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 Baha'u'llah 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 Baha'u'llah 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 Akka 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 Bab, 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 Kitab-i-Iqan,
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 Baha'u'llah's Revelation was mounting
to full meridian splendor, the shado