passing, by the demise of the effete Qájár dynasty in
Persia, and the stupendous collapse of both the Sultanate and the
Caliphate. It is still operating, under our very eyes, as we behold
the fate which, in the course of this colossal and ravaging struggle,
is successively overtaking the crowned heads of the European
continent. Surely, no man, contemplating dispassionately the
manifestations of this relentless revolutionizing process, within
comparatively so short a time, can escape the conclusion that the
last hundred years may well be regarded, in so far as the fortunes of
royalty are concerned, as one of the most cataclysmic periods in the
annals of mankind.

Humiliation Immediate and Complete

Of all the monarchs of the earth, at the time when
Bahá’u’lláh, proclaiming His Message to
them, revealed the Súriy-i-Mulúk in Adrianople, the
most august and influential were the French Emperor and the Supreme
Pontiff. In the political and religious spheres they respectively
held the foremost rank, and the humiliation both suffered was alike
immediate and complete.

Napoleon III, son of Louis Bonaparte (brother of
Napoleon I), was, few historians will deny, the most outstanding
monarch of his day in the West. “The Emperor,” it was
said of him, “was the state.” The French capital was the
most attractive capital in Europe, the French court “the most
brilliant and luxurious of the XIX century.” Possessed of a
fixed and indestructible ambition, he aspired to emulate the example,
and finish the interrupted work, of his imperial uncle. A dreamer, a
conspirator, of a shifting nature, hypocritical and reckless, he, the
heir to the Napoleonic throne, taking advantage of the policy which
sought to foster the reviving interest in the career of his great
prototype, had sought to overthrow the monarchy. Failing in his
attempt, he was deported to America, was later captured in the course
of an attempted invasion of France, was condemned to perpetual
captivity, and escaped to London, until, in 1848, the Revolution
brought about his return, and enabled him to overthrow the
constitution, after which he was proclaimed emperor. Though able to
initiate far-reaching movements, he possessed neither the sagacity
nor the courage required to control them.

To this man, the last emperor of the French, who,
through foreign conquest, had striven to endear his dynasty to the
people, who even cherished the ideal of making France the center of a
revived Roman Empire—to such a man the Exile of Akká,
already thrice banished by Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz,
had transmitted, from behind the walls of the barracks in which He
lay imprisoned, an Epistle which bore this indubitably clear
arraignment and ominous prophecy: “We testify that that which
wakened thee was not their cry [Turks drowned in the Black Sea], but
the promptings of thine own passions, for We tested thee, and found
thee wanting…. Hadst thou been sincere in thy words, thou wouldst
not have cast behind thy back the Book of God [previous Tablet], when
it was sent unto thee by Him Who is the Almighty, the All-Wise.
…For what thou hast done, thy kingdom shall be thrown into
confusion, and thine empire shall pass from thine hands, as a
punishment for that which thou hast wrought.”

Bahá’u’lláh’s previous
Message, forwarded through one of the French ministers to the
Emperor, had been accorded a welcome the nature of which can be
conjectured from the words recorded in the “Epistle to the Son
of the Wolf”: “To this [first Tablet], however, he did
not reply. After Our arrival in the Most Great Prison there reached
Us a letter from his minister, the first part of which was in
Persian, and the latter in his own handwriting. In it he was cordial,
and wrote the following: ‘I have, as requested by you,
delivered your letter, and until now have received no answer. We
have, however, issued the necessary recommendations to our Minister
in Constantinople and our consuls in those regions. If there be
anything you wish done, inform us, and we will carry it out.’
From his words it became apparent that he understood the purpose of
this Servant to have been a request for material assistance.”

In His first Tablet Bahá’u’lláh,
wishing to test the sincerity of the Emperor’s motives, and
deliberately assuming a meek and unprovocative tone, had, after
expatiating on the sufferings He had endured, addressed him the
following words: “Two statements graciously uttered by the king
of the age have reached the ears of these wronged ones. These
pronouncements are, in truth, the king of all pronouncements, the
like of which have never been heard from any sovereign. The first was
the answer given the Russian government when it inquired why the war
[Crimean] was waged against it. Thou didst reply: ‘The cry of
the oppressed who, without guilt or blame, were drowned in the Black
Sea wakened me at dawn. Wherefore, I took up arms against thee.’
These oppressed ones, however, have suffered a greater wrong, and are
in greater distress. Whereas the trials inflicted upon those people
lasted but one day, the troubles borne by these servants have
continued for twenty and five years, every moment of which has held
for us a grievous affliction. The other weighty statement, which was
indeed a wondrous statement, manifested to the world, was this: ‘Ours
is the responsibility to avenge the oppressed and succor the
helpless.’ The fame of the Emperor’s justice and fairness
hath brought hope to a great many souls. It beseemeth the king of the
age to inquire into the condition of such as have been wronged, and
it behooveth him to extend his care to the weak. Verily, there hath
not been, nor is there now, on earth anyone as oppressed as we are,
or as helpless as these wanderers.”

It is reported that upon receipt of this first Message
that superficial, tricky, and pride-intoxicated monarch flung down
the Tablet saying: “If this man is God, I am two gods!”
The transmitter of the second Tablet had, it is reliably stated, in
order to evade the strict surveillance of the guards, concealed it in
his hat, and was able to deliver it to the French agent, who resided
in Akká, and who, as attested by Nabíl in his
Narrative, translated it into French and sent it to the Emperor, he
himself becoming a believer when he had later witnessed the
fulfillment of so remarkable a prophecy.

The significance of the somber and pregnant words
uttered by Bahá’u’lláh in His second Tablet
was soon revealed. He who was actuated in provoking the Crimean War
by his selfish desires, who was prompted by a personal grudge against
the Russian Emperor, who was impatient to tear up the Treaty of 1815
in order to avenge the disaster of Moscow, and who sought to shed
military glory over his throne, was soon himself engulfed by a
catastrophe that hurled him in the dust, and caused France to sink
from her preeminent station among the nations to that of a fourth
power in Europe.

The Battle of Sedan in 1870 sealed the fate of the
French Emperor. The whole of his army was broken up and surrendered,
constituting the greatest capitulation hitherto recorded in modern
history. A crushing indemnity was exacted. He himself was taken
prisoner. His only son, the Prince Imperial, was killed, a few years
later, in the Zulu War. The Empire collapsed, its program unrealized.
The Republic was proclaimed. Paris was subsequently besieged and
capitulated. “The terrible Year” marked by civil war,
exceeding in its ferocity the Franco-German War, followed. William I,
the Prussian king, was proclaimed German Emperor in the very palace
which stood as a “mighty monument and symbol of the power and
pride of Louis XIV, a power which had been secured to some extent by
the humiliation of Germany.” Deposed by a disaster “so
appalling that it resounded throughout the world,” this false
and boastful monarch suffered in the end, and till his death, the
same exile as that which, in the case of Bahá’u’lláh,
he had so heartlessly ignored.

A humiliation less spectacular yet historically more
significant awaited Pope Pius IX. It was to him who regarded himself
as the Vicar of Christ that Bahá’u’lláh
wrote that “the Word which the Son [Jesus] concealed is made
manifest,” that “it hath been sent down in the form of
the human temple,” that the Word was Himself, and He Himself
the Father. It was to him who styling himself “the servant of
the servants of God” that the Promised One of all ages,
unveiling His station in its plenitude, announced that “He Who
is the Lord of Lords is come overshadowed with clouds.” It was
he, who, claiming to be the successor of St. Peter, was reminded by
Bahá’u’lláh that “this is the day
whereon the Rock [Peter] crieth out and shouteth … saying: ‘Lo,
the Father is come, and that which ye were promised in the Kingdom is
fulfilled.’” It was he, the wearer of the triple crown,
who later became the first prisoner of the Vatican, who was commanded
by the Divine Prisoner of Akká to “leave his palaces
unto such as desire them,” to “sell all the embellished
ornaments” he possessed, and to “expend them in the path
of God,” and to “abandon his kingdom unto the kings,”
and emerge from his habitation with his face “set towards the
Kingdom.”

Count Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, the 254th pope
since the inception of St. Peter’s primacy, who had been
elevated to the apostolic throne two years after the Declaration of
the Báb, and the duration of whose pontificate exceeded that
of any of his predecessors, will be permanently remembered as the
author of the Bull which declared the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin (1854), referred to in the Kitáb-i-Íqán,
to be a doctrine of the Church, and as the promulgator of the new
dogma of Papal Infallibility (1870). Authoritarian by nature, a poor
statesman, disinclined to conciliation, determined to preserve all
his authority, he, while he succeeded through his assumption of an
ultramontane attitude in defining further his position and in
reinforcing his spiritual authority, failed, in the end, to maintain
that temporal rule which, for so many centuries, had been exercised
by the heads of the Catholic Church.

This temporal power had, throughout the ages, shrunk to
insignificant proportions. The decades preceding its extinction were
fraught with the gravest vicissitudes. As the sun of Bahá’u’lláh’s
Revelation was mounting to full meridian splendor, the shadows that
beset the dwindling patrimony of St. Peter were correspondingly
deepening. The Tablet of Bahá’u’lláh,
addressed to Pius IX, precipitated its extinction. A hasty glance at
the course of its ebbing fortunes, during those decades, will
suffice. Napoleon I had driven the Pope from his estates. The
Congress of Vienna had reestablished him as their head and their
administration in the hands of the priests. Corruption,
disorganization, impotence to ensure internal security, the
restoration of the inquisition, had induced an historian to assert
that “no land of Italy, perhaps of Europe, except Turkey, is
ruled as is this ecclesiastical state.” Rome was “a city
of ruins, both material and moral.” Insurrections led to
Austria’s intervention. Five great Powers demanded the
introduction of far-reaching reforms, which the Pope promised but
failed to carry out. Austria again reasserted herself, and was
opposed by France. Both watched each other on the Papal estates until
1838, when, on their withdrawal, absolutism was again restored. The
Pope’s temporal power was now denounced by some of his own
subjects, heralding its extinction in 1870. Internal complications
forced him to flee, in the dead of night and in the disguise of a
humble priest, from Rome which was declared a republic. It was later
restored by the French to its former status. The creation of the
kingdom of Italy, the shifting policy of Napoleon III, the disaster
of Sedan, the misdeeds of the Papal government denounced by
Clarendon, at the Congress of Paris, terminating the Crimean War, as
a “disgrace to Europe,” sealed the fate of that tottering
dominion.

In 1870, after Bahá’u’lláh had
revealed His Epistle to Pius IX, King Victor Emmanuel II went to war
with the Papal states, and his troops entered Rome and seized it. On
the eve of its seizure, the Pope repaired to the Lateran and, despite
his age and with his face bathed in tears, ascended on bended knees
the Scala Santa. The following morning, as the cannonade began, he
ordered the white flag to be hoisted above the dome of St. Peter.
Despoiled, he refused to recognize this “creation of
revolution,” excommunicated the invaders of his states,
denounced Victor Emmanuel as the “robber King” and as
“forgetful of every religious principle, despising every right,
trampling upon every law.” Rome, “the Eternal City, on
which rest twenty-five centuries of glory,” and over which the
Popes had ruled in unchallengeable right for ten centuries, finally
became the seat of the new kingdom, and the scene of that humiliation
which Bahá’u’lláh had anticipated and which
the Prisoner of the Vatican had imposed upon himself.

“The last years of the old Pope,” writes a
commentator on his life, “were filled with anguish. To his
physical infirmities was added the sorrow of beholding, all too
often, the Faith outraged in the very heart of Rome, the religious
orders despoiled and persecuted, the Bishops and priests debarred
from exercising their functions.”

Every effort to retrieve the situation created in 1870
proved fruitless. The Archbishop of Posen went to Versailles to
solicit Bismarck’s intervention in behalf of the Papacy, but
was coldly received. Later a Catholic party was organized in Germany
to bring political pressure on the German Chancellor. All, however,
was in vain. The mighty process already referred to had to pursue
inexorably its course. Even now, after the lapse of above half a
century, the so-called restoration of temporal sovereignty has but
served to throw into greater relief the helplessness of this
erstwhile potent Prince, at whose name kings trembled and to whose
dual sovereignty they willingly submitted. This temporal sovereignty,
practically confined to the miniscule City of the Vatican, and
leaving Rome the undisputed possession of a secular monarchy, has
been obtained at the price of unreserved recognition, so long
withheld, of the Kingdom of Italy. The Treaty of the Lateran,
claiming to have resolved once and for all the Roman Question, has
indeed assured to a secular Power, in respect of the Enclaved City, a
liberty of action which is fraught with uncertainty and peril. “The
two souls of the Eternal City,” a Catholic writer has observed,
“have been separated from each other, only to collide more
severely than ever before.”

Well might the Sovereign Pontiff recall the reign of the
most powerful among his predecessors, Innocent III who, during the
eighteen years of his pontificate, raised and deposed the kings and
the emperors, whose interdicts deprived nations of the exercise of
Christian worship, at the feet of whose legate the King of England
surrendered his crown, and at whose voice the fourth and the fifth
crusades were both undertaken.

Might not the process, to which reference has already
been made, manifest, in the course of its operation, during the
tumultuous years in store for mankind, and in this same domain, a
commotion still more devastating than it has yet produced?

The dramatic collapse of both the Third Empire and the
Napoleonic dynasty, the virtual extinction of the temporal
sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff, in the lifetime of Bahá’u’lláh,
were but the precursors of still greater catastrophes that may be
said to have marked the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
The forces unleashed by a conflict, the full significance of which
still remains unfathomed, and which may be considered as a prelude to
this, the most devastating of all wars, can well be regarded as the
occasion of these dreadful catastrophes. The progress of the War of
1914–18 dethroned the House of Romanov, while its termination
precipitated the downfall of both the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern
dynasties.

The Rise of Bolshevism

The rise of Bolshevism, born amidst the fires of that
inconclusive struggle, shook the throne of the Czars and overthrew
it. Alexander II Nicolaevich, whom Bahá’u’lláh
had commanded in His Tablet to “arise … and summon the
nations unto God,” who had been thrice warned: “beware
lest thy desire deter thee from turning towards the face of thy
Lord,” “beware lest thou barter away this sublime
station,” “beware lest thy sovereignty withhold thee from
Him Who is the Supreme Sovereign,” was not indeed the last of
the Czars to rule his country, but rather the inaugurator of a
retrogressive policy which in the end proved fatal to both himself
and his dynasty.

In the latter part of his reign he initiated a
reactionary policy which, causing widespread disillusionment, gave
rise to Nihilism, which, as it spread, ushered in a period of
terrorism of unexampled violence, leading in its turn to several
attempts on his life, and culminating in his assassination. Stern
repression guided the policy of his successor, Alexander III, who
“assumed an attitude of defiant hostility to innovators and
liberals.” The tradition of unqualified absolutism, of extreme
religious orthodoxy was maintained by the still more severe Nicolas
II, the last of the Czars, who, guided by the counsels of a man who
was “the very incarnation of a narrow-minded, stiff-necked
despotism,” and aided by a corrupt bureaucracy, and humiliated
by the disastrous effects of a foreign war, increased the general
discontent of the masses, both intellectuals and peasants. Driven for
a time into subterranean channels, and intensified by military
reverses, it exploded at last in the midst of the Great War, in the
form of a Revolution which, in the principles it challenged, the
institutions it subverted, and the havoc it wrought, has scarcely a
parallel in modern history.

A great trembling seized and rocked the foundations of
that country. The light of religion was dimmed. Ecclesiastical
institutions of every denomination were swept away. The state
religion was disendowed, persecuted, and abolished. A far-flung
empire was dismembered. A militant, triumphant proletariat exiled the
intellectuals, and plundered and massacred the nobility. Civil war
and disease decimated a population, already in the throes of agony
and despair. And, finally, the Chief Magistrate of a mighty dominion,
together with his consort, and his family, and his dynasty, were
swept into the vortex of this great convulsion, and perished.

The very ordeal that heaped such dire misfortunes on the
empire of the Czars brought about, in its concluding stages, the fall
of the almighty German Kaiser as well as that of the inheritor of the
once famed Holy Roman Empire. It shattered the whole fabric of
Imperial Germany, which arose out of the disaster that engulfed the
Napoleonic dynasty, and dealt the Dual Monarchy its death blow.

Almost half a century before, Bahá’u’lláh,
Who had predicted, in clear and resounding terms, the ignominious
fall of the successor of the great Napoleon, had, in the
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, addressed to Kaiser William I, the newly
acclaimed victor, a no less significant warning, and prophesied, in
His apostrophe to the banks of the Rhine, in words equally
unambiguous, the mourning that would afflict the capital of the newly
federated empire.

“Do thou remember,” Bahá’u’lláh
thus addressed him, “the one [Napoleon] whose power transcended
thy power, and whose station excelled thy station…. Think deeply, O
king, concerning him, and concerning them who, like unto thee, have
conquered cities and ruled over men.” And again: “O banks
of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the
swords of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have
another turn. And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be
today in conspicuous glory.”

On him who, in his old age, sustained two attempts upon
his life by the advocates of the rising tide of socialism; on his son
Frederick III, whose three months’ reign was overshadowed by
mortal disease; and finally on his grandson, William II, the
self-willed and overweening monarch and wrecker of his own empire—on
these fell, in varying degrees, the full weight of the
responsibilities consequent to these dire pronouncements.

William I, first German Emperor and seventh king of
Prussia, whose entire lifetime had, up to the date of his accession,
been spent in the army, was a militaristic, autocratic ruler, imbued
with antiquated ideas, who initiated, with the aid of a statesman
rightly regarded as “one of the geniuses of his century,”
a policy which may be said to have inaugurated a new era not only for
Prussia but for the world. This policy was pursued with
characteristic thoroughness and perfected through the repressive
measures that were taken to safeguard and uphold it, through the wars
that were waged for its realization, and the political combinations
that were subsequently formed to exalt and consolidate it,
combinations that were fraught with such dreadful consequences to the
European continent.

William II, temperamentally dictatorial, politically
inexperienced, militarily aggressive, religiously insincere, posed as
the apostle of European peace, yet actually insisted on “the
mailed fist” and “the shining armor.”
Irresponsible, indiscreet, inordinately ambitious, his first act was
to dismiss that sagacious statesman, the true founder of his empire,
to whose sagacity Bahá’u’lláh had paid
tribute, and to the unwisdom of whose imperial and ungrateful master
‘Abdu’l-Bahá had testified. War indeed became a
religion of his country, and by enlarging the scope of his
multifarious activities, he proceeded to prepare the way for that
final catastrophe that was to dethrone him and his dynasty. And when
the war broke out, and the might of his armies seemed to have
overpowered his adversaries, and the news of his triumphs was noised
abroad, reverberating as far as Persia, voices were raised ridiculing
those passages of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas which so clearly
foreshadowed the misfortunes that were to befall his capital.
Suddenly, however, swift and unforeseen reverses fatally overtook
him. Revolution broke out. William II, deserting his armies, fled
ignominiously to Holland, followed by the Crown Prince. The princes
of the German states abdicated. A period of chaos ensued. The
communist flag was hoisted in the capital, which became a caldron of
confusion and civil strife. The Kaiser signed his abdication. The
Constitution of Weimar established the Republic, bringing the
tremendous structure, so elaborately reared through a policy of blood
and iron, crashing to the ground. All the efforts to that end, which
through internal legislation and foreign wars had, ever since the
accession of William I to the Prussian throne, been assiduously
exerted, came to naught. “The lamentations of Berlin,”
tortured by the terms of a treaty monstrous in its severity, were
raised, contrasting with the hilarious shouts of victory that rang,
half a century before, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of
Versailles.

The Hapsburg monarch, heir of centuries of glorious
history, simultaneously toppled from his throne. It was Francis
Joseph, whom Bahá’u’lláh chided in the
Kitáb-i-Aqdas for having failed in his duty to investigate His
Cause, let alone to seek His presence, when so easily accessible to
him in the course of his visit to the Holy Land. “Thou passed
Him by,” He thus reproves the pilgrim-emperor, “and
inquired not about Him…. We have been with thee at all times, and
found thee clinging unto the Branch and heedless of the Root…. Open
thine eyes, that thou mayest behold this Glorious Vision and
recognize Him Whom thou invokest in the daytime and in the night
season, and gaze on the Light that shineth above this luminous
Horizon.”

The House of Hapsburg, in which the Imperial Title had
remained practically hereditary for almost five centuries, was, ever
since those words were uttered, being increasingly menaced by the
forces of internal disintegration, and was sowing the seeds of an
external conflict, to both of which it ultimately succumbed. Francis
Joseph, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, a reactionary ruler,
reestablished old abuses, ignored the rights of nationalities, and
restored that bureaucratic centralization that proved in the end so
injurious to his empire. Repeated tragedies darkened his reign. His
brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico. The Crown Prince Rudolph
perished in a dishonorable affair. The Empress was assassinated in
Geneva. Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were murdered in
Sarajevo, kindling a war in the midst of which the Emperor himself
died, closing a reign which is unsurpassed by any other reign in the
disasters it brought to the nation.

End of the Holy Roman Empire

Belated efforts had been made to steady his tottering
throne. The “ramshackle empire,” a medley of states,
races, and languages, was, however, relentlessly and rapidly
disintegrating. The political and economic situation was desperate.
The defeat of Austria and Hungary, in that same war, sounded its
death knell and brought its dismemberment. Hungary sundered its
connection. The conglomerate realm was carved up, and all that was
left of the once formidable Holy Roman Empire was a shrunken republic
that led a miserable existence until, in more recent times, it was,
unlike its sister nation, completely extinguished and wiped off the
political map of Europe.

Such was the fate of the Napoleonic, the Romanov, the
Hohenzollern, and the Hapsburg empires, whose rulers, together with
the sovereign occupant of the Papal throne, were individually
addressed by the Pen of the Most High, and who were respectively
chastised, forewarned, condemned, rebuked and admonished. What of the
fate of those sovereigns who, exercising direct political
jurisdiction over the Faith, its Founders, and followers, and within
the radius of whose domains that Faith was born and first spread,
were at liberty to crucify its Herald, banish its Founder, and mow
down its adherents?

What of Turkey and Persia?

Already in the lifetime of Bahá’u’lláh,
and later during the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the
first blows of a slow yet steady and relentless retribution were
falling alike upon the rulers of the Turkish House of Uthmán
and of the Qájár dynasty in Persia—the
archenemies of God’s infant Faith. Sulṭán
‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz fell from power, and was
murdered soon after Bahá’u’lláh’s
banishment from Adrianople, while Náṣiri’d-Dín
Sháh succumbed to an assassin’s pistol, during
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s incarceration in the
fortress-town of Akká. It was reserved, however, for the
Formative Period of the Faith of God—the Age of the birth and
rise of its Administrative Order—which, as stated in a previous
communication, is through its unfoldment casting such a turmoil in
the world, to witness not only the extinction of both of these
dynasties, but also the abolition of the twin institutions of the
Sultanate and the Caliphate.

Of the two despots ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz
was the more powerful, the more exalted in rank, the more preeminent
in guilt, and the more concerned with the tribulations and fortunes
of the Founder of our Faith. He it was who, through his farmáns,
had thrice banished Bahá’u’lláh, and in
whose dominions the Manifestation of God spent almost the whole of
His forty years’ captivity. It was during his reign and that of
his nephew and successor, ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd II,
that the Center of the Covenant of God had to endure, for no less
than forty years, in the fortress-town of Akká, an
incarceration fraught with so many perils, affronts and privations.

“Hearken, O king!” is the summons issued to
Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz by
Bahá’u’lláh, “to the speech of Him
that speaketh the truth, Him that doth not ask thee to recompense Him
with the things God hath chosen to bestow upon thee, Him Who
unerringly treadeth the Straight Path…. Observe, O king, with thine
inmost heart and with thy whole being, the precepts of God, and walk
not in the paths of the oppressor…. Place not thy reliance on thy
treasures. Put thy whole confidence in the grace of God, thy Lord….
Overstep not the bounds of moderation, and deal justly with them that
serve thee…. Set before thine eyes God’s unerring Balance,
and, as one standing in His presence, weigh in that Balance thine
actions, every day, every moment of thy life. Bring thyself to
account ere thou art summoned to a reckoning, on the Day when no man
shall have strength to stand for fear of God, the Day when the hearts
of the heedless ones shall be made to tremble.”

“The day is approaching,” Bahá’u’lláh
thus prophesies in the Lawḥ-i-Ra’ís, “when
the Land of Mystery [Adrianople], and what is beside it shall be
changed, and shall pass out of the hands of the king, and commotions
shall appear, and the voice of lamentation shall be raised, and the
evidences of mischief shall be revealed on all sides, and confusion
shall spread by reason of that which hath befallen these captives at
the hands of the hosts of oppression. The course of things shall be
altered, and conditions shall wax so grievous, that the very sands on
the desolate hills will moan, and the trees on the mountain will
weep, and blood will flow out of all things. Then wilt thou behold
the people in sore distress.”

“Soon,” He, moreover has written, “will
He seize you in His wrathful anger, and sedition will be stirred up
in your midst, and your dominions will be disrupted. Then will ye
bewail and lament, and will find none to help or succor you….
Several times calamities have overtaken you, and yet ye failed
utterly to take heed. One of them was the conflagration which
devoured most of the City [Constantinople] with the flames of
justice, and concerning which many poems were written, stating that
no such fire had ever been witnessed. And yet, ye waxed more
heedless…. Plague, likewise, broke out, and ye still failed to give
heed! Be expectant, however, for the wrath of God is ready to
overtake you. Erelong will ye behold that which hath been sent down
from the Pen of My command.”

“By your deeds,” He, in another Tablet,
anticipating the fall of the Sultanate and the Caliphate, thus
reproves the combined forces of Sunní and Shí’ih
Islám, “the exalted station of the people hath been
abased, the standard of Islám hath been reversed, and its
mighty throne hath fallen.”

And finally, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, revealed soon
after Bahá’u’lláh’s banishment to
Akká, He thus apostrophizes the seat of Turkish imperial
power: “O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas!
The throne of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and
the flame of hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom…. Thou art
indeed filled with manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made
thee vainglorious? By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon
perish, and thy daughters, and thy widows, and all the kindreds that
dwell within thee shall lament. Thus informeth thee, the All-Knowing,
the All-Wise.”

Indeed, in a most remarkable passage in the
Lawḥ-i-Fu’ád, wherein mention has been made of the
death of Fu’ád Páshá, the Turkish
Minister of Foreign Affairs, the fall of the Sulṭán
himself is unmistakably foretold: “Soon will We dismiss the one
who was like unto him, and will lay hold on their Chief who ruleth
the land, and I, verily, am the Almighty, the All-Compelling.”

The Sulṭán’s reaction to these words,
bearing upon his person, his empire, his throne, his capital, and his
ministers, can be gathered from the recital of the sufferings he
inflicted on Bahá’u’lláh, and already
referred to in the beginning of these pages. The extinction of the
“outward splendor” surrounding that proud seat of
Imperial power is the theme I now proceed to expose.

The Doom of Imperial Turkey

A cataclysmic process, one of the most remarkable in
modern history, was set in motion ever since Bahá’u’lláh,
while a prisoner in Constantinople, delivered to a Turkish official
His Tablet, addressed to Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz
and his ministers, to be transmitted to ‘Alí Páshá,
the Grand Vizir. It was this Tablet which, as attested by that
officer and affirmed by Nabíl in his chronicle, affected the
Vizir so profoundly that he paled while reading it. This process
received fresh impetus after the Lawḥ-i-Ra’ís was
revealed on the morrow of its Author’s final banishment from
Adrianople to Akká. Relentless, devastating, and with
ever-increasing momentum, it ominously unfolded, damaging the
prestige of the Empire, dismembering its territory, dethroning its
sulṭáns, sweeping away their dynasty, degrading and
deposing its Caliph, disestablishing its religion, and extinguishing
its glory. The “sick man” of Europe, whose condition had
been unerringly diagnosed by the Divine Physician, and whose doom was
pronounced inevitable, fell a prey, during the reign of five
successive sulṭáns, all degenerate, all deposed, to a
series of convulsions which, in the end, proved fatal to his life.
Imperial Turkey that had, under ‘Abdu’l-Majíd,
been admitted into the European Concert, and had emerged victorious
from the Crimean War, entered, under his successor, ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz,
upon a period of swift decline, culminating, soon after
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, in the doom which
the judgment of God had pronounced against it.

Risings in Crete and the Balkans marked the reign of
this, the 32nd sulṭán of his dynasty, a despot whose
mind was vacuous, whose recklessness was extreme, whose extravagance
knew no bounds. The Eastern Question entered upon an acute phase. His
gross misrule gave rise to movements which were to exercise
far-reaching effects upon his realm, while his continual and enormous
borrowings, leading to a state of semibankruptcy, introduced the
principle of foreign control over the finances of his empire. A
conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution, finally deposed him. A
fatvá of the muftí denounced his incapacity and
extravagance. Four days later he was assassinated, and was succeeded
by his nephew, Murád V, whose mind had been reduced to a
nullity by intemperance and by a long seclusion in the Cage. Declared
to be imbecile, he, after a reign of three months, was deposed and
was succeeded by the subtle, the resourceful, the suspicious, the
tyrannical ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd II who “proved
to be the most mean, cunning, untrustworthy and cruel intriguer of
the long dynasty of Uthmán.” “No one knew,”
it was written of him, “from day to day who was the person on
whose advice the sulṭán overruled his ostensible
ministers, whether a favorite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some
fanatical dervish, or an astrologer, or a spy.” The Bulgarian
atrocities heralded the black reign of this “Great Assassin,”
which thrilled Europe with horror, and were characterized by
Gladstone as “the basest and blackest outrages upon record in
that [XIX] century.” The War of 1877–78 accelerated the
process of the empire’s dismemberment. No less than eleven
million people were emancipated from Turkish yoke. The Russian troops
occupied Adrianople. Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania proclaimed their
independence. Bulgaria became a self-governing state, tributary to
the sulṭán. Cyprus and Egypt were occupied. The French
assumed a protectorate over Tunis. Eastern Rumelia was ceded to
Bulgaria. The wholesale massacres of Armenians, involving directly
and indirectly a hundred thousand souls, were but a foretaste of the
still more extensive bloodbaths to come in a later reign. Bosnia and
Herzegovina were lost to Austria. Bulgaria obtained her independence.
Universal contempt and hatred of an infamous sovereign, shared alike
by his Christian and Muslim subjects, finally culminated in a
revolution, swift and sweeping. The Committee of Young Turks secured
from the Shaykhu’l-Islám the condemnation
of the sulṭán. Deserted and friendless, execrated by his
subjects, and despised by his fellow-rulers, he was forced to
abdicate, and was made a prisoner of state, thus ending a reign “more
disastrous in its immediate losses of territory and in the certainty
of others to follow, and more conspicuous for the deterioration of
the condition of his subjects, than that of any other of his
twenty-three degenerate predecessors since the death of Soliman the
Magnificent.”

The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of
a new era which, however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined
to witness the collapse of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten
state. Muḥammad V, a brother of ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd
II, an absolute nonentity, failed to improve the status of his
subjects. The follies of his government ultimately sealed the doom of
the empire. The War of 1914–18 provided the occasion. Military
reverses brought to a head the forces that were sapping its
foundations. While the war was still being fought the defection of
the Sherif of Mecca and the revolt of the Arabian provinces portended
the convulsion which was to seize the Turkish throne. The precipitate
flight and complete destruction of the army of Jamál Páshá,
the commander-in-chief in Syria—he who had sworn to raze to the
ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the Tomb of
Bahá’u’lláh, and to publicly crucify the
Center of His Covenant in a public square of Constantinople—was
the signal for the nemesis that was to overtake an empire in
distress. Nine-tenths of the large Turkish armies had melted away. A
fourth of the whole population had perished from war, disease, famine
and massacre.

A new ruler, Muḥammad VI, the last of the
twenty-five successive degenerate sulṭáns, had meanwhile
succeeded his wretched brother. The edifice of the empire was now
quaking and tottering to its fall. Muṣṭafá Kamál
dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk to a small
Asiatic state, became a republic. The sulṭán was
deposed, the Ottoman Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had
remained unbroken for six and a half centuries was extinguished. An
empire which had stretched from the center of Hungary to the Persian
Gulf and the Sudan, and from the Caspian Sea to Oran in Africa, had
now dwindled to a small Asiatic republic. Constantinople itself,
which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been honored as the splendid
metropolis of the Roman Empire, and had been made the capital of the
Ottoman government, was abandoned by its conquerors, and stripped of
its pomp and glory—a mute reminder of the base tyranny that had
for so long stained its throne.

Such, in their bare outline, were the awful evidences of
that retributive justice which so tragically afflicted ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz,
his successors, his throne and his dynasty. What of Náṣiri’d-Dín
Sháh, the other partner in that imperial conspiracy
which sought to extirpate, root and branch, the budding Faith of God?
His reaction to the Divine Message borne to him by the fearless Badí,
the “Pride of Martyrs,” who had spontaneously dedicated
himself to this purpose, was characteristic of that implacable hatred
which, throughout his reign, glowed so fiercely in his breast.

Divine Retribution on the Qájár
Dynasty

The French Emperor had, it was reported, flung away
Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet, and directed
his minister, as Bahá’u’lláh Himself
asserts, to address to its Author an irreverent reply. The Grand
Vizir of ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, it is reliably
stated, blanched while reading the communication addressed to his
Imperial master and his ministers, and made the following comment:
“It is as if the king of kings were issuing his behest to his
humblest vassal king, and regulating his conduct!” Queen
Victoria, it is said, upon reading the Tablet revealed for her
remarked: “If this is of God, it will endure; if not, it can do
no harm.” It was reserved for Náṣiri’d-Dín
Sháh, however, to wreak, at the instigation of the
divines, his vengeance on One Whom he could no longer personally
chastise by arresting His messenger, a lad of about seventeen, by
freighting him with chains, by torturing him on the rack, and finally
slaying him.

To this despotic sovereign Bahá’u’lláh,
Who denounced him as the “Prince of Oppressors,” and as
one who would soon be made “an object-lesson for the world,”
had written: “Look upon this Youth, O king, with the eyes of
justice; judge thou, then, with truth concerning what hath befallen
Him. Of a verity, God hath made thee His shadow amongst men, and the
sign of His power unto all that dwell on earth.” And again: “O
king! Wert thou to incline thine ears unto the shrill of the Pen of
Glory and the cooing of the Dove of Eternity … thou wouldst attain
unto a station from which thou wouldst behold in the world of being
naught save the effulgence of the Adored One, and wouldst regard thy
sovereignty as the most contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning
it to whosoever might desire it, and setting thy face toward the
horizon aglow with the light of His countenance.” And again:
“We fain would hope, however, that His Majesty the Sháh
will himself examine these matters, and bring hope to the hearts.
That which We have submitted to thee is indeed for thine highest
good.”

This hope, however, was to remain unfulfilled. It was
indeed shattered by a reign which had been inaugurated by the
execution of the Báb, and the imprisonment of Bahá’u’lláh
in the Síyáh-Chál of Ṭihrán,
by a sovereign who had repeatedly instigated Bahá’u’lláh’s
successive banishments, and by a dynasty that had been sullied by the
slaughter of no less than twenty thousand of His followers. The
Sháh’s dramatic assassination, the ignoble rule
of the last sovereigns of the House of Qájár, and the
extinction of that dynasty, were signal instances of the Divine
retribution which these horrid atrocities had provoked.

The Qájárs, members of the alien Turkoman
tribe, had, indeed, usurped the Persian throne. Áqá
Muḥammad Khán, the eunuch Sháh and
founder of the dynasty, was such an atrocious, avaricious,
bloodthirsty tyrant that the memory of no Persian is so detested and
universally execrated as his memory. The record of his reign and that
of his immediate successors is one of vandalism, of internal warfare,
of recalcitrant and rebellious chieftains, of brigandage, and
medieval oppression, whilst the annals of the reigns of the later
Qájárs are marked by the stagnation of the nation, the
illiteracy of the people, the corruption and incompetence of the
government, the scandalous intrigues of the court, the decadence of
the princes, the irresponsibility and extravagance of the sovereign,
and his abject subservience to a notoriously degraded clerical order.

The successor of Áqá Muḥammad Khán,
the uxorious, philoprogenetive Fatḥ-‘Alí Sháh,
the so-called “Darius of the Age,” was a vain, an
arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous number
of his wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his
incalculable progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon
his country. He it was who commanded that his vizir, to whom he owed
his throne, be cast into a caldron of boiling oil. As to his
successor, the bigoted Muḥammad Sháh, one of his
earliest acts, definitely condemned by the pen of Bahá’u’lláh,
was the order to strangle his first minister, the illustrious
Qá’im-Maqám, immortalized by that same pen as the
“Prince of the City of Statesmanship and Literary
Accomplishment,” and to have him replaced by that lowbred,
consummate scoundrel, Ḥájí Mírzá
Aqásí, who brought the country to the verge of
bankruptcy and revolution. It was this same Sháh who
refused to interview the Báb and imprisoned Him in
Ádhirbayján, and who, at the age of forty, was
afflicted by a complication of maladies to which he succumbed,
hastening the doom forecast in these words of the Qayyúm-i-Asmá:
“I swear by God, O Sháh! If thou showest enmity
unto Him Who is His Remembrance, God will, on the Day of
Resurrection, condemn thee, before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou
shalt not, in very truth, find on that day any helper except God, the
Exalted.”

Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh,
a selfish, capricious, imperious monarch, succeeded to the throne,
and, for half a century, was destined to remain the sole arbiter of
the fortunes of his hapless country. A disastrous obscurantism, a
chaotic administration in the provinces, the disorganization of the
finances of the realm, the intrigues, the vindictiveness, and
profligacy of the pampered and greedy courtiers, who buzzed and
swarmed round his throne, his own despotism which, but for the
restraining fear of European public opinion and the desire to be
thought well of in the capitals of the West, would have been more
cruel and savage, were the distinguishing features of the bloody
reign of one who styled himself “Footpath of Heaven,” and
“Asylum of the Universe.” A triple darkness of chaos,
bankruptcy and oppression enveloped the country. His own
assassination was the first portent of the revolution which was to
restrict the prerogatives of his son and successor, depose the last
two monarchs of the House of Qájár, and extinguish
their dynasty. On the eve of his jubilee, which was to inaugurate a
new era, and the celebration of which had been elaborately prepared,
he fell, in the shrine of Sháh ‘Abdu’l-‘Aẓím,
a victim to an assassin’s pistol, his dead body driven back to
his capitol, propped up in the royal carriage in front of his Grand
Vizir, in order to defer the news of his murder.

“It was whispered,” writes an eyewitness of
both the ceremony and the assassination, “that the day of the
Sháh’s celebration was to be the greatest in the
history of Persia…. Prisoners were to be released without
condition, and a general amnesty was to be proclaimed; peasants were
promised exemption from taxes for at least two years. …the poor
were to be fed for months. Ministers and officials were already
intriguing for honors and pension from the Sháh.
Shrines and sacred places were to open their gates to all wayfarers
and pilgrims, and the siyyids and mullás were taking cough
medicine to clear their throats to sing and chant the praises of the
Sháh in all the pulpits. The mosques were swept and
prepared for general meetings and public prayers in behalf of the
Sovereign…. Sacred fountains were enlarged to hold more holy water,
and the rightful authorities had foreseen that many miracles might
take place on the day of the jubilee, with the aid of these
fountains…. The Sháh had declared … that he would
renounce his prerogatives as despot, and proclaim himself ‘The
Majestic Father of all the Persians.’ The city authority was to
relax its vigilant watch. No record was to be kept of the strangers
who flocked to the caravanserais, and the population was to be left
free to wander the streets during the whole night.” Even the
great mujtahids had, according to what had been reported to that same
eyewitness, “decided, for the time being, to discontinue
persecuting the Bábís and other infidels.”

Thus fell the one whose reign will remain forever
associated with the most heinous crime in history—the martyrdom
of that One Whom the Supreme Manifestation of God proclaimed to be
the “Point round Whom the realities of the Prophets and
Messengers revolve.” In a Tablet in which the pen of
Bahá’u’lláh condemns him, we read: “Among
them [kings of the earth] is the King of Persia, who suspended Him
Who is the Temple of the Cause [the Báb] in the air, and put
Him to death with such cruelty that all created things, and the
inmates of Paradise, and the Concourse on high wept for Him. He slew,
moreover, some of Our kindred, and plundered Our property, and made
Our family captives in the hands of the oppressors. Once and again he
imprisoned Me. By God, the True One! None can reckon the things which
befell Me in prison, save God, the Reckoner, the Omniscient, the
Almighty. Subsequently he banished Me and My family from My country,
whereupon We arrived in ‘Iráq in evident sorrow. We
tarried there until the time when the King of Rúm [Sulṭán
of Turkey] arose against Us, and summoned Us unto the seat of his
sovereignty. When We reached it there flowed over Us that whereat the
King of Persia rejoiced. Later We entered this Prison, wherein the
hands of Our loved ones were torn from the hem of Our robe. In such a
manner hath he dealt with Us!”

The days of the Qájár dynasty were now
numbered. The torpor of the national consciousness had vanished. The
reign of Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh’s
successor, Muzaffari’d-Dín Sháh, a weak
and timid creature, extravagant and lavish to his courtiers, led the
country down the broad road to ruin. The movement in favor of a
constitution, limiting the sovereign’s prerogatives, gathered
force, and culminated in the signature of the constitution by the
dying Sháh, who expired a few days later. Muḥammad-‘Alí
Sháh, a despot of the worst type, unprincipled and
avaricious, succeeded to the throne. Hostile to the constitution, he,
by his summary action, involving the bombardment of the Baháristán,
where the Assembly met, precipitated a revolution which led to his
deposition by the nationalists. Accepting, after much bargaining, a
large pension, he ignominiously withdrew to Russia. The boy-king,
Aḥmad Sháh, who succeeded him, was a mere cipher
and careless of his duties. The crying needs of his country continued
to be ignored. Increasing anarchy, the impotence of the central
government, the state of the national finances, the progressive
deterioration of the general condition of the country, practically
abandoned by a sovereign who preferred the gaieties and frivolities
of society life in the European capitals to the discharge of the
stern and urgent responsibilities which the plight of his nation
demanded, sounded the death knell of a dynasty which, it was
generally felt, had forfeited the crown. Whilst abroad, on one of his
periodic visits, Parliament deposed him, and proclaimed the
extinction of his dynasty, which had occupied the throne of Persia
for a hundred and thirty years, whose rulers proudly claimed no less
a descent than from Japhet, son of Noah, and whose successive
monarchs, with only one exception, were either assassinated, deposed,
or struck down by mortal disease.

Their myriad progeny, a veritable “beehive of
princelings,” a “race of royal drones,” were both a
disgrace and a menace to their countrymen. Now, however, these
luckless descendants of a fallen house, shorn of all power, and some
of them reduced even to beggary, proclaim, in their distress, the
consequences of the abominations which their progenitors have
perpetrated. Swelling the ranks of the ill-fated scions of the House
of Uthmán, and of the rulers of the Romanov, the
Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg, and the Napoleonic dynasties, they roam
the face of the earth, scarcely aware of the character of those
forces which have operated such tragic revolutions in their lives,
and so powerfully contributed to their present plight.

Already grandsons of both Náṣiri’d-Dín
Sháh and of Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz
have, in their powerlessness and destitution, turned to the World
Center of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, and
sought respectively political aid and pecuniary assistance. In the
case of the former, the request was promptly and firmly refused,
whilst in the case of the latter it was unhesitatingly offered.

The Decline in the Fortunes of
Royalty

And as we survey in other fields the decline in the
fortunes of royalty, whether in the years immediately preceding the
Great War or after, and contemplate the fate that has overtaken the
Chinese Empire, the Portuguese and Spanish Monarchies, and more
recently the vicissitudes that have afflicted, and are still
afflicting, the sovereigns of Norway, of Denmark and of Holland, and
observe the impotence of their fellow-sovereigns, and note the fear
and trembling that has seized their thrones, may we not associate
their plight with the opening passages of the Súriy-i-Mulúk,
which, in view of their momentous significance, I feel impelled to
quote a second time: “Fear God, O concourse of kings, and
suffer not yourselves to be deprived of this most sublime grace….
Set your hearts towards the face of God, and abandon that which your
desires have bidden you to follow, and be not of those who perish….
Ye examined not His [the Báb’s] Cause, when so to do had
been better for you than all that the sun shineth upon, could ye but
perceive it…. Beware that ye be not careless henceforth, as ye have
been careless aforetime…. My face hath come forth from the veils,
and shed its radiance upon all that is in heaven and on earth, and
yet ye turned not towards Him…. Arise then … and make ye amends
for that which hath escaped you…. If ye pay no heed unto the
counsels which, in peerless and unequivocal language, We have
revealed in this Tablet, Divine chastisement shall assail you from
every direction, and the sentence of His justice shall be pronounced
against you…. Twenty years have passed, O kings, during which We
have, each day, tasted the agony of a fresh tribulation…. Though
aware of most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to
stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to
restrain the tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with
your subjects, that your high sense of justice may be fully
demonstrated to all mankind?”

No wonder that Bahá’u’lláh, in
view of the treatment meted out to Him by the sovereigns of the
earth, should, as already quoted, have written these words: “From
two ranks amongst men power hath been seized: kings and
ecclesiastics.” Indeed, He even goes further, and states in His
Tablet addressed to Shaykh Salmán: “One of
the signs of the maturity of the world is that no one will accept to
bear the weight of kingship. Kingship will remain with none willing
to bear alone its weight. That day will be the day whereon wisdom
will be manifested among mankind. Only in order to proclaim the Cause
of God and spread abroad His Faith will anyone be willing to bear
this grievous weight. Well is it with him who, for love of God and
His Cause, and for the sake of God and for the purpose of proclaiming
His Faith, will expose himself unto this great danger, and will
accept this toil and trouble.”

Recognition of Kingship

Let none, however, mistake or unwittingly misrepresent
the purpose of Bahá’u’lláh. Severe as has
been His condemnation pronounced against those sovereigns who
persecuted Him, and however strict the censure expressed collectively
against those who failed signally in their clear duty to investigate
the truth of His Faith and to restrain the hand of the wrongdoer, His
teachings embody no principle that can, in any way, be construed as a
repudiation, or even a disparagement, however veiled, of the
institution of kingship. The catastrophic fall, and the extinction of
the dynasties and empires of those monarchs whose disastrous end He
particularly prophesied, and the declining fortunes of the sovereigns
of His Own generation, whom He generally reproved—both
constituting a passing phase of the evolution of the Faith—should,
in no wise, be confounded with the future position of that
institution. Indeed if we delve into the writings of the Author of
the Bahá’í Faith, we cannot fail to discover
unnumbered passages in which, in terms that none can misrepresent,
the principle of kingship is eulogized, the rank and conduct of just
and fair-minded kings is extolled, the rise of monarchs, ruling with
justice and even professing His Faith, is envisaged, and the solemn
duty to arise and ensure the triumph of Bahá’í
sovereigns is inculcated. To conclude from the above quoted words,
addressed by Bahá’u’lláh to the monarchs of
the earth, to infer from the recital of the woeful disasters that
have overtaken so many of them, that His followers either advocate or
anticipate the definite extinction of the institution of kingship,
would indeed be tantamount to a distortion of His teaching.

I can do no better than quote some of Bahá’u’lláh’s
Own testimonies, leaving the reader to shape his own judgment as to
the falsity of such a deduction. In His “Epistle to the Son of
the Wolf” He indicates the true source of kingship: “Regard
for the rank of sovereigns is divinely ordained, as is clearly
attested by the words of the Prophets of God and His chosen ones. He
Who is the Spirit [Jesus]—may peace be upon Him—was
asked: ‘O Spirit of God! Is it lawful to give tribute to
Caesar, or not?’ And He made reply: ‘Yea, render to
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that
are God’s.’ He forbade it not. These two sayings are, in
the estimation of men of insight, one and the same, for if that which
belonged to Caesar had not come from God He would have forbidden it.
And likewise in the sacred verse: ‘Obey God and obey the
Apostle, and those among you invested with authority.’ By
‘those invested with authority’ is meant primarily and
more specially the Imáms—the blessings of God rest upon
them. They verily are the manifestations of the power of God and the
sources of His authority, and the repositories of His knowledge, and
the daysprings of His commandments. Secondarily these words refer
unto the kings and rulers—those through the brightness of whose
justice the horizons of the world are resplendent and luminous.”

And again: “In the Epistle to the Romans Saint
Paul hath written: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher
powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are
ordained of God. Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth
the ordinance of God.’ And further: ‘For he is the
minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth
evil.’ He saith that the appearance of the kings, and their
majesty and power, are of God.”

And again: “A just king enjoyeth nearer access
unto God than anyone. Unto this testifieth He Who speaketh in His
Most Great Prison.”

Likewise in the Bishárát
(Glad-Tidings) Bahá’u’lláh asserts that
“the majesty of kingship is one of the signs of God.” “We
do not wish,” He adds, “that the countries of the world
should be deprived thereof.”

In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas He sets forth His purpose,
and eulogizes the king who will profess His Faith: “By the
Righteousness of God! It is not Our wish to lay hands on your
kingdoms. Our mission is to seize and possess the hearts of men. Upon
them the eyes of Bahá are fastened. To this testifieth the
Kingdom of Names, could ye but comprehend it. Whoso followeth his
Lord, will renounce the world and all that is therein; how much
greater, then, must be the detachment of Him Who holdeth so august a
station!” “How great the blessedness that awaiteth the
king who will arise to aid My Cause in My Kingdom, who will detach
himself from all else but Me! Such a king is numbered with the
Companions of the Crimson Ark—the Ark which God hath prepared
for the people of Bahá. All must glorify his name, must
reverence his station, and aid him to unlock the cities with the keys
of My Name, the Omnipotent Protector of all that inhabit the visible
and invisible kingdoms. Such a king is the very eye of mankind, the
luminous ornament on the brow of creation, the fountainhead of
blessings unto the whole world. Offer up, O people of Bahá,
your substance, nay your very lives, for his assistance.”

In the Lawḥ-i-Sulṭán Bahá’u’lláh
further reveals the significance of kingship: “A just king is
the shadow of God on earth. All should seek shelter under the shadow
of his justice, and rest in the shade of his favor. This is not a
matter which is either specific or limited in its scope, that it
might be restricted to one or another person, inasmuch as the shadow
telleth of the One Who casteth it. God, glorified be His remembrance,
hath called Himself the Lord of the worlds, for He hath nurtured and
still nurtureth everyone. Glorified be, then, His grace that hath
preceded all created things, and His mercy that hath surpassed the
worlds.”

In one of His Tablets Bahá’u’lláh
has also written: “The one true God, exalted be His glory, hath
bestowed the government of the earth upon the kings. To none is given
the right to act in any manner that would run counter to the
considered views of them who are in authority. That which He hath
reserved for Himself are the cities of men’s hearts; and of
these the loved ones of Him Who is the Sovereign Truth are, in this
Day, as the keys.”

In the following passage He expresses this wish: “We
cherish the hope that one of the kings of the earth will, for the
sake of God, arise for the triumph of this wronged, this oppressed
people. Such a king will be eternally extolled and glorified. God
hath prescribed unto this people the duty of aiding whosoever will
aid them, of serving his best interests, and of demonstrating to him
their abiding loyalty.”

In the Lawḥ-i-Ra’ís He actually and
categorically prophesies the rise of such a king: “Erelong will
God raise up from among the kings one who will aid His loved ones.
He, verily, encompasseth all things. He will instill in the hearts
the love of His loved ones. This, indeed, is irrevocably decreed by
One Who is the Almighty, the Beneficent.” In the
Ridvánu’l-‘Adl, wherein the virtue of justice is
exalted, He makes a parallel prediction: “Erelong will God make
manifest on earth kings who will recline on the couches of justice,
and will rule amongst men even as they rule their own selves. They,
indeed, are among the choicest of My creatures in the entire
creation.”

In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas He visualizes in these words
the elevation to the throne of His native city, “the Mother of
the World” and “the Dayspring of Light,” of a king
who will be adorned with the twin ornaments of justice and of
devotion to His Faith: “Let nothing grieve thee, O Land of Tá,
for God hath chosen thee to be the source of the joy of all mankind.
He shall, if it be His will, bless thy throne with one who will rule
with justice, who will gather together the flock of God which the
wolves have scattered. Such a ruler will, with joy and gladness, turn
his face towards and extend his favors unto, the people of Bahá.
He indeed is accounted in the sight of God as a jewel among men. Upon
him rest forever the glory of God, and the glory of all that dwell in
the kingdom of His Revelation.”

The Crumbling of Religious Orthodoxy

Dear friends! The decline in the fortunes of the crowned
wielders of temporal power has been paralleled by a no less startling
deterioration in the influence exercised by the world’s
spiritual leaders. The colossal events that have heralded the
dissolution of so many kingdoms and empires have almost synchronized
with the crumbling of the seemingly inviolable strongholds of
religious orthodoxy. That same process which, swiftly and tragically,
sealed the doom of kings and emperors, and extinguished their
dynasties, has operated in the case of the ecclesiastical leaders of
both Christianity and Islám, damaging their prestige, and, in
some cases, overthrowing their highest institutions. “Power
hath been seized” indeed from both “kings and
ecclesiastics.” The glory of the former has been eclipsed, the
power of the latter irretrievably lost.

Those leaders who exercised guidance and control over
the ecclesiastical hierarchies of their respective religions have,
likewise, been appealed to, warned, and reproved by Bahá’u’lláh,
in terms no less uncertain than those in which the sovereigns who
presided over the destinies of their subjects have been addressed.
They, too, and more particularly the heads of Muslim ecclesiastical
orders, have, in conjunction with despots and potentates, launched
their assaults and thundered their anathemas against the Founders of
the Faith of God, its followers, its principles, and its
institutions. Were not the divines of Persia the first who hoisted
the standard of revolt, who inflamed the ignorant and subservient
masses against it, and who instigated the civil authorities, through
their outcry, their threats, their lies, their calumnies, and
denunciations, to decree the banishments, to enact the laws, to
launch the punitive campaigns, and to carry out the executions and
massacres that fill the pages of its history? So abominable and
savage was the butchery committed in a single day, instigated by
these divines, and so typical of the “callousness of the brute
and the ingenuity of the fiend” that Renan, in his “Les
Apôtres,” characterized that day as “perhaps
unparalleled in the history of the world.”

It was these divines, who, by these very acts, sowed the
seeds of the disintegration of their own institutions, institutions
that were so potent, so famous, and appeared so invulnerable when the
Faith was born. It was they who, by assuming so lightly and
foolishly, such awful responsibilities were primarily answerable for
the release of those violent and disruptive influences that have
unchained disasters as catastrophic as those which overwhelmed kings,
dynasties, and empires, and which constitute the most noteworthy
landmarks in the history of the first century of the Bahá’í
era.

This process of deterioration, however startling in its
initial manifestations, is still operating with undiminished force,
and will, as the opposition to the Faith of God, from various sources
and in distant fields, gathers momentum, be further accelerated and
reveal still more remarkable evidences of its devastating power. I
cannot, in view of the proportions which this communication has
already assumed, expatiate, as fully as I would wish, on the aspects
of this weighty theme which, together with the reaction of the
sovereigns of the earth to the Message of Bahá’u’lláh,
is one of the most fascinating and edifying episodes in the dramatic
story of His Faith. I will only consider the repercussions of the
violent assaults made by the ecclesiastical leaders of Islám
and, to a lesser degree, by certain exponents of Christian orthodoxy
upon their respective institutions. I will preface these observations
with some passages gleaned from the great mass of Bahá’u’lláh’s
Tablets which, both directly and indirectly, bear reference to Muslim
and Christian divines, and which throw such a powerful light on the
dismal disasters that have overtaken, and are still overtaking, the
ecclesiastical hierarchies of the two religions with which the Faith
has been immediately concerned.

It must not be inferred, however, that Bahá’u’lláh
directed His historic addresses exclusively to the leaders of Islám
and Christianity, or that the impact of an all-pervading Faith on the
strongholds of religious orthodoxy is to be confined to the
institutions of these two religious systems. “The time
foreordained unto the peoples and kindreds of the earth,”
affirms Bahá’u’lláh, “is now come.
The promises of God, as recorded in the Holy Scriptures, have all
been fulfilled…. This is the Day which the Pen of the Most High
hath glorified in all the Holy Scriptures. There is no verse in them
that doth not declare the glory of His holy Name, and no Book that
doth not testify unto the loftiness of this most exalted theme.”
“Were We,” He adds, “to make mention of all that
hath been revealed in these heavenly Books and Holy Scriptures
concerning this Revelation, this Tablet would assume impossible
dimensions.” As the promise of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh
is enshrined in all the Scriptures of past religions, so does its
Author address Himself to their followers, and particularly to their
responsible leaders who have intervened between Him and their
respective congregations. “At one time,” writes
Bahá’u’lláh, “We address the people
of the Torah and summon them unto Him Who is the Revealer of verses,
Who hath come from Him Who layeth low the necks of men…. At
another, We address the people of the Evangel and say: ‘The
All-Glorious is come in this Name whereby the Breeze of God hath
wafted over all regions.’… At still another, We address the
people of the Qur’án saying: ‘Fear the
All-Merciful, and cavil not at Him through Whom all religions were
founded.’… Know thou, moreover, that We have addressed to the
Magians Our Tablets, and adorned them with Our Law…. We have
revealed in them the essence of all the hints and allusions contained
in their Books. The Lord, verily, is the Almighty, the All-Knowing.”

Addressing the Jewish people Bahá’u’lláh
has written: “The Most Great Law is come, and the Ancient
Beauty ruleth upon the throne of David. Thus hath My Pen spoken that
which the histories of bygone ages have related. At this time,
however, David crieth aloud and saith: ‘O my loving Lord! Do
Thou number me with such as have stood steadfast in Thy Cause, O Thou
through Whom the faces have been illumined, and the footsteps have
slipped!’” And again: “The Breath hath been wafted,
and the Breeze hath blown, and from Zion hath appeared that which was
hidden, and from Jerusalem is heard the Voice of God, the One, the
Incomparable, the Omniscient.” Furthermore, in His “Epistle
to the Son of the Wolf” Bahá’u’lláh
has revealed: “Lend an ear unto the song of David. He saith:
‘Who will bring me into the Strong City?’ The Strong City
is Akká, which hath been named the Most Great Prison, and
which possesseth a fortress and mighty ramparts. O Shaykh!
Peruse that which Isaiah hath spoken in His Book. He saith: ‘Get
thee up into the high mountain, O Zion, that bringest good tidings;
lift up thy voice with strength, O Jerusalem, that bringest good
tidings. Lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah:
“Behold your God! Behold the Lord God will come with strong
hand, and His arm shall rule for Him.”’ This Day all the
signs have appeared. A Great City hath descended from heaven, and
Zion trembleth and exulteth with joy at the Revelation of God, for it
hath heard the Voice of God on every side.”

To the priestly caste, holding sacerdotal supremacy over
the followers of the Faith of Zoroaster, that same Voice, identifying
itself with the voice of the promised Sháh-Bahrám,
has declared: “O high priests! Ears have been given you that
they may hearken unto the mystery of Him Who is the Self-Dependent,
and eyes that they may behold Him. Wherefore flee ye? The
Incomparable Friend is manifest. He speaketh that wherein lieth
salvation. Were ye, O high priests, to discover the perfume of the
rose garden of understanding, ye would seek none other but Him, and
would recognize, in His new vesture, the All-Wise and Peerless One,
and would turn your eyes from the world and all who seek it, and
would arise to help Him.” “Whatsoever hath been announced
in the Books,” Bahá’u’lláh, replying
to a Zoroastrian who had inquired regarding the promised Sháh-Bahrám,
has written, “hath been revealed and made clear. From every
direction the signs have been manifested. The Omnipotent One is
calling, in this Day, and announcing the appearance of the Supreme
Heaven.” “This is not the day,” He, in another
Tablet declares, “whereon the high priests can command and
exercise their authority. In your Book it is stated that the high
priests will, on that Day, lead men far astray, and will prevent them
from drawing nigh unto Him. He indeed is a high priest who hath seen
the light and hastened unto the way leading to the Beloved.”
“Say, O high priests!” He, again addresses them, “The
Hand of Omnipotence is stretched forth from behind the clouds; behold
ye it with new eyes. The tokens of His majesty and greatness are
unveiled; gaze ye on them with pure eyes…. Say, O high priests! Ye
are held in reverence because of My Name, and yet ye flee Me! Ye are
the high priests of the Temple. Had ye been the high priests of the
Omnipotent One, ye would have been united with Him, and would have
recognized Him…. Say, O high priests! No man’s acts shall be
acceptable, in this Day, unless he forsaketh mankind and all that men
possess, and setteth his face towards the Omnipotent One.”

It is not, however, with either of these two Faiths that
we are primarily concerned. It is to Islám and, to a lesser
extent, to Christianity that my theme is directly related. Islám,
from which the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh has
sprung, even as did Christianity from Judaism, is the religion within
whose pale that Faith first rose and developed, from whose ranks the
great mass of Bahá’í adherents have been
recruited, and by whose leaders they have been, and indeed are still
being, persecuted. Christianity, on the other hand, is the religion
to which the vast majority of Bahá’ís of
non-Islamic extraction belong, within whose spiritual domain the
Administrative Order of the Faith of God is rapidly advancing, and by
whose ecclesiastical exponents that Order is being increasingly
assailed. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and even Zoroastrianism
which, in the main, are still unaware of the potentialities of the
Cause of God, and whose response to its Message is as yet negligible,
the Muḥammadan and Christian Faiths may be regarded as the two
religious systems which are sustaining, at this formative stage in
its evolution, the full impact of so tremendous a Revelation.

Let us, then, consider what the Founders of the Bahá’í
Faith have addressed to, or written about, the recognized leaders of
Islám and Christianity. We have already considered the
passages with reference to the kings of Islám, whether as
Caliphs reigning in Constantinople, or as Sháhs of
Persia who ruled the kingdom as temporary trustees for the expected
Imám. We have also noted the Tablet which Bahá’u’lláh
specifically revealed for the Roman Pontiff, and the more general
message in the Súriy-i-Mulúk directed to the kings of
Christendom. No less challenging and ominous is the Voice that has
warned and called to account the Muḥammadan divines and the
Christian clergy.

“Leaders of religion,” is Bahá’u’lláh’s
clear and universal censure pronounced in the Kitáb-i-Íqán,
“in every age, have hindered their people from attaining the
shores of eternal salvation, inasmuch as they held the reins of
authority in their mighty grasp. Some for the lust of leadership,
others through want of knowledge and understanding, have been the
cause of the deprivation of the people. By their sanction and
authority, every Prophet of God hath drunk from the chalice of
sacrifice, and winged His flight unto the heights of glory. What
unspeakable cruelties they that have occupied the seats of authority
and learning have inflicted upon the true Monarchs of the world,
those Gems of Divine virtue! Content with a transitory dominion, they
have deprived themselves of an everlasting sovereignty.” And
again, in that same Book: “Among these ‘veils of glory’
are the divines and doctors living in the days of the Manifestation
of God, who, because of their want of discernment and their love and
eagerness for leadership, have failed to submit to the Cause of God,
nay, have even refused to incline their ears unto the Divine Melody.
‘They have thrust their fingers into their ears.’ And the
people also, utterly ignoring God and taking them for their masters,
have placed themselves unreservedly under the authority of these
pompous and hypocritical leaders, for they have no sight, no hearing,
no heart, of their own to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Notwithstanding the divinely inspired admonitions of all the
Prophets, the Saints, and Chosen Ones of God, enjoining the people to
see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears, they have
disdainfully rejected their counsels and have blindly followed, and
will continue to follow, the leaders of their Faith. Should a poor
and obscure person, destitute of the attire of the men of learning,
address them saying: ‘Follow ye, O people, the Messengers of
God,’ they would, greatly surprised at such a statement, reply:
‘What! Meanest thou that all these divines, all these exponents
of learning, with all their authority, their pomp, and pageantry,
have erred, and failed to distinguish truth from falsehood? Dost
thou, and people like thyself, pretend to have comprehended that
which they have not understood?’ If numbers and excellence of
apparel be regarded as the criterions of learning and truth, the
peoples of a bygone age, whom those of today have never surpassed in
numbers, magnificence and power, should certainly be accounted a
superior and worthier people.” Furthermore, “Not one
Prophet of God was made manifest Who did not fall a victim to the
relentless hate, to the denunciation, denial and execration of the
clerics of His day! Woe unto them for the iniquities their hands have
formerly wrought! Woe unto them for that which they are now doing!
What veils of glory more grievous than these embodiments of error! By
the righteousness of God! To pierce such veils is the mightiest of
all acts, and to rend them asunder the most meritorious of all
deeds!” “On their tongue,” He moreover has written,
“the mention of God hath become an empty name; in their midst
His holy Word a dead letter. Such is the sway of their desires, that
the lamp of conscience and reason hath been quenched in their
hearts…. No two are found to agree on one and the same law, for
they seek no God but their own desire, and tread no path but the path
of error. In leadership they have recognized the ultimate object of
their endeavor, and account pride and haughtiness as the highest
attainments of their hearts’ desire. They have placed their
sordid machinations above the Divine decree, have renounced
resignation unto the will of God, busied themselves with selfish
calculation, and walked in the way of the hypocrite. With all their
power and strength they strive to secure themselves in their petty
pursuits, fearful lest the least discredit undermine their authority
or blemish the display of their magnificence.”

“The source and origin of tyranny,”
Bahá’u’lláh in another Tablet has affirmed,
“have been the divines. Through the sentences pronounced by
these haughty and wayward souls the rulers of the earth have wrought
that which ye have heard…. The reins of the heedless masses have
been, and are, in the hands of the exponents of idle fancies and vain
imaginings. These decree what they please. God, verily, is clear of
them, and We, too, are clear of them, as are such as have testified
unto that which the Pen of the Most High hath spoken in this glorious
Station.”

“The leaders of men,” He has likewise
asserted, “have, from time immemorial, prevented the people
from turning unto the Most Great Ocean. The Friend of God [Abraham]
was cast into fire through the sentence pronounced by the divines of
the age, and lies and calumnies were imputed to Him Who discoursed
with God [Moses]. Reflect upon the One Who was the Spirit of God
[Jesus]. Though He showed forth the utmost compassion and tenderness,
yet they rose up against that Essence of Being and Lord of the seen
and unseen, in such a manner that He could find no refuge wherein to
rest. Each day He wandered unto a new place, and sought a new
shelter. Consider the Seal of the Prophets [Muḥammad]—may
the souls of all else except Him be His sacrifice! How grievous the
things which befell that Lord of all being at the hands of the
priests of idolatry, and of the Jewish doctors, after He had uttered
the blessed words proclaiming the unity of God! By My life! My pen
groaneth, and all created things cry out by reason of the things that
have touched Him, at the hands of such as have broken the Covenant of
God and His Testament, and denied His Testimony, and gainsaid His
signs.”

“The foolish divines,” another Tablet
declares, “have laid aside the Book of God, and are occupied
with that which they themselves have fashioned. The Ocean of
Knowledge is revealed, and the shrill of the Pen of the Most High is
raised, and yet they, even as earthworms, are afflicted with the clay
of their fancies and imaginings. They are exalted by reason of their
relationship to the one true God, and yet they have turned aside from
Him! Because of Him have they become famous, and yet they are shut
off as by a veil from Him!”

“The pagan priests,” in yet another Tablet
is written, “and the Jewish and Christian divines, have
committed the very things which the divines of the age, in this
Dispensation, have committed, and are still committing. Nay, these
have displayed a more grievous cruelty and a fiercer malice. Every
atom beareth witness unto that which I say.”

To these leaders who “esteem themselves the best
of all creatures and have been regarded as the vilest by Him Who is
the Truth,” who “occupy the seats of knowledge and
learning, and who have named ignorance knowledge, and called
oppression justice,” and who, “worship no God but their
own desire, who bear allegiance to naught but gold, who are wrapt in
the densest veils of learning, and who, enmeshed by its obscurities,
are lost in the wilds of error”—to these Bahá’u’lláh
has chosen to address these words: “O concourse of divines! Ye
shall not henceforward behold yourselves possessed of any power,
inasmuch as We have seized it from you, and destined it for such as
have believed in God, the One, the All-Powerful, the Almighty, the
Unconstrained.”

In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas we read the following: “Say:
O leaders of religion! Weigh not the Book of God with such standards
and sciences as are current amongst you, for the Book itself is the
unerring Balance established amongst men. In this most perfect
Balance whatsoever the peoples and kindreds of the earth possess must
be weighed, while the measure of its weight should be tested
according to its own standard, did ye but know it. The eye of My
loving-kindness weepeth sore over you, inasmuch as ye have failed to
recognize the One upon Whom ye have been calling in the daytime and
in the night season, at even and at morn…. O ye leaders of
religion! Who is the man amongst you that can rival Me in vision or
insight? Where is he to be found that dareth to claim to be My equal
in utterance or wisdom? No, by My Lord, the All-Merciful! All on the
earth shall pass away; and this is the face of your Lord, the
Almighty, the Well-Beloved…. Say: This, verily, is the heaven in
which the Mother Book is treasured, could ye but comprehend it. He it
is Who hath caused the Rock to shout, and the Burning Bush to lift up
its voice, upon the Mount rising above the Holy Land, and proclaim:
‘The Kingdom is God’s, the sovereign Lord of all, the
All-Powerful, the Loving!’ We have not entered any school, nor
read any of your dissertations. Incline your ears to the words of
this unlettered One, wherewith He summoneth you unto God, the
Ever-Abiding. Better is this for you than all the treasures of the
earth, could ye but comprehend it.”

“O concourse of divines!” He moreover has
written, “When My verses were sent down, and My clear tokens
were revealed, We found you behind the veils. This, verily, is a
strange thing…. We have rent the veils asunder. Beware lest ye shut
out the people by yet another veil. Pluck asunder the chains of vain
imaginings, in the name of the Lord of all men, and be not of the
deceitful. Should ye turn unto God, and embrace His Cause, spread not
disorder within it, and measure not the Book of God with your selfish
desires. This, verily, is the counsel of God aforetime and
hereafter…. Had ye believed in God, when He revealed Himself, the
people would not have turned aside from Him, nor would the things ye
witness today have befallen Us. Fear God, and be not of the heedless.
…This is the Cause that hath caused all your superstitions and
idols to tremble…. O concourse of divines! Beware lest ye be the
cause of strife in the land, even as ye were the cause of the
repudiation of the Faith in its early days. Gather the people around
this Word that hath made the pebbles to cry out: ‘The Kingdom
is God’s, the Dawning-Place of all signs!’… Tear the
veils asunder in such wise that the inmates of the Kingdom will hear
them being rent. This is the command of God, in days gone by, and for
those to come. Blessed the man that observeth that whereunto he was
bidden, and woe betide the negligent.”

And again: “How long will ye, O concourse of
divines, level the spears of hatred at the face of Bahá? Rein
in your pens. Lo, the Most Sublime Pen speaketh betwixt earth and
heaven. Fear God, and follow not your desires which have altered the
face of creation. Purify your ears that they may hearken unto the
Voice of God. By God! It is even as fire that consumeth the veils,
and as water that washeth the souls of all who are in the universe.”

“Say: O concourse of divines!” He
furthermore addresses them, “Can any one of you race with the
Divine Youth in the arena of wisdom and utterance, or soar with Him
into the heaven of inner meaning and explanation? Nay, by My Lord,
the God of mercy! All have swooned away in this Day from the Word of
thy Lord. They are even as dead and lifeless, except him whom thy
Lord, the Almighty, the Unconstrained, hath willed to exempt. Such a
one is indeed of those endued with knowledge in the sight of Him Who
is the All-Knowing. The inmates of Paradise, and the dwellers of the
sacred Folds, bless him at eventide and at dawn. Can the one
possessed of wooden legs resist him whose feet God hath made of
steel? Nay, by Him Who illumineth the whole of creation!”

“When We observed carefully,” He
significantly remarks, “We discovered that Our enemies are, for
the most part, the divines.” “Among the people are those
who said: ‘He hath repudiated the divines.’ Say: ‘Yea,
by My Lord! I, in very truth, was the One Who abolished the idols!’”
“We, verily, have sounded the Trumpet, which is Our Most
Sublime Pen, and lo, the divines and the learned, and the doctors and
the rulers, swooned away except such as God preserved, as a token of
His grace, and He, verily, is the All-Bounteous, the Ancient of
Days.”

“O concourse of divines! Fling away idle fancies
and imaginings, and turn, then, towards the Horizon of Certitude. I
swear by God! All that ye possess will profit you not, neither all
the treasures of the earth, nor the leadership ye have usurped. Fear
God, and be not of the lost ones.” “Say: O concourse of
divines! Lay aside all your veils and coverings. Give ear unto that
whereunto calleth you the Most Sublime Pen, in this wondrous Day….
The world is laden with dust, by reason of your vain imaginings, and
the hearts of such as enjoy near access to God are troubled because
of your cruelty. Fear God, and be of them that judge equitably.”

“O ye the dawning-places of knowledge!” He
thus exhorts them, “Beware that ye suffer not yourselves to
become changed, for as ye change, most men will, likewise, change.
This, verily, is an injustice unto yourselves and unto others…. Ye
are even as a spring. If it be changed, so will the streams that
branch out from it be changed. Fear God, and be numbered with the
godly. In like manner, if the heart of man be corrupted, his limbs
will also be corrupted. And similarly, if the root of a tree be
corrupted, its branches, and its offshoots, and its leaves, and its
fruits, will be corrupted.”

“Say: O concourse of divines!” He thus
appeals to them, “Be fair, I adjure you by God, and nullify not
the Truth with the things ye possess. Peruse that which We have sent
down with truth. It will, verily, aid you, and will draw you nigh
unto God, the Mighty, the Great. Consider and call to mind how when
Muḥammad, the Apostle of God, appeared, the people denied Him.
They ascribed unto Him what caused the Spirit [Jesus] to lament in
His Most Sublime Station, and the Faithful Spirit to cry out.
Consider, moreover, the things which befell the Apostles and
Messengers of God before Him, by reason of what the hands of the
unjust have wrought. We make mention of you for the sake of God, and
remind you of His signs, and announce unto you the things ordained
for such as are nigh unto Him in the most sublime Paradise and the
all-highest Heaven, and I, verily, am the Announcer, the Omniscient.
He hath come for your salvation, and hath borne tribulations that ye
may ascend, by the ladder of utterance, unto the summit of
understanding…. Peruse, with fairness and justice, that which hath
been sent down. It will, verily, exalt you through the truth, and
will cause you to behold the things from which ye have been withheld,
and will enable you to quaff His sparkling Wine.”

Words Addressed to Muslim
Ecclesiastics

Let us now consider more particularly the specific
references, and the words directly addressed, to Muslim ecclesiastics
by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. The Báb,
as attested by the Kitáb-i-Íqán, has
“specifically revealed an Epistle unto the divines of every
city, wherein He hath fully set forth the character of the denial and
repudiation of each of them.” Whilst in Iṣfáhán,
that time-honored stronghold of Muslim ecclesiasticism, He, through
the medium of its governor, Manúchihr Khán,
invited in writing the divines of that city to engage in a contest
with Him, in order, as He expressed it, to “establish the truth
and dissipate falsehood.” Not one of the multitude of divines
who thronged that great seat of learning had the courage to take up
that challenge. Bahá’u’lláh, on His part,
while in Adrianople, and as witnessed by His own Tablet to the Sháh
of Persia, signified His wish to be “brought face to face with
the divines of the age, and produce proofs and testimonies in the
presence of His Majesty, the Sháh.” This offer
was denounced as a “great presumption and amazing audacity”
by the divines of Ṭihrán, who, in their fear, advised
their sovereign to instantly punish the bearer of that Tablet.
Previously, while Bahá’u’lláh was in
Baghdád, He expressed His willingness that, provided
the divines of Najaf and Karbilá—the twin holiest cities
next to Mecca and Medina, in the eyes of the Shí’ihs—assembled
and agreed regarding any miracle they wished to be performed, and
signed and sealed a statement affirming that on performance of this
miracle they would acknowledge the truth of His Mission, He would
unhesitatingly produce it. To this challenge they, as recorded by
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His “Some Answered
Questions,” could offer no better reply than this: “This
man is an enchanter; perhaps he will perform an enchantment, and then
we shall have nothing more to say.” “For twelve years,”
Bahá’u’lláh Himself has testified, “We
tarried in Baghdád. Much as We desired that a large
gathering of divines and fair-minded men be convened, so that truth
might be distinguished from falsehood, and be fully demonstrated, no
action was taken.” And again: “And likewise, while in
‘Iráq, We wished to come together with the divines of
Persia. No sooner did they hear of this, than they fled and said: ‘He
indeed is a manifest sorcerer!’ This is the word that proceeded
aforetime out of the mouths of such as were like them. These
[divines] objected to what they said, and yet, they themselves
repeat, in this day, what was said before them, and understand not.
By My life! They are even as ashes in the sight of thy Lord. If He be
willing, tempestuous gales will blow over them, and make them as
dust. Thy Lord, verily, doth what He pleaseth.”

These false, these cruel and cowardly Shí’ih
clericals, who, as Bahá’u’lláh declared,
had they not intervened, Persia would have been subdued by the power
of God in hardly more than two years, have been thus addressed in the
Qayyúm-i-Asmá: “O concourse of divines! Fear God
from this day onwards in the views ye advance, for He Who is Our
Remembrance in your midst, and Who cometh from Us, is, in very truth,
the Judge and Witness. Turn away from that which ye lay hold of, and
which the Book of God, the True One, hath not sanctioned, for on the
Day of Resurrection ye shall, upon the Bridge, be, in very truth,
held answerable for the position ye occupied.”

In that same Book the Báb thus addresses the
Shí’ihs, as well as the entire body of the
followers of the Prophet: “O concourse of Shí’ihs!
Fear ye God, and Our Cause, which concerneth Him Who is the Most
Great Remembrance of God. For great is its fire, as decreed in the
Mother-Book.” “O people of the Qur’án! Ye
are as nothing unless ye submit unto the Remembrance of God and unto
this Book. If ye follow the Cause of God, We will forgive you your
sins, and if ye turn aside from Our command, We will, in truth,
condemn your souls in Our Book, unto the Most Great Fire. We, verily,
do not deal unjustly with men, even to the extent of a speck on a
date stone.”

And finally, in that same Commentary, this startling
prophecy is recorded: “Erelong We will, in very truth, torment
such as waged war against Ḥusayn [Imám Ḥusayn], in
the Land of the Euphrates, with the most afflictive torment, and the
most dire and exemplary punishment.” “Erelong,” He
also, referring to that same people, in that same Book, has written,
“will God wreak His vengeance upon them, at the time of Our
Return, and He hath, in very truth, prepared for them, in the world
to come, a severe torment.”

As to Bahá’u’lláh, the
passages I cite in these pages constitute but a fraction of the
references to the Muslim divines with which His writings abound. “The
Lote-Tree beyond Which there is no passing,” He exclaims,
“crieth out, by reason of the cruelty of the divines. It
shouteth aloud, and bewaileth itself.” “From the
inception of this sect [Shí’ih],” He, in
His “Epistle to the Son of the Wolf,” has written, “until
the present day, how great hath been the number of the divines that
have appeared, none of whom became cognizant of the nature of this
Revelation. What could have been the cause of this waywardness? Were
We to mention it, their limbs would cleave asunder. It is necessary
for them to meditate, nay to meditate for a thousand thousand years,
that haply they may attain unto a sprinkling from the ocean of
knowledge, and discover the things whereof they are oblivious in this
day. I was walking in the Land of Tá [Ṭihrán]—the
dayspring of the signs of thy Lord—when lo, I heard the
lamentation of the pulpits and the voice of their supplication unto
God, blessed and glorified be He! They cried out and said: ‘O
God of the world and Lord of the nations! Thou beholdest our state
and the things which have befallen us, by reason of the cruelty of
Thy servants. Thou hast created us and revealed us for Thy
glorification and praise. Thou dost now hear what the wayward
proclaim upon us in Thy days. By Thy might! Our souls are melted, and
our limbs are trembling. Alas, alas! Would that we had never been
created and revealed by Thee!’ The hearts of them that enjoy
near access to God are consumed by these words, and from them the
cries of such as are devoted to Him are raised.”

“These thick clouds,” He, in that same
Epistle, has stated, “are the exponents of idle fancies and
vain imaginings, who are none other than the divines of Persia.”
“By ‘divines’ in the passage cited above,”
He, in that same connection, explains, “is meant those men who
outwardly attire themselves with the raiment of knowledge, but who
inwardly are deprived therefrom. In this connection We quote, from
the Tablet addressed to His Majesty the Sháh, certain
passages from the ‘Hidden Words’ which were revealed by
the Abhá Pen under the name of the ‘Book of Fátimih,’
the blessings of God be upon her! ‘O ye that are foolish, yet
have a name to be wise! Wherefore do ye wear the guise of the
shepherd, when inwardly ye have become wolves, intent upon My flock?
Ye are even as the star, which riseth ere the dawn, and which, though
it seem radiant and luminous, leadeth the wayfarers of My city astray
into the paths of perdition.’ And likewise He saith: ‘O
ye seemingly fair yet inwardly foul! Ye are like clear but bitter
water, which to outward seeming is but crystal pure but of which,
when tested by the Divine Assayer, not a drop is accepted. Yea, the
sunbeam falleth alike upon the dust and the mirror, yet differ they
in reflection even as doth the star from the earth: nay, immeasurable
is the difference!’”

“We have invited all men,” Bahá’u’lláh,
in another Tablet, has stated, “to turn towards God, and have
acquainted them with the Straight Path. They [divines] rose up
against Us with such cruelty as hath sapped the strength of Islám,
and yet most of the people are heedless!” “The children
of Him Who is the Friend of God [Abraham],” He moreover has
written, “and heirs of the One Who discoursed with God [Moses],
who were accounted the most abject of men, have split the veils
asunder, and rent the coverings, and seized the Sealed Wine from the
hands of the bounty of Him Who is the Self-Subsisting, and drunk
their fill, whilst the detestable Shí’ih divines
have remained, until the present time, hesitant and perverse.”
And again: “The divines of Persia committed that which no
people amongst the peoples of the world have committed.”

“If this Cause be of God,” He thus addresses
the Minister of the Sháh in Constantinople, “no
man can prevail against it; and if it be not of God, the divines
amongst you, and they that follow their corrupt desires, and such as
have rebelled against Him, will surely suffice to overpower it.”

“Of all the peoples of the world,” He, in
another Tablet, observes, “they that have suffered the greatest
loss have been, and are still, the people of Persia. I swear by the
Daystar of Utterance which shineth upon the world in its meridian
glory! The lamentations of the pulpits, in that country, are being
raised continually. In the early days such lamentations were heard in
the Land of Tá [Ṭihrán], for pulpits, erected for
the purpose of remembering the True One—exalted be His
glory—have now, in Persia, become places wherefrom blasphemies
are uttered against Him Who is the Desire of the worlds.”

“In this day,” is His caustic denunciation,
“the world is redolent with the fragrances of the robe of the
Revelation of the Ancient King … and yet, they [divines] have
gathered together, and established themselves upon their seats, and
have spoken that which would put an animal to shame, how much more
man himself! Were they to become aware of one of their acts, and
perceive the mischief it hath wrought, they would, with their own
hands, dispatch themselves to their final abode.”

“O concourse of divines!” Bahá’u’lláh
thus commands them, “…Lay aside that which ye possess, and
hold your peace, and give ear, then, unto that which the Tongue of
Grandeur and Majesty speaketh. How many the veiled handmaidens who
turned unto Me, and believed, and how numerous the wearers of the
turban who were debarred from Me, and followed in the footsteps of
bygone generations!”

“I swear by the Daystar that shineth above the
Horizon of Utterance!” He asserts, “A paring from the
nail of one of the believing handmaidens is, in this day, more
esteemed, in the sight of God, than the divines of Persia, who, after
thirteen hundred years’ waiting, have perpetrated what the Jews
have not perpetrated during the Revelation of Him Who is the Spirit
[Jesus].” “Though they rejoice,” is His warning,
“at the adversities that have touched Us, the day will come
whereon they shall wail and weep.”

“O heedless one!” He thus addresses, in the
Lawḥ-i-Burhán, a notorious Persian mujtahid, whose hands
were stained with the blood of Bahá’í martyrs,
“rely not on thy glory and thy power. Thou art even as the last
trace of sunlight upon the mountaintop. Soon will it fade away, as
decreed by God, the All-Possessing, the Most High. Thy glory, and the
glory of such as are like thee, have been taken away, and this,
verily, is what hath been ordained by the One with Whom is the Mother
Tablet. …Because of you the Apostle [Muḥammad] lamented, and
the Chaste One [Fátimih] cried out, and the countries were
laid waste, and darkness fell upon all regions. O concourse of
divines! Because of you the people were abased, and the banner of
Islám was hauled down, and its mighty throne subverted. Every
time a man of discernment hath sought to hold fast unto that which
would exalt Islám, you raised a clamor, and thereby was he
deterred from achieving his purpose, while the land remained fallen
in clear ruin.”

“Say: O concourse of Persian divines!”
Bahá’u’lláh again prophesies, “In My
name ye have seized the reins of men, and occupy the seats of honor,
by reason of your relation to Me. When I revealed Myself, however, ye
turned aside, and committed what hath caused the tears of such as
have recognized Me to flow. Erelong will all that ye possess perish,
and your glory be turned into the most wretched abasement, and ye
shall behold the punishment for what ye have wrought, as decreed by
God, the Ordainer, the All-Wise.”

In the Súriy-i-Mulúk, addressing the
entire company of the ecclesiastical leaders of Sunní Islám
in Constantinople, the capital of the Empire and seat of the
Caliphate, He has written: “O ye divines of the City! We came
to you with the truth, whilst ye were heedless of it. Methinks ye are
as dead, wrapt in the coverings of your own selves. Ye sought not Our
presence, when so to do would have been better for you than all your
doings…. Know ye, that had your leaders, to whom ye owe allegiance,
and on whom ye pride yourselves, and whom ye mention by day and by
night, and from whose traces ye seek guidance—had they lived in
these days, they would have circled around Me, and would not have
separated themselves from Me, whether at eventide or at morn. Ye,
however, did not turn your faces towards My face, for even less than
a moment, and waxed proud, and were careless of this Wronged One, Who
hath been so afflicted by men that they dealt with Him as they
pleased. Ye failed to inquire about My condition, nor did ye inform
yourselves of the things which befell Me. Thereby have ye withheld
from yourselves the winds of holiness, and the breezes of bounty,
that blow from this luminous and perspicuous Spot. Methinks ye have
clung to outward things, and forgotten the inner things, and say that
which ye do not. Ye are lovers of names, and appear to have given
yourselves up to them. For this reason make ye mention of the names
of your leaders. And should anyone like them, or superior unto them,
come unto you, ye would flee him. Through their names ye have exalted
yourselves, and have secured your positions, and live and prosper.
And were your leaders to reappear, ye would not renounce your
leadership, nor would ye turn in their direction, nor set your faces
towards them. We found you, as We found most men, worshiping names
which they mention during the days of their life, and with which they
occupy themselves. No sooner do the Bearers of these names appear,
however, than they repudiate them, and turn upon their heels…. Know
ye that God will not, in this day, accept your thoughts, nor your
remembrance of Him, nor your turning towards Him, nor your devotions,
nor your vigilance, unless ye be made new in the estimation of this
Servant, could be but perceive it.”

The voice of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Center
of the Covenant of God, has, likewise, been raised, announcing the
dire misfortunes which were to overtake, soon after His passing, the
ecclesiastical hierarchies of both Sunní and Shí’ih
Islám. “This glory,” He has written, “shall
be turned into the most abject abasement, and this pomp and might
converted into the most complete subjugation. Their palaces will be
transformed into prisons, and the course of their ascendant star
terminate in the depths of the pit. Laughter and merriment will
vanish, nay more, the voice of their weeping will be raised.”
“Even as the snow,” He moreover has written, “they
will melt away in the July sun.”

The dissolution of the institution of the Caliphate, the
complete secularization of the state which had enshrined the most
august institution of Islám, and the virtual collapse of the
Shí’ih hierarchy in Persia, were the visible and
immediate consequences of the treatment meted out to the Cause of God
by the clergy of the two largest communions of the Muslim world.

The Falling Fortunes of Shí’ih
Islám

Let us first consider the visitations that have marked
the falling fortunes of Shí’ih Islám. The
iniquities summarized in the beginning of these pages, and for which
the Shí’ih ecclesiastical order in Persia is to
be held primarily answerable; iniquities which, in the words of
Bahá’u’lláh, had caused “the Apostle
[Muḥammad] to lament, and the Chaste One [Fátimih] to
cry out,” and “all created things to groan, and the limbs
of the holy ones to quake”; iniquities which had riddled the
breast of the Báb with bullets, and bowed down Bahá’u’lláh,
and turned His hair white, and caused Him to groan aloud in anguish,
and made Muḥammad to weep over Him, and Jesus to beat Himself
upon the head, and the Báb to bewail His plight—such
iniquities indeed could not, and were not to, remain unpunished. God,
the Fiercest of Avengers, was lying in wait, pledged “not to
forgive any man’s injustice.” The scourge of His
chastisement, swift, sudden and terrible, was, at long last, let
loose upon the perpetrators of these iniquities.

A revolution, formidable in its proportions,
far-reaching in its repercussions, amazing in the absence of
bloodshed and even of violence which marked its progress, challenged
that ecclesiastical ascendency which, for centuries, had been of the
essence of Islám in that country, and virtually overthrew a
hierarchy with which the machinery of the state and the life of the
people had been inextricably interwoven. Such a revolution did not
signalize the disestablishment of a state-church. It indeed was
tantamount to the disruption of what may be called a church-state—a
state that had been hopefully awaiting, even up till the moment of
its expiry, the gladsome advent of the Hidden Imám, who would
not only seize the reins of authority from the sháh,
the chief magistrate who was merely representing him, but would also
assume dominion over the whole earth.

The spirit which that clerical order had so assiduously
striven, during a whole century, to crush; the Faith which it had,
with such ferocious brutality, attempted to extirpate; were now, in
their turn, through the forces they had engendered in the world,
deranging the equilibrium, and sapping the strength, of that same
order whose ramifications had extended to every sphere, duty, and act
of life in that country. The rock wall of Islám, seemingly
impregnable, was now shaken to its foundations, and was tottering to
its ruin, before the very eyes of the persecuted followers of the
Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. A sacerdotal
hierarchy that had held in thrall for so long the Faith of God, and
seemed, at one time, to have mortally struck it down, now found
itself the prey of a superior civil authority whose settled policy
was to fasten, steadily and relentlessly, its coils around it.

The vast system of that hierarchy, with all its elements
and appurtenances—its shaykhu’l-isláms
(high priests), its mujtahids (doctors of the law), its mullás
(priests), its fuqáhás (jurists), its imáms
(prayer-leaders), its mu’adhdhíns (criers), its
vu’azz (preachers), its qádís (judges), its
mutávallís (custodians), its madrasihs (seminaries),
its mudárrisíns (professors), its tullábs
(pupils), its qurrá’s (intoners), its mu’ábbiríns
(soothsayers), its muháddithíns (narrators), its
musákhkhiríns (spirit-subduers), its dhákiríns
(rememberers), its ummal-i-dhakát (almsgivers), its
muqaddasíns (saints), its munzavís (recluses), its
súfís, its dervishes, and what not—was paralyzed
and utterly discredited. Its mujtahids, those firebrands, who wielded
powers of life and death, and who for generations had been accorded
honors almost regal in character, were reduced to a deplorably
insignificant number. The beturbaned prelates of the Islamic church
who, in the words of Bahá’u’lláh, “decked
their heads with green and white, and committed what made the
Faithful Spirit to groan,” were ruthlessly swept away, except
for a handful who, in order to safeguard themselves against the fury
of an impious populace, are now compelled to submit to the
humiliation of producing, whenever the occasion demands it, the
license granted them by the civil authorities to wear this vanishing
emblem of a vanished authority. The rest of this turbaned class,
whether siyyids, mullás, or ḥájís, were
forced not only to exchange their venerable headdress for the
kuláh-i-farangí (European hat), which not long ago they
themselves had anathematized, but also to discard their flowing robes
and don the tight-fitting garments of European style, the
introduction of which into their country they had, a generation ago,
so violently disapproved.

“The dark blue and white domes”—an
allusion by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the rotund and massive
headgears of the priests of Persia—had indeed been “inverted.”
Those whose heads had borne them, the arrogant, fanatical,
perfidious, and retrograde clericals, “in the grasp of whose
authority,” as testified by Bahá’u’lláh,
“were held the reins of the people,” whose “words
are the pride of the world,” and whose “deeds are the
shame of the nations,” recognizing the wretchedness of their
state, betook themselves, crestfallen and destitute of hope, to their
homes, there to drag out a miserable existence. Impotent and sullen,
they are watching the operations of a process which, having reversed
their policy and ruined their handiwork, is irresistibly moving
towards a climax.

The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of
Islám has already died out. Their fanatical outcries, their
clamorous invocations, their noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their
fatvás (sentences), pronounced with such shamelessness, and at
times embracing the denunciation of kings, are a dead letter. The
spectacular sight of congregational prayers, in which thousands of
worshipers, lined row upon row, participated, has vanished. The
pulpits from whence they discharged the thunder of their anathemas
against the powerful and the innocent alike, are deserted and silent.
Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung endowments—the
landed property of the expected Imám—which in Iṣfáhán
alone at one time embraced the whole of the city, have been wrested
out of their hands, and brought under the control of a lay
administration. Their madrasihs (seminaries), with their medieval
learning, are deserted and dilapidated. The innumerable tomes of
theological commentaries, super-commentaries, glosses, and notes,
unreadable, unprofitable, the product of misdirected ingenuity and
toil, and pronounced by one of the most enlightened Islamic thinkers
in modern times as works obscuring sound knowledge, breeding maggots,
and fit for fire, are now buried away, overspread with cobwebs, and
forgotten. Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement
controversies, their interminable discussions, are outmoded and
abandoned. Their masjids (mosques) and imám-zádihs
(tombs of saints), which were privileged to extend the bast (right of
sanctuary) to many a criminal, and which had degenerated into a
monstrous scandal, whose walls rang with the intonations of a
hypocritical and profligate clergy, whose ornaments vied with the
treasures of the palaces of kings, are either forsaken or fallen in
ruin. Their takyihs, the haunts of the lazy, the passive, and
contemplative pietists, are either being sold or closed down. Their
ta’zíyihs (religious plays), acted with barbaric zeal,
and accentuated by sudden spasms of unbridled religious excitement,
are forbidden. Even their rawdih-khánís
(lamentations), with their long-drawn-out, plaintive howls, which
arose from so many houses, have been curtailed and discouraged. The
sacred pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbilá, the holiest shrines
of the Shí’ih world, are reduced in number and
made increasingly difficult, preventing thereby many a greedy mullá
from indulging in his time-honored habit of charging double for
making those pilgrimages as a substitute for the religious-minded.
The disuse of the veil which the mullás fought tooth and nail
to prevent; the equality of sexes which their law forbade; the
erection of civil tribunals which superseded their ecclesiastical
courts; the abolition of the síghih (concubinage)
which, when contracted for short periods, is hardly distinguishable
from quasi-prostitution, and which made of the turbulent and
fanatical Mashhad, the national center of pilgrimage, one of
the most immoral cities in Asia; and finally, the efforts which are
being made to disparage the Arabic tongue, the sacred language of
Islám and of the Qur’án, and to divorce it from
Persian—all these have successively lent their share to the
acceleration of that impelling process which has subordinated to the
civil authority the position and interests of Muslim clericals to a
degree undreamt of by any mullá.

Well might the once lofty-turbaned, long-bearded,
grave-looking áqá (mullá), who had so insolently
concerned himself with every department of human activity, as he
sits, hatless, clean shaven, in the seclusion of his home, and
perhaps listening to the strains of western music, blared upon the
ethers of his native land, pause to reflect for a while on the
vanished splendors of his defunct empire. Well might he muse upon the
havoc which the rising tide of nationalism and skepticism has wrought
in the adamantine traditions of his country. Well might he recollect
the halcyon days when, seated on a donkey, and parading through the
bázárs and maydáns of his native town, an eager
but deluded multitude would rush to kiss with fervor not only his
hands, but also the tail of the animal on which he rode. Well might
he remember the blind zeal with which they acclaimed his acts, and
the prodigies and miracles they ascribed to their performance.

He might indeed look back further, and call to mind the
reign of those pious Safaví monarchs, who delighted to call
themselves “dogs of the threshold of the Immaculate Imáms,”
how one of those kings was induced to go on foot before the mujtahid
as he rode through the maydán-i-Sháh, the main
square of Iṣfáhán, as a mark of royal
subservience to the favorite minister of the Hidden Imám, a
minister who, as distinct from the Sháh’s title,
styled himself “the servant of the Lord of Saintship (Imám
‘Alí).”

Was it not, he might well ponder, this same Sháh
Abbás the Great who had been arrogantly addressed by another
mujtahid as “the founder of a borrowed empire,” implying
that the kingdom of the “king of kings” really belonged
to the expected Imám, and was held by the Sháh
solely in the capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same
Sháh who walked the entire distance of eight hundred
miles from Iṣfáhán to Mashhad, the
“special glory of the Shí’ih world,”
to offer his prayers, in the only way that befitted the sháhansháh,
at the shrine of the Imám Riḍá, and who trimmed
the thousand candles which adorned its courts? Had not Sháh
Tahmásp, on receiving an epistle, penned by yet another
mujtahid, sprung to his feet, placed it on his eyes, kissed it with
rapture, and, because he had been addressed as “brother,”
ordered it to be placed within his winding-sheet and buried with him?

Might not that same mullá ponder the torrents of
blood which, during the long years when he enjoyed impunity of
conduct, flowed at his behest, the flamboyant anathemas he
pronounced, and the great army of orphans and widows, of the
disinherited, the dishonored, the destitute, and the homeless which,
on the Day of Reckoning, were, with one accord, to cry out for
vengeance, and invoke the malediction of God upon him?

That infamous crew had indeed merited the degradation in
which it had sunk. Persistently ignoring the sentence of doom which
the finger of Bahá’u’lláh had traced upon
the wall, it pursued, for well nigh a hundred years, its fatal
course, until, at the appointed hour, its death knell was sounded by
those spiritual, revolutionary forces which, synchronizing with the
first dawnings of the World Order of His Faith, are upsetting the
equilibrium, and throwing into such confusion, the ancient
institutions of mankind.

The Collapse of the Caliphate

These same forces, operating in a collateral field, have
effected a still more remarkable, and a more radical, revolution,
culminating in the collapse and fall of the Muslim Caliphate, the
most powerful institution of the whole Islamic world. This event of
portentous significance has, moreover, been followed by a formal and
definite separation of what was left of the Sunní faith in
Turkey from the state, and by the complete secularization of the
Republic that has arisen on the ruins of the Ottoman theocratic
empire. This catastrophic fall, that stunned the Islamic world, and
the avowed, the unqualified, and formal divorce between the spiritual
and temporal powers, which distinguished the revolution in Turkey
from that which occurred in Persia, I now proceed to consider.

Sunní Islám has sustained, not through the
action of a foreign and invading Power, but at the hands of a
dictator, avowedly professing the Faith of Muḥammad, a blow
more grievous than that which fell, almost simultaneously, upon its
sister-sect in Persia. This retributive act, directed against the
archenemy of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh,
recalls a similar disaster precipitated through the action of a Roman
emperor, during the latter part of the first century of the Christian
era—a disaster that razed to its foundations the Temple of
Solomon, destroyed the Holy of Holies, laid waste the city of David,
uprooted the Jewish hierarchy in Jerusalem, massacred thousands of
the Jewish people—the persecutors of the religion of Jesus
Christ—dispersed the remainder over the surface of the earth,
and reared a pagan colony on Zion.

The Caliph, the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of
Islám, exercised a spiritual sovereignty, and was invested
with a sacred character, which the Sháh of Persia
neither claimed nor possessed. Nor should it be forgotten that the
sphere of his spiritual jurisdiction extended to countries far beyond
the confines of his own empire, and embraced the overwhelming
majority of Muslims throughout the world. He was, moreover, in his
capacity as the Prophet’s representative on earth, regarded as
the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the defender
and propagator of Islám, and the commander of its followers in
any holy war they might be called upon to wage.

So potent, so august, so sacred a personage was at first
by virtue of the abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of
that temporal authority which the exponents of the Sunní
school have regarded as a necessary concomitant to his high office.
The sword, emblem of temporal sovereignty, was thus wrested out of
the hands of the commander who, for a brief period, was permitted to
occupy such an anomalous and precarious position. It was soon,
however, trumpeted to the Sunní world, which had not
previously been in the least consulted, that the Caliphate itself had
been extinguished, and that the country which had accepted it as an
appanage to its Sultanate, for more than four hundred years, had now
permanently disowned it. The Turks who had been the militant leaders
of the Muḥammadan world, since the Arab decline, and who had
carried the standard of Islám as far as the gates of Vienna,
the seat of government of Europe’s premier Power, had resigned
their leadership. The ex-caliph, shorn of his royal pomp, stripped of
the symbols of his vicarship, and deserted by friend and foe alike,
was forced to flee from Constantinople, the proud seat of a dual
sovereignty, to the land of the infidels, resigning himself to that
same life of exile to which a number of his fellow-sovereigns had
been and were still condemned.

Nor has the Sunní world, despite determined
efforts, succeeded in designating anyone in his stead who, though
deprived of the sword of a commander, would still act as the
custodian of the cloak and standard of the Apostle of God—the
twin holy symbols of the Caliphate. Conferences were held,
discussions ensued, a Congress of the Caliphate was convened in the
Egyptian capital, the City of the Fatimites, only to result in the
widely advertised and public confession of its failure: “They
have agreed to disagree!”

Strange, incredibly strange, must appear the position of
this most powerful branch of the Islamic Faith, with no outward and
visible head to voice its sentiments and convictions, its unity
irretrievably shattered, its radiance obscured, its law undermined,
its institutions thrown into hopeless confusion. This institution
that had challenged the inalienable, divinely appointed rights of the
Imáms of the Faith of Muḥammad, had, after the
revolution of thirteen centuries, vanished like a smoke, an
institution which had dealt such merciless blows to a Faith Whose
Herald was Himself a descendant of the Imáms, the lawful
successors of the Apostle of God.

To what else could this remarkable prophecy, enshrined
in the Lawḥ-i-Burhán, allude if not to the downfall of
this crowned overlord of Sunní Muslims? “O concourse of
Muslim Divines! Because of you the people were abased, and the banner
of Islám was hauled down, and its mighty throne subverted.”
What of the indubitably clear and amazing prophecy recorded in the
Qayyúm-i-Asmá? “Erelong We will, in very truth,
torment such as waged war against Ḥusayn [Imám Ḥusayn],
in the Land of the Euphrates, with the most afflictive torment, and
the direst and most exemplary punishment.” What other
interpretation can this Muḥammadan tradition be given? “In
the latter days a grievous calamity shall befall My people at the
hands of their ruler, a calamity such as no man ever heard to surpass
it.”

This was not all, however. The disappearance of the
Caliph, the spiritual head of above two hundred million Muḥammadans,
brought in its wake, in the land that had dealt Islám such a
heavy blow, the annulment of the sharí’ah
canonical Law, the disendowment of Sunní institutions, the
promulgation of a civil Code, the suppression of religious orders,
the abrogation of ceremonials and traditions inculcated by the
religion of Muḥammad. The Shaykhu’l-Islám
and his satellites, including muftís, qádís,
hujáhs, shaykhs, súfís, ḥájís,
mawlavís, dervishes, and others, vanished at a stroke more
determined, more open, and drastic than the one dealt the Shí’ihs
by the Sháh and his government. The mosques of the
capital, the pride and glory of the Islamic world, were deserted, and
the fairest and most famous of them all, the peerless St. Sophia,
“the Second Firmament,” “the Vehicle of the
Cherubim,” converted by the blatant creators of a secular
regime into a museum. The Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet
of God, was banished from the land, its alphabet was superseded by
Latin characters, and the Qur’án itself translated into
Turkish for the few who still cared to read it. The constitution of
the new Turkey not only proclaimed formally the disestablishment and
disendowment of Islám, with all its attendant and, in the view
of some, atheistic enactments, but also heralded various measures
that aimed at its further humiliation and weakening. Even the city of
Constantinople, “the Dome of Islám,” apostrophized
in such condemnatory terms by Bahá’u’lláh,
which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been hailed by the great
Constantine as “the New Rome,” and exalted to the rank of
the metropolis of both the Roman Empire and of Christendom, and
subsequently revered as the seat of the Caliphs, was relegated to the
position of a provincial city and stripped of all its pomp and glory,
its soaring and slender minarets standing sentinel at the grave of so
much vanished splendor and power.

“O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two
seas!” Bahá’u’lláh has thus
apostrophized the Imperial City, in terms that call to mind the
prophetic words addressed by Jesus Christ to Jerusalem, “The
throne of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the
flame of hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom, in such wise that
the Concourse on high, and they who circle around the Exalted Throne,
have wailed and lamented. We behold in thee the foolish ruling over
the wise, and darkness vaunting itself against the light. Thou art
indeed filled with manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made
thee vainglorious? By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon
perish, and thy daughters, and thy widows, and all the kindreds that
dwell within thee shall lament. Thus informeth thee the All-Knowing,
the All-Wise.”

Such was the fate that overtook both Shí’ih
and Sunní Islám, in the two countries where they had
planted their banners and reared their most powerful and far-famed
institutions. Such was their fate in these two countries, in one of
which Bahá’u’lláh died an exile, and in the
other the Báb suffered a martyr’s death. Such was the
fate of the self-styled Vicar of the Prophet of God, and of the
favorite ministers of the still awaited Imám. “The
people of the Qur’án,” Bahá’u’lláh
testifies, “have risen against Us, and tormented Us with such a
torment that the Holy Spirit lamented, and the thunder roared out,
and the clouds wept over Us…. Muḥammad, the Apostle of God,
bewaileth, in the all-highest Paradise, their acts.” “A
day shall be witnessed by My people,” their own traditions
condemn them, “whereon there will have remained of Islám
naught but a name, and of the Qur’án naught but a mere
appearance. The doctors of that age shall be the most evil the world
hath ever seen. Mischief hath proceeded from them, and on them it
will recoil.” And again: “Most of His enemies will be the
divines. His bidding they will not obey, but will protest saying:
‘This is contrary to that which hath been handed down unto us
by the Imáms of the Faith.’” And still again: “At
that hour His malediction shall descend upon you, and your curse
shall afflict you, and your religion shall remain an empty word on
your tongues. And when these signs appear amongst you, anticipate the
day when the red-hot wind will have swept over you, or the day when
ye will have been disfigured, or when stones will have rained upon
you.”

A Warning Unto All Nations

This horde of degraded priests, stigmatized by
Bahá’u’lláh as “doctors of doubt,”
as the “abject manifestations of the Prince of Darkness,”
as “wolves” and “pharaohs,” as “focal
centers of hellish fire,” as “voracious beasts preying
upon the carrion of the souls of men,” and, as testified by
their own traditions, as both the sources and victims of mischief,
have joined the various swarms of sháh-zádihs,
of emirs, and princelings of fallen dynasties—a witness and a
warning unto all nations of what must, sooner or later, befall those
wielders of earthly dominion, be it royal or ecclesiastic, who might
dare to challenge or persecute the appointed Channels and Embodiments
of Divine authority and power.

Islám, at once the progenitor and persecutor of
the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, is, if we read
aright the signs of the times, only beginning to sustain the impact
of this invincible and triumphant Faith. We need only recall the
nineteen hundred years of abject misery and dispersion which they,
who only for the short space of three years persecuted the Son of
God, have had to endure, and are still enduring. We may well ask
ourselves, with mingled feelings of dread and awe, how severe must be
the tribulations of those who, during no less than fifty years, have,
“at every moment tormented with a fresh torment” Him Who
is the Father, and who have, in addition, made His Herald—Himself
a Manifestation of God—to quaff, in such tragic circumstances,
the cup of martyrdom.

I have, in the pages immediately preceding, quoted
certain passages addressed collectively to the members of the
ecclesiastical order, both Islamic and Christian, and have then
recorded a number of specific addresses and references to Muslim
divines, both Shí’ih and Sunní, after
which I proceeded to describe the calamities that afflicted these
Muḥammadan hierarchies, their heads, their members, their
properties, their ceremonials, and institutions. Let us now consider
the addresses specifically made to the members of the Christian
clerical order who, for the most part, have ignored the Faith of
Bahá’u’lláh, whilst a few among them have,
as its Administrative Order gained in stature and spread its
ramifications over Christian countries, arisen to check its progress,
to belittle its influence, and obscure its purpose.

His Messages to Christian Leaders

A glance at the writings of the Author of the Bahá’í
Revelation will reveal the important and significant fact that He Who
addressed collectively an immortal message to all the kings of the
earth, Who revealed a Tablet to each of the outstanding crowned heads
of Europe and Asia, Who issued His call to the sacerdotal leaders of
Islám, both Sunní and Shí’ih, Who
did not exclude from His purview the Jews and the Zoroastrians, has,
apart from His numerous and repeated exhortations and warnings to the
entire Christian world, directed particular messages, some general,
others precise and challenging, to the heads, as well as to the rank
and file, of the ecclesiastical orders of Christendom—its pope,
its kings, its patriarchs, its archbishops, its bishops, its priests,
and its monks. We have already, in connection with the messages of
Bahá’u’lláh to the crowned heads of the
world, considered certain features of the Tablet to the Roman
Pontiff, as well as the words written to the kings of Christendom.
Let us now turn our attention to those passages in which the
aristocracy of the church and its ordained servants are singled out
for exhortation and admonition by the Pen of Bahá’u’lláh:

“Say: O concourse of patriarchs! He Whom ye were
promised in the Tablets is come. Fear God, and follow not the vain
imaginings of the superstitious. Lay aside the things ye possess, and
take fast hold of the Tablet of God by His sovereign power. Better is
this for you than all your possessions. Unto this testifieth every
understanding heart, and every man of insight. Pride ye yourselves on
My Name, and yet shut yourselves out as by a veil from Me? This
indeed is a strange thing!”

“Say: O concourse of archbishops! He Who is the
Lord of all men hath appeared. In the plain of guidance He calleth
mankind, whilst ye are numbered with the dead! Great is the
blessedness of him who is stirred by the Breeze of God, and hath
arisen from amongst the dead in this perspicuous Name.”

“Say: O concourse of bishops! Trembling hath
seized all the kindreds of the earth, and He Who is the Everlasting
Father calleth aloud between earth and heaven. Blessed the ear that
hath heard, and the eye that hath seen, and the heart that hath
turned unto Him Who is the Point of Adoration of all who are in the
heavens and all who are on earth.” “O concourse of
bishops! Ye are the stars of the heaven of My knowledge. My mercy
desireth not that ye should fall upon the earth. My justice, however,
declareth: ‘This is that which the Son [Jesus] hath decreed.’
And whatsoever hath proceeded out of His blameless, His
truthspeaking, trustworthy mouth, can never be altered. The bells,
verily, peal out My Name, and lament over Me, but My spirit rejoiceth
with evident gladness. The body of the Loved One yearneth for the
cross, and His head is eager for the spear, in the path of the
All-Merciful. The ascendancy of the oppressor can in no wise deter
Him from His purpose.” And again: “The stars of the
heaven of knowledge have fallen, they that adduce the proofs they
possess in order to demonstrate the truth of My Cause, and who make
mention of God in My Name. When I came unto them, in My majesty,
however, they turned aside from Me. They, verily, are of the fallen.
This is what the Spirit [Jesus] prophesied when He came with the
truth, and the Jewish doctors caviled at Him, until they committed
what made the Holy Spirit to lament, and the eyes of such as enjoy
near access to God to weep.”

“Say: O concourse of priests! Leave the bells, and
come forth, then, from your churches. It behooveth you, in this day,
to proclaim aloud the Most Great Name among the nations. Prefer ye to
be silent, whilst every stone and every tree shouteth aloud: ‘The
Lord is come in His great glory!’?… He that summoneth men in
My name is, verily, of Me, and he will show forth that which is
beyond the power of all that are on earth. …Let the Breeze of God
awaken you. Verily, it hath wafted over the world. Well is it with
him that hath discovered the fragrance thereof and been accounted
among the well-assured.” And again: “O concourse of
priests! The Day of Reckoning hath appeared, the Day whereon He Who
was in heaven hath come. He, verily, is the One Whom ye were promised
in the Books of God, the Holy, the Almighty, the All-Praised. How
long will ye wander in the wilderness of heedlessness and
superstition? Turn with your hearts in the direction of your Lord,
the Forgiving, the Generous.”

“Say: O concourse of monks! Seclude not yourselves
in churches and cloisters. Come forth by My leave, and occupy
yourselves with that which will profit your souls and the souls of
men. Thus biddeth you the King of the Day of Reckoning. Seclude
yourselves in the stronghold of My love. This, verily, is a befitting
seclusion, were ye of them that perceive it. He that shutteth himself
up in a house is indeed as one dead. It behooveth man to show forth
that which will profit all created things, and he that bringeth forth
no fruit is fit for fire. Thus counseleth you your Lord, and He,
verily, is the Almighty, the All-Bounteous. Enter ye into wedlock,
that after you someone may fill your place. We have forbidden you
perfidious acts, and not that which will demonstrate fidelity. Have
ye clung to the standards fixed by your own selves, and cast the
standards of God behind your backs? Fear God, and be not of the
foolish. But for man, who would make mention of Me on My earth, and
how could My attributes and My name have been revealed? Ponder ye,
and be not of them that are veiled and fast asleep. He that wedded
not [Jesus] found no place wherein to dwell or lay His head, by
reason of that which the hands of the treacherous had wrought. His
sanctity consisteth not in that which ye believe or fancy, but rather
in the things We possess. Ask, that ye may apprehend His station
which hath been exalted above the imaginings of all that dwell on
earth. Blessed are they who perceive it.” And again: “O
concourse of monks! If ye choose to follow Me, I will make you heirs
of My Kingdom; and if ye transgress against Me, I will, in My
long-suffering, endure it patiently, and I, verily, am the
Ever-Forgiving, the All-Merciful. …Bethlehem is astir with the
Breeze of God. We hear her voice saying: ‘O Most Generous Lord!
Where is Thy great glory established? The sweet savors of Thy
presence have quickened me, after I had melted in my separation from
Thee. Praised be Thou in that Thou hast raised the veils, and come
with power in evident glory.’ We called unto her from behind
the Tabernacle of Majesty and Grandeur: ‘O Bethlehem! This
Light hath risen in the orient, and traveled towards the occident,
until it reached thee in the evening of its life. Tell Me then: Do
the sons recognize the Father, and acknowledge Him, or do they deny
Him, even as the people aforetime denied Him [Jesus]?’
Whereupon she cried out saying: ‘Thou art, in truth, the
All-Knowing, the Best-Informed.” And again: “Consider,
likewise, how numerous at this time are the monks who have secluded
themselves in their churches, in My name, and who, when the appointed
time came, and We unveiled to them Our beauty, failed to recognize
Me, notwithstanding that they call upon Me at dawn and at eventide.”
“Read ye the Evangel,” He again addresses them, “and
yet refuse to acknowledge the All-Glorious Lord? This indeed
beseemeth you not, O concourse of learned men!… The fragrances of
the All-Merciful have wafted over all creation. Happy the man that
hath forsaken his desires, and taken fast hold of guidance.”

These “fallen stars” of the firmament of
Christendom, these “thick clouds” that have obscured the
radiance of the true Faith of God, these princes of the Church that
have failed to acknowledge the sovereignty of the “King of
kings,” these deluded ministers of the Son who have shunned and
ignored the promised Kingdom which the “Everlasting Father”
has brought down from heaven, and is now establishing upon
earth—these are experiencing, in this “Day of Reckoning,”
a crisis, not indeed as critical as that which the Islamic sacerdotal
order, the inveterate enemies of the Faith, has had to face, but one
which is no less widespread and significant. “Power hath been
seized” indeed, and is being increasingly seized, from these
ecclesiastics that speak in the name, and yet are so far away from
the spirit, of the Faith they profess.

We have only to look around us, as we survey the
fortunes of Christian ecclesiastical orders, to appreciate the steady
deterioration of their influence, the decline of their power, the
damage to their prestige, the flouting of their authority, the
dwindling of their congregations, the relaxation of their discipline,
the restriction of their press, the timidity of their leaders, the
confusion in their ranks, the progressive confiscation of their
properties, the surrender of some of their most powerful strongholds,
and the extinction of other ancient and cherished institutions.
Indeed, ever since the Divine summons was issued, and the invitation
extended, and the warning sounded, and the condemnation pronounced,
this process, that may be said to have been initiated with the
collapse of the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff, soon after
the Tablet to the Pope had been revealed, has been operating with
increasing momentum, menacing the very basis on which the entire
order is resting. Aided by the forces which the Communist movement
has unloosed, reinforced by the political consequences of the last
war, accelerated by the excessive, the blind, the intolerant, and
militant nationalism which is now convulsing the nations, and
stimulated by the rising tide of materialism, irreligion, and
paganism, this process is not only tending to subvert ecclesiastical
institutions, but appears to be leading to the rapid
dechristianization of the masses in many Christian countries.

I shall content myself with the enumeration of certain
outstanding manifestations of this force which is increasingly
invading the domain, and assailing the firmest ramparts, of one of
the leading religious systems of mankind. The virtual extinction of
the temporal power of the most preeminent ruler in Christendom
immediately after the creation of the Kingdom of Italy; the wave of
anticlericalism that swept over France after the collapse of the
Napoleonic empire, and which culminated in the complete separation of
the Catholic Church from the state, in the laicization of the Third
Republic, in the secularization of education, and in the suppression
and dispersal of religious orders; the swift and sudden rise of that
“religious irreligion,” that bold, conscious, and
organized assault launched in Soviet Russia against the Greek
Orthodox Church, that precipitated the disestablishment of the state
religion, that massacred a vast number of its members originally
numbering above a hundred million souls, that pulled down, closed, or
converted into museums, theatres and warehouses, thousands upon
thousands of churches, monasteries, synagogues and mosques, that
stripped the church of its six and a half million acres of property,
and sought, through its League of Militant Atheists and the
promulgation of a “five-year plan of godlessness,” to
loosen from its foundations the religious life of the masses; the
dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that dissolved, by one
stroke, the most powerful unit which owed its allegiance to, and
supported through its resources the administration of, the Church of
Rome; the divorce of the Spanish state from that same Church, and the
overthrow of the monarchy, the champion of Catholic Christendom; the
nationalistic philosophy, the parent of an unbridled and obsolete
nationalism, which, having dethroned Islám, has indirectly
assaulted the front line of the Christian church in non-Christian
lands, and is dealing such heavy blows to Catholic, Anglican, and
Presbyterian Missions in Persia, Turkey, and the Far East; the
revolutionary movement that brought in its wake the persecution of
the Catholic Church in Mexico; and finally the gospel of modern
paganism, unconcealed, aggressive, and unrelenting, which, in the
years preceding the present turmoil, and increasingly since its
outbreak, has swept over the continent of Europe, invading the
citadels, and sowing confusion in the hearts of the supporters, of
the Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Lutheran churches, in
Austria, Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavian states, and more
recently in Western Europe, the home and center of the most powerful
hierarchies of Christendom.

Christian Nations against Christian
Nations

What a sorry spectacle of impotence and disruption does
this fratricidal war, which Christian nations are waging against
Christian nations—Anglicans pitted against Lutherans, Catholics
against Greek Orthodox, Catholics against Catholics, and Protestants
against Protestants—in support of a so-called Christian
civilization, offer to the eyes of those who are already perceiving
the bankruptcy of the institutions that claim to speak in the name,
and to be the custodians, of the Faith of Jesus Christ! The
powerlessness and despair of the Holy See to halt this internecine
strife, in which the children of the Prince of Peace—blessed
and supported by the benedictions and harangues of the prelates of a
hopelessly divided church—are engaged, proclaim the degree of
subservience into which the once all-powerful institutions of the
Christian Faith have sunk, and are a striking reminder of the
parallel state of decadence into which the hierarchies of its sister
religion have fallen.

How tragically has Christendom ignored, and how far it
has strayed from, that high mission which He Who is the true Prince
of Peace has, in these, the concluding passages of His Tablet to Pope
Pius IX, called upon the entire body of Christians to
fulfill—passages which establish, for all time, the distinction
between the Mission of Bahá’u’lláh in this
age and that of Jesus Christ: “Say: O concourse of Christians!
We have, on a previous occasion, revealed Ourself unto you, and ye
recognized Me not. This is yet another occasion vouchsafed unto you.
This is the Day of God; turn ye unto Him…. The Beloved One loveth
not that ye be consumed with the fire of your desires. Were ye to be
shut out as by a veil from Him, this would be for no other reason
than your own waywardness and ignorance. Ye make mention of Me, and
know Me not. Ye call upon Me, and are heedless of My Revelation…. O
people of the Gospel! They who were not in the Kingdom have now
entered it, whilst We behold you, in this day, tarrying at the gate.
Rend the veils asunder by the power of your Lord, the Almighty, the
All-Bounteous, and enter, then, in My name My Kingdom. Thus biddeth
you He Who desireth for you everlasting life…. We behold you, O
children of the Kingdom, in darkness. This, verily, beseemeth you
not. Are ye, in the face of the Light, fearful because of your deeds?
Direct yourselves towards Him…. Verily, He [Jesus] said: ‘Come
ye after Me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.’ In
this day, however, We say: ‘Come ye after Me, that We may make
you to become the quickeners of mankind.’” “Say,”
He moreover has written, “We, verily, have come for your sakes,
and have borne the misfortunes of the world for your salvation. Flee
ye the One Who hath sacrificed His life that ye may be quickened?
Fear God, O followers of the Spirit [Jesus], and walk not in the
footsteps of every divine that hath gone far astray…. Open the
doors of your hearts. He Who is the Spirit [Jesus] verily, standeth
before them. Wherefore keep ye afar from Him Who hath purposed to
draw you nigh unto a Resplendent Spot? Say: We, in truth, have opened
unto you the gates of the Kingdom. Will ye bar the doors of your
houses in My face? This indeed is naught but a grievous error.”

Such is the pass to which the Christian clergy have
come—a clergy that have interposed themselves between their
flock and the Christ returned in the glory of the Father. As the
Faith of this Promised One penetrates farther and farther into the
heart of Christendom, as its recruits from the garrisons which its
spirit is assailing multiply, and provoke a concerted and determined
action in defense of the strongholds of Christian orthodoxy, and as
the forces of nationalism, paganism, secularism and racialism move
jointly towards a climax, might we not expect that the decline in the
power, the authority, and the prestige of these ecclesiastics will be
accentuated, and further demonstrate the truth, and more fully unfold
the implications, of Bahá’u’lláh’s
pronouncement predicting the eclipse of the luminaries of the Church
of Jesus Christ.

Devastating indeed has been the havoc wrought in the
fortunes of the Shí’ih hierarchy in Persia, and
pitiable the lot reserved for its remnant now groaning under the yoke
of a civil authority it had for centuries scorned and dominated.
Cataclysmic indeed has been the collapse of the most preeminent
institution of Sunní Islám, and irretrievable the
downfall of its hierarchy in a country that had championed the cause
of the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of God. Steady and relentless
is the process which has brought such destruction, shame, division,
and weakness to the defenders of the strongholds of Christian
ecclesiasticism, and black indeed are the clouds that darken its
horizon. Through the actions of Muslim and Christian divines—“idols,”
whom Bahá’u’lláh has stigmatized as
constituting the majority of His enemies—who failed, as
commanded by Him, to lay aside their pens and fling away their
fancies, and who, as He Himself testified, had they believed in Him
would have brought about the conversion of the masses, Islám
and Christianity have, it would be no exaggeration to say, entered
the most critical phase of their history.

Let none, however, mistake my purpose, or misrepresent
this cardinal truth which is of the essence of the Faith of
Bahá’u’lláh. The divine origin of all the
Prophets of God—including Jesus Christ and the Apostle of God,
the two greatest Manifestations preceding the Revelation of the
Báb—is unreservedly and unshakably upheld by each and
every follower of the Bahá’í religion. The
fundamental unity of these Messengers of God is clearly recognized,
the continuity of their Revelations is affirmed, the God-given
authority and correlative character of their Books is admitted, the
singleness of their aims and purposes is proclaimed, the uniqueness
of their influence emphasized, the ultimate reconciliation of their
teachings and followers taught and anticipated. “They all,”
according to Bahá’u’lláh’s testimony,
“abide in the same tabernacle, soar in the same heaven, are
seated upon the same throne, utter the same speech, and proclaim the
same Faith.”

The Continuity of Revelation

The Faith standing identified with the name of
Bahá’u’lláh disclaims any intention to
belittle any of the Prophets gone before Him, to whittle down any of
their teachings, to obscure, however slightly, the radiance of their
Revelations, to oust them from the hearts of their followers, to
abrogate the fundamentals of their doctrines, to discard any of their
revealed Books, or to suppress the legitimate aspirations of their
adherents. Repudiating the claim of any religion to be the final
revelation of God to man, disclaiming finality for His own
Revelation, Bahá’u’lláh inculcates the
basic principle of the relativity of religious truth, the continuity
of Divine Revelation, the progressiveness of religious experience.
His aim is to widen the basis of all revealed religions and to
unravel the mysteries of their scriptures. He insists on the
unqualified recognition of the unity of their purpose, restates the
eternal verities they enshrine, coordinates their functions,
distinguishes the essential and the authentic from the nonessential
and spurious in their teachings, separates the God-given truths from
the priest-prompted superstitions, and on this as a basis proclaims
the possibility, and even prophecies the inevitability, of their
unification, and the consummation of their highest hopes.

As to Muḥammad, the Apostle of God, let none among
His followers who read these pages, think for a moment that either
Islám, or its Prophet, or His Book, or His appointed
Successors, or any of His authentic teachings, have been, or are to
be in any way, or to however slight a degree, disparaged. The lineage
of the Báb, the descendant of the Imám Ḥusayn;
the divers and striking evidences, in Nabíl’s Narrative,
of the attitude of the Herald of our Faith towards the Founder, the
Imáms, and the Book of Islám; the glowing tributes paid
by Bahá’u’lláh in the Kitáb-i-Íqán
to Muḥammad and His lawful Successors, and particularly to the
“peerless and incomparable” Imám Ḥusayn; the
arguments adduced, forcibly, fearlessly, and publicly by
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in churches and synagogues, to
demonstrate the validity of the Message of the Arabian Prophet; and
last but not least the written testimonial of the Queen of Rumania,
who, born in the Anglican faith and notwithstanding the close
alliance of her government with the Greek Orthodox Church, the state
religion of her adopted country, has, largely as a result of the
perusal of these public discourses of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,
been prompted to proclaim her recognition of the prophetic function
of Muḥammad—all proclaim, in no uncertain terms, the true
attitude of the Bahá’í Faith towards its parent
religion.

“God,” is her royal tribute, “is All,
everything. He is the power behind all beginnings…. His is the
Voice within us that shows us good and evil. But mostly we ignore or
misunderstand this voice. Therefore, did He choose His Elect to come
down amongst us upon earth to make clear His Word, His real meaning.
Therefore, the Prophets; therefore, Christ, Muḥammad,
Bahá’u’lláh, for man needs from time to
time a voice upon earth to bring God to him, to sharpen the
realization of the existence of the true God. Those voices sent to us
had to become flesh, so that with our earthly ears we should be able
to hear and understand.”

What greater proof, it may be pertinently asked, can the
divines of either Persia or Turkey require wherewith to demonstrate
the recognition by the followers of Bahá’u’lláh
of the exalted position occupied by the Prophet Muḥammad among
the entire company of the Messengers of God? What greater service do
these divines expect us to render the Cause of Islám? What
greater evidence of our competence can they demand than that we
should kindle, in quarters so far beyond their reach, the spark of an
ardent and sincere conversion to the truth voiced by the Apostle of
God, and obtain from the pen of royalty this public, and indeed
historic, confession of His God-given Mission?

As to the position of Christianity, let it be stated
without any hesitation or equivocation that its divine origin is
unconditionally acknowledged, that the Sonship and Divinity of Jesus
Christ are fearlessly asserted, that the divine inspiration of the
Gospel is fully recognized, that the reality of the mystery of the
Immaculacy of the Virgin Mary is confessed, and the primacy of Peter,
the Prince of the Apostles, is upheld and defended. The Founder of
the Christian Faith is designated by Bahá’u’lláh
as the “Spirit of God,” is proclaimed as the One Who
“appeared out of the breath of the Holy Ghost,” and is
even extolled as the “Essence of the Spirit.” His mother
is described as “that veiled and immortal, that most beauteous,
countenance,” and the station of her Son eulogized as a
“station which hath been exalted above the imaginings of all
that dwell on earth,” whilst Peter is recognized as one whom
God has caused “the mysteries of wisdom and of utterance to
flow out of his mouth.” “Know thou,” Bahá’u’lláh
has moreover testified, “that when the Son of Man yielded up
His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping. By
sacrificing Himself, however, a fresh capacity was infused into all
created things. Its evidences, as witnessed in all the peoples of the
earth, are now manifest before thee. The deepest wisdom which the
sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any mind hath
unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the
influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but
manifestations of the quickening power released by His transcendent,
His all-pervasive and resplendent Spirit. We testify that when He
came into the world, He shed the splendor of His glory upon all
created things. Through Him the leper recovered from the leprosy of
perversity and ignorance. Through Him the unchaste and wayward were
healed. Through His power, born of Almighty God, the eyes of the
blind were opened and the soul of the sinner sanctified…. He it is
Who purified the world. Blessed is the man who, with a face beaming
with light, hath turned towards Him.”

Indeed, the essential prerequisites of admittance into
the Bahá’í fold of Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus,
Buddhists, and the followers of other ancient faiths, as well as of
agnostics and even atheists, is the wholehearted and unqualified
acceptance by them all of the divine origin of both Islám and
Christianity, of the Prophetic functions of both Muḥammad and
Jesus Christ, of the legitimacy of the institution of the Imamate,
and of the primacy of St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. Such are
the central, the solid, the incontrovertible principles that
constitute the bedrock of Bahá’í belief, which
the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh is proud to
acknowledge, which its teachers proclaim, which its apologists
defend, which its literature disseminates, which its summer schools
expound, and which the rank and file of its followers attest by both
word and deed.

Nor should it be thought for a moment that the followers
of Bahá’u’lláh either seek to degrade or
even belittle the rank of the world’s religious leaders,
whether Christian, Muslim, or of any other denomination, should their
conduct conform to their professions, and be worthy of the position
they occupy. “Those divines,” Bahá’u’lláh
has affirmed, “…who are truly adorned with the ornament of
knowledge and of a goodly character are, verily, as a head to the
body of the world, and as eyes to the nations. The guidance of men
hath, at all times, been and is dependent upon these blessed souls.”
And again: “The divine whose conduct is upright, and the sage
who is just, are as the spirit unto the body of the world. Well is it
with that divine whose head is attired with the crown of justice, and
whose temple is adorned with the ornament of equity.” And yet
again: “The divine who hath seized and quaffed the most holy
Wine, in the name of the sovereign Ordainer, is as an eye unto the
world. Well is it with them who obey him, and call him to
remembrance.” “Great is the blessedness of that divine,”
He, in another connection, has written, “that hath not allowed
knowledge to become a veil between him and the One Who is the Object
of all knowledge, and who, when the Self-Subsisting appeared, hath
turned with a beaming face towards Him. He, in truth, is numbered
with the learned. The inmates of Paradise seek the blessing of his
breath, and his lamp sheddeth its radiance over all who are in heaven
and on earth. He, verily, is numbered with the inheritors of the
Prophets. He that beholdeth him hath, verily, beheld the True One,
and he that turneth towards him hath, verily, turned towards God, the
Almighty, the All-Wise.” “Respect ye the divines amongst
you,” is His exhortation, “They whose acts conform to the
knowledge they possess, who observe the statutes of God, and decree
the things God hath decreed in the Book. Know ye that they are the
lamps of guidance betwixt earth and heaven. They that have no
consideration for the position and merit of the divines amongst them
have, verily, altered the bounty of God vouchsafed unto them.”

Dear friends! I have, in the preceding pages, attempted
to represent this world-afflicting ordeal that has laid its grip upon
mankind as primarily a judgment of God pronounced against the peoples
of the earth, who, for a century, have refused to recognize the One
Whose advent had been promised to all religions, and in Whose Faith
all nations can alone, and must eventually, seek their true
salvation. I have quoted certain passages from the writings of
Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb that reveal
the character, and foreshadow the occurrence of this divinely
inflicted visitation. I have enumerated the woeful trials with which
the Faith, its Herald, its Founder, and its Exemplar, have been
afflicted, and exposed the tragic failure of the generality of
mankind and its leaders to protest against these tribulations, and to
acknowledge the claims advanced by those Who bore them. I have,
moreover, indicated that a direct, an awful, an inescapable
responsibility rested on the sovereigns of the earth and the world’s
religious leaders who, in the days of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh,
held within their grasp the reins of absolute political and religious
authority. I have also endeavored to show how, as a result of the
direct and active antagonism of some of them to the Faith, and the
neglect by others of their unquestioned duty to investigate its truth
and its claims, to vindicate its innocence, and avenge its injuries,
both kings and ecclesiastics have been, and are still being,
subjected to the dire punishments which their sins of omission and
commission have provoked. I have, owing to the chief responsibility
which they incurred, as a result of the undisputed ascendancy they
held over their subjects and followers, quoted extensively from the
messages, the exhortations and warnings addressed to them by the
Founders of our Faith, and expatiated on the consequences that have
flowed from these momentous and epoch-making utterances.

This great retributive calamity, for which the world’s
supreme leaders, both secular and religious, are to be regarded as
primarily answerable, as testified by Bahá’u’lláh,
should not, if we would correctly appraise it, be regarded solely as
a punishment meted out by God to a world that has, for a hundred
years, persisted in its refusal to embrace the truth of the
redemptive Message proffered to it by the supreme Messenger of God in
this day. It should be viewed also, though to a lesser degree, in the
light of a divine retribution for the perversity of the human race in
general, in casting itself adrift from those elementary principles
which must, at all times, govern, and can alone safeguard, the life
and progress of mankind. Humanity has, alas, with increasing
insistence, preferred, instead of acknowledging and adoring the
Spirit of God as embodied in His religion in this day, to worship
those false idols, untruths and half-truths, which are obscuring its
religions, corrupting its spiritual life, convulsing its political
institutions, corroding its social fabric, and shattering its
economic structure.

Not only have the peoples of the earth ignored, and some
of them even assailed, a Faith which is at once the essence, the
promise, the reconciler, and the unifier of all religions, but they
have drifted away from their own religions, and set up on their
subverted altars other gods wholly alien not only to the spirit but
to the traditional forms of their ancient faiths.

“The face of the world,” Bahá’u’lláh
laments, “hath altered. The way of God and the religion of God
have ceased to be of any worth in the eyes of men.” “The
vitality of men’s belief in God,” He also has written,
“is dying out in every land…. The corrosion of ungodliness is
eating into the vitals of human society.” “Religion,”
He affirms, “is verily the chief instrument for the
establishment of order in the world, and of tranquility amongst its
peoples…. The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous
the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to
chaos and confusion.” And again: “Religion is a radiant
light and an impregnable stronghold for the protection and welfare of
the peoples of the world.” “As the body of man,”
He, in another connection, has written, “needeth a garment to
clothe it, so the body of mankind must needs be adorned with the
mantle of justice and wisdom. Its robe is the Revelation vouchsafed
unto it by God.”

The Three False Gods

This vital force is dying out, this mighty agency has
been scorned, this radiant light obscured, this impregnable
stronghold abandoned, this beauteous robe discarded. God Himself has
indeed been dethroned from the hearts of men, and an idolatrous world
passionately and clamorously hails and worships the false gods which
its own idle fancies have fatuously created, and its misguided hands
so impiously exalted. The chief idols in the desecrated temple of
mankind are none other than the triple gods of Nationalism, Racialism
and Communism, at whose altars governments and peoples, whether
democratic or totalitarian, at peace or at war, of the East or of the
West, Christian or Islamic, are, in various forms and in different
degrees, now worshiping. Their high priests are the politicians and
the worldly-wise, the so-called sages of the age; their sacrifice,
the flesh and blood of the slaughtered multitudes; their incantations
outworn shibboleths and insidious and irreverent formulas; their
incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends from the lacerated hearts
of the bereaved, the maimed, and the homeless.

The theories and policies, so unsound, so pernicious,
which deify the state and exalt the nation above mankind, which seek
to subordinate the sister races of the world to one single race,
which discriminate between the black and the white, and which
tolerate the dominance of one privileged class over all others—these
are the dark, the false, and crooked doctrines for which any man or
people who believes in them, or acts upon them, must, sooner or
later, incur the wrath and chastisement of God.

“Movements,” is the warning sounded by
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “newly born and worldwide in
their range, will exert their utmost effort for the advancement of
their designs. The Movement of the Left will acquire great
importance. Its influence will spread.”

Contrasting with, and irreconcilably opposed to, these
war-engendering, world-convulsing doctrines are the healing, the
saving, the pregnant truths proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh,
the Divine Organizer and Savior of the whole human race—truths
which should be regarded as the animating force and the hallmark of
His Revelation: “The world is but one country, and mankind its
citizens.” “Let not a man glory in that he loves his
country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.”
And again: “Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of
one branch.” “Bend your minds and wills to the education
of the peoples and kindreds of the earth, that haply … all mankind
may become the upholders of one order, and the inhabitants of one
city…. Ye dwell in one world, and have been created through the
operation of one Will.” “Beware lest the desires of the
flesh and of a corrupt inclination provoke divisions among you. Be ye
as the fingers of one hand, the members of one body.” And yet
again: “All the saplings of the world have appeared from one
Tree, and all the drops from one Ocean, and all beings owe their
existence to one Being.” And furthermore: “That one
indeed is a man who today dedicateth himself to the service of the
entire human race.”

The Weakened Pillars of Religion

Not only must irreligion and its monstrous offspring,
the triple curse that oppresses the soul of mankind in this day, be
held responsible for the ills which are so tragically besetting it,
but other evils and vices, which are, for the most part, the direct
consequences of the “weakening of the pillars of religion,”
must also be regarded as contributory factors to the manifold guilt
of which individuals and nations stand convicted. The signs of moral
downfall, consequent to the dethronement of religion and the
enthronement of these usurping idols, are too numerous and too patent
for even a superficial observer of the state of present-day society
to fail to notice. The spread of lawlessness, of drunkenness, of
gambling, and of crime; the inordinate love of pleasure, of riches,
and other earthly vanities; the laxity in morals, revealing itself in
the irresponsible attitude towards marriage, in the weakening of
parental control, in the rising tide of divorce, in the deterioration
in the standard of literature and of the press, and in the advocacy
of theories that are the very negation of purity, of morality and
chastity—these evidences of moral decadence, invading both the
East and the West, permeating every stratum of society, and
instilling their poison in its members of both sexes, young and old
alike, blacken still further the scroll upon which are inscribed the
manifold transgressions of an unrepentant humanity.

Small wonder that Bahá’u’lláh,
the Divine Physician, should have declared: “In this day the
tastes of men have changed, and their power of perception hath
altered. The contrary winds of the world, and its colors, have
provoked a cold, and deprived men’s nostrils of the sweet
savors of Revelation.”

Brimful and bitter indeed is the cup of humanity that
has failed to respond to the summons of God as voiced by His Supreme
Messenger, that has dimmed the lamp of its faith in its Creator, that
has transferred, in so great a measure, the allegiance owed Him to
the gods of its own invention, and polluted itself with the evils and
vices which such a transference must necessarily engender.

Dear friends! It is in this light that we, the followers
of Bahá’u’lláh, should regard this
visitation of God which, in the concluding years of the first century
of the Bahá’í era, afflicts the generality, and
has thrown into such a bewildering confusion the affairs, of mankind.
It is because of this dual guilt, the things it has done and the
things it has left undone, its misdeeds as well as its dismal and
signal failure to accomplish its clear and unmistakable duty towards
God, His Messenger, and His Faith, that this grievous ordeal,
whatever its immediate political and economic causes, has laid its
adamantine grip upon it.

God, however, as has been pointed out in the very
beginning of these pages, does not only punish the wrongdoings of His
children. He chastises because He is just, and He chastens because He
loves. Having chastened them, He cannot, in His great mercy, leave
them to their fate. Indeed, by the very act of chastening them He
prepares them for the mission for which He has created them. “My
calamity is My providence,” He, by the mouth of Bahá’u’lláh,
has assured them, “outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but
inwardly it is light and mercy.”

The flames which His Divine justice have kindled cleanse
an unregenerate humanity, and fuse its discordant, its warring
elements as no other agency can cleanse or fuse them. It is not only
a retributory and destructive fire, but a disciplinary and creative
process, whose aim is the salvation, through unification, of the
entire planet. Mysteriously, slowly, and resistlessly God
accomplishes His design, though the sight that meets our eyes in this
day be the spectacle of a world hopelessly entangled in its own
meshes, utterly careless of the Voice which, for a century, has been
calling it to God, and miserably subservient to the siren voices
which are attempting to lure it into the vast abyss.

God’s Purpose

God’s purpose is none other than to usher in, in
ways He alone can bring about, and the full significance of which He
alone can fathom, the Great, the Golden Age of a long-divided, a
long-afflicted humanity. Its present state, indeed even its immediate
future, is dark, distressingly dark. Its distant future, however, is
radiant, gloriously radiant—so radiant that no eye can
visualize it.

“The winds of despair,” writes Bahá’u’lláh,
as He surveys the immediate destinies of mankind, “are, alas,
blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and
afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending
convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the
prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective.” “Such
shall be its plight,” He, in another connection, has declared,
“that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly.”
“These fruitless strifes,” He, on the other hand,
contemplating the future of mankind, has emphatically prophesied, in
the course of His memorable interview with the Persian orientalist,
Edward G. Browne, “these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the
‘Most Great Peace’ shall come…. These strifes and this
bloodshed and discord must cease, and all men be as one kindred and
one family.” “Soon,” He predicts, “will the
present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its
stead.” “After a time,” He also has written, “all
the governments on earth will change. Oppression will envelop the
world. And following a universal convulsion, the sun of justice will
rise from the horizon of the unseen realm.” “The whole
earth,” He, moreover, has stated, “is now in a state of
pregnancy. The day is approaching when it will have yielded its
noblest fruits, when from it will have sprung forth the loftiest
trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the most heavenly blessings.”
“All nations and kindreds,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
likewise has written, “…will become a single nation.
Religious and sectarian antagonism, the hostility of races and
peoples, and differences among nations, will be eliminated. All men
will adhere to one religion, will have one common faith, will be
blended into one race, and become a single people. All will dwell in
one common fatherland, which is the planet itself.”

What we witness at the present time, during “this
gravest crisis in the history of civilization,” recalling such
times in which “religions have perished and are born,” is
the adolescent stage in the slow and painful evolution of humanity,
preparatory to the attainment of the stage of manhood, the stage of
maturity, the promise of which is embedded in the teachings, and
enshrined in the prophecies, of Bahá’u’lláh.
The tumult of this age of transition is characteristic of the
impetuosity and irrational instincts of youth, its follies, its
prodigality, its pride, its self-assurance, its rebelliousness, and
contempt of discipline.

The Great Age to Come

The ages of its infancy and childhood are past, never
again to return, while the Great Age, the consummation of all ages,
which must signalize the coming of age of the entire human race, is
yet to come. The convulsions of this transitional and most turbulent
period in the annals of humanity are the essential prerequisites, and
herald the inevitable approach, of that Age of Ages, “the time
of the end,” in which the folly and tumult of strife that has,
since the dawn of history, blackened the annals of mankind, will have
been finally transmuted into the wisdom and the tranquility of an
undisturbed, a universal, and lasting peace, in which the discord and
separation of the children of men will have given way to the
worldwide reconciliation, and the complete unification of the divers
elements that constitute human society.

This will indeed be the fitting climax of that process
of integration which, starting with the family, the smallest unit in
the scale of human organization, must, after having called
successively into being the tribe, the city-state, and the nation,
continue to operate until it culminates in the unification of the
whole world, the final object and the crowning glory of human
evolution on this planet. It is this stage which humanity, willingly
or unwillingly, is resistlessly approaching. It is for this stage
that this vast, this fiery ordeal which humanity is experiencing is
mysteriously paving the way. It is with this stage that the fortunes
and the purpose of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh
are indissolubly linked. It is the creative energies which His
Revelation has released in the “year sixty,” and later
reinforced by the successive effusions of celestial power vouchsafed
in the “year nine” and the “year eighty” to
all mankind, that have instilled into humanity the capacity to attain
this final stage in its organic and collective evolution. It is with
the Golden Age of His Dispensation that the consummation of this
process will be forever associated. It is the structure of His New
World Order, now stirring in the womb of the administrative
institutions He Himself has created, that will serve both as a
pattern and a nucleus of that world commonwealth which is the sure,
the inevitable destiny of the peoples and nations of the earth.

Just as the organic evolution of mankind has been slow
and gradual, and involved successively the unification of the family,
the tribe, the city-state, and the nation, so has the light
vouchsafed by the Revelation of God, at various stages in the
evolution of religion, and reflected in the successive Dispensations
of the past, been slow and progressive. Indeed the measure of Divine
Revelation, in every age, has been adapted to, and commensurate with,
the degree of social progress achieved in that age by a constantly
evolving humanity.

“It hath been decreed by Us,” explains
Bahá’u’lláh, “that the Word of God,
and all the potentialities thereof, shall be manifested unto men in
strict conformity with such conditions as have been foreordained by
Him Who is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise…. Should the Word be
allowed to release suddenly all the energies latent within it, no man
could sustain the weight of so mighty a Revelation.” “All
created things,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, elucidating
this truth, has affirmed, “have their degree or stage of
maturity. The period of maturity in the life of a tree is the time of
its fruit-bearing…. The animal attains a stage of full growth and
completeness, and in the human kingdom man reaches his maturity when
the light of his intelligence attains its greatest power and
development. …Similarly there are periods and stages in the
collective life of humanity. At one time it was passing through its
stage of childhood, at another its period of youth, but now it has
entered its long-predicted phase of maturity, the evidences of which
are everywhere apparent…. That which was applicable to human needs
during the early history of the race can neither meet nor satisfy the
demands of this day, this period of newness and consummation.
Humanity has emerged from its former state of limitation and
preliminary training. Man must now become imbued with new virtues and
powers, new moral standards, new capacities. New bounties, perfect
bestowals, are awaiting and already descending upon him. The gifts
and blessings of the period of youth, although timely and sufficient
during the adolescence of mankind, are now incapable of meeting the
requirements of its maturity.” “In every Dispensation,”
He moreover has written, “the light of Divine Guidance has been
focused upon one central theme…. In this wondrous Revelation, this
glorious century, the foundation of the Faith of God, and the
distinguishing feature of His Law, is the consciousness of the
oneness of mankind.”

Religion and Social Evolution

The Revelation associated with the Faith of Jesus Christ
focused attention primarily on the redemption of the individual and
the molding of his conduct, and stressed, as its central theme, the
necessity of inculcating a high standard of morality and discipline
into man, as the fundamental unit in human society. Nowhere in the
Gospels do we find any reference to the unity of nations or the
unification of mankind as a whole. When Jesus spoke to those around
Him, He addressed them primarily as individuals rather than as
component parts of one universal, indivisible entity. The whole
surface of the earth was as yet unexplored, and the organization of
all its peoples and nations as one unit could, consequently, not be
envisaged, how much less proclaimed or established. What other
interpretation can be given to these words, addressed specifically by
Bahá’u’lláh to the followers of the Gospel,
in which the fundamental distinction between the Mission of Jesus
Christ, concerning primarily the individual, and His own Message,
directed more particularly to mankind as a whole, has been definitely
established: “Verily, He [Jesus] said: ‘Come ye after Me,
and I will make you to become fishers of men.’ In this day,
however, We say: ‘Come ye after Me, that We may make you to
become the quickeners of mankind.’”

The Faith of Islám, the succeeding link in the
chain of Divine Revelation, introduced, as Bahá’u’lláh
Himself testifies, the conception of the nation as a unit and a vital
stage in the organization of human society, and embodied it in its
teaching. This indeed is what is meant by this brief yet highly
significant and illuminating pronouncement of Bahá’u’lláh:
“Of old [Islamic Dispensation] it hath been revealed: ‘Love
of one’s country is an element of the Faith of God.’”
This principle was established and stressed by the Apostle of God,
inasmuch as the evolution of human society required it at that time.
Nor could any stage above and beyond it have been envisaged, as world
conditions preliminary to the establishment of a superior form of
organization were as yet unobtainable. The conception of nationality,
the attainment to the state of nationhood, may, therefore, be said to
be the distinguishing characteristics of the Muḥammadan
Dispensation, in the course of which the nations and races of the
world, and particularly in Europe and America, were unified and
achieved political independence.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá Himself elucidates this
truth in one of His Tablets: “In cycles gone by, though harmony
was established, yet, owing to the absence of means, the unity of all
mankind could not have been achieved. Continents remained widely
divided, nay even among the peoples of one and the same continent
association and interchange of thought were well-nigh impossible.
Consequently intercourse, understanding and unity amongst all the
peoples and kindreds of the earth were unattainable. In this day,
however, means of communication have multiplied, and the five
continents of the earth have virtually merged into one…. In like
manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or
governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly
interdependent. For none is self-sufficiency any longer possible,
inasmuch as political ties unite all peoples and nations, and the
bonds of trade and industry, of agriculture and education, are being
strengthened every day. Hence the unity of all mankind can in this
day be achieved. Verily this is none other but one of the wonders of
this wondrous age, this glorious century. Of this past ages have been
deprived, for this century—the century of light—has been
endowed with unique and unprecedented glory, power and illumination.
Hence the miraculous unfolding of a fresh marvel every day.
Eventually it will be seen how bright its candles will burn in the
assemblage of man.”

“Behold,” He further explains, “how
its light is now dawning upon the world’s darkened horizon. The
first candle is unity in the political realm, the early glimmerings
of which can now be discerned. The second candle is unity of thought
in world undertakings, the consummation of which will erelong be
witnessed. The third candle is unity in freedom which will surely
come to pass. The fourth candle is unity in religion which is the
cornerstone of the foundation itself, and which, by the power of God,
will be revealed in all its splendor. The fifth candle is the unity
of nations—a unity which, in this century, will be securely
established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard
themselves as citizens of one common fatherland. The sixth candle is
unity of races, making of all that dwell on earth peoples and
kindreds of one race. The seventh candle is unity of language, i.e.,
the choice of a universal tongue in which all peoples will be
instructed and converse. Each and every one of these will inevitably
come to pass, inasmuch as the power of the Kingdom of God will aid
and assist in their realization.”

“One of the great events,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
has, in His “Some Answered Questions,” affirmed, “which
is to occur in the Day of the manifestation of that Incomparable
Branch [Bahá’u’lláh] is the hoisting of the
Standard of God among all nations. By this is meant that all nations
and kindreds will be gathered together under the shadow of this
Divine Banner, which is no other than the Lordly Branch itself, and
will become a single nation. Religious and sectarian antagonism, the
hostility of races and peoples, and differences among nations, will
be eliminated. All men will adhere to one religion, will have one
common faith, will be blended into one race, and become a single
people. All will dwell in one common fatherland, which is the planet
itself.”

This is the stage which the world is now approaching,
the stage of world unity, which, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
assures us, will, in this century, be securely established. “The
Tongue of Grandeur,” Bahá’u’lláh
Himself affirms, “hath … in the Day of His Manifestation
proclaimed: ‘It is not his to boast who loveth his country, but
it is his who loveth the world.’” “Through the
power,” He adds, “released by these exalted words He hath
lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men’s
hearts, and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and
limitation from God’s Holy Book.”

The Wider, Inclusive Loyalty

A word of warning should, however, be uttered in this
connection. The love of one’s country, instilled and stressed
by the teaching of Islám, as “an element of the Faith of
God,” has not, through this declaration, this clarion-call of
Bahá’u’lláh, been either condemned or
disparaged. It should not, indeed it cannot, be construed as a
repudiation, or regarded in the light of a censure, pronounced
against a sane and intelligent patriotism, nor does it seek to
undermine the allegiance and loyalty of any individual to his
country, nor does it conflict with the legitimate aspirations,
rights, and duties of any individual state or nation. All it does
imply and proclaim is the insufficiency of patriotism, in view of the
fundamental changes effected in the economic life of society and the
interdependence of the nations, and as the consequence of the
contraction of the world, through the revolution in the means of
transportation and communication—conditions that did not and
could not exist either in the days of Jesus Christ or of Muḥammad.
It calls for a wider loyalty, which should not, and indeed does not,
conflict with lesser loyalties. It instills a love which, in view of
its scope, must include and not exclude the love of one’s own
country. It lays, through this loyalty which it inspires, and this
love which it infuses, the only foundation on which the concept of
world citizenship can thrive, and the structure of world unification
can rest. It does insist, however, on the subordination of national
considerations and particularistic interests to the imperative and
paramount claims of humanity as a whole, inasmuch as in a world of
interdependent nations and peoples the advantage of the part is best
to be reached by the advantage of the whole.

The world is, in truth, moving on towards its destiny.
The interdependence of the peoples and nations of the earth, whatever
the leaders of the divisive forces of the world may say or do, is
already an accomplished fact. Its unity in the economic sphere is now
understood and recognized. The welfare of the part means the welfare
of the whole, and the distress of the part brings distress to the
whole. The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh has,
in His own words, “lent a fresh impulse and set a new
direction” to this vast process now operating in the world. The
fires lit by this great ordeal are the consequences of men’s
failure to recognize it. They are, moreover, hastening its
consummation. Adversity, prolonged, worldwide, afflictive, allied to
chaos and universal destruction, must needs convulse the nations,
stir the conscience of the world, disillusion the masses, precipitate
a radical change in the very conception of society, and coalesce
ultimately the disjointed, the bleeding limbs of mankind into one
body, single, organically united, and indivisible.

World Commonwealth

To the general character, the implications and features
of this world commonwealth, destined to emerge, sooner or later, out
of the carnage, agony, and havoc of this great world convulsion, I
have already referred in my previous communications. Suffice it to
say that this consummation will, by its very nature, be a gradual
process, and must, as Bahá’u’lláh has
Himself anticipated, lead at first to the establishment of that
Lesser Peace which the nations of the earth, as yet unconscious of
His Revelation and yet unwittingly enforcing the general principles
which He has enunciated, will themselves establish. This momentous
and historic step, involving the reconstruction of mankind, as the
result of the universal recognition of its oneness and wholeness,
will bring in its wake the spiritualization of the masses, consequent
to the recognition of the character, and the acknowledgment of the
claims, of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh—the
essential condition to that ultimate fusion of all races, creeds,
classes, and nations which must signalize the emergence of His New
World Order.

Then will the coming of age of the entire human race be
proclaimed and celebrated by all the peoples and nations of the
earth. Then will the banner of the Most Great Peace be hoisted. Then
will the worldwide sovereignty of Bahá’u’lláh—the
Establisher of the Kingdom of the Father foretold by the Son, and
anticipated by the Prophets of God before Him and after Him—be
recognized, acclaimed, and firmly established. Then will a world
civilization be born, flourish, and perpetuate itself, a civilization
with a fullness of life such as the world has never seen nor can as
yet conceive. Then will the Everlasting Covenant be fulfilled in its
completeness. Then will the promise enshrined in all the Books of God
be redeemed, and all the prophecies uttered by the Prophets of old
come to pass, and the vision of seers and poets be realized. Then
will the planet, galvanized through the universal belief of its
dwellers in one God, and their allegiance to one common Revelation,
mirror, within the limitations imposed upon it, the effulgent glories
of the sovereignty of Bahá’u’lláh, shining
in the plenitude of its splendor in the Abhá Paradise, and be
made the footstool of His Throne on high, and acclaimed as the
earthly heaven, capable of fulfilling that ineffable destiny fixed
for it, from time immemorial, by the love and wisdom of its Creator.

Not ours, puny mortals that we are, to attempt, at so
critical a stage in the long and checkered history of mankind, to
arrive at a precise and satisfactory understanding of the steps which
must successively lead a bleeding humanity, wretchedly oblivious of
its God, and careless of Bahá’u’lláh, from
its calvary to its ultimate resurrection. Not ours, the living
witnesses of the all-subduing potency of His Faith, to question, for
a moment, and however dark the misery that enshrouds the world, the
ability of Bahá’u’lláh to forge, with the
hammer of His Will, and through the fire of tribulation, upon the
anvil of this travailing age, and in the particular shape His mind
has envisioned, these scattered and mutually destructive fragments
into which a perverse world has fallen, into one single unit, solid
and indivisible, able to execute His design for the children of men.

Ours rather the duty, however confused the scene,
however dismal the present outlook, however circumscribed the
resources we dispose of, to labor serenely, confidently, and
unremittingly to lend our share of assistance, in whichever way
circumstances may enable us, to the operation of the forces which, as
marshaled and directed by Bahá’u’lláh, are
leading humanity out of the valley of misery and shame to the
loftiest summits of power and glory.

Shoghi

To the beloved of God and the handmaids of the Merciful
throughout the West.
Haifa, Palestine
March 28, 1941