st august
institution of Islam, and the virtual collapse of the _Sh_i'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 _SH_I'IH ISLAM

Let us first consider the visitations that have marked the falling
fortunes of _Sh_i'ih Islam. The iniquities summarized in the beginning of
these pages, and for which the _Sh_i'ih ecclesiastical order in Persia is
to be held primarily answerable; iniquities which, in the words of
Baha'u'llah, had caused "the Apostle [Muhammad] to lament, and the Chaste
One [Fatimih] 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
Bab with bullets, and bowed down Baha'u'llah, and turned His hair white,
and caused Him to groan aloud in anguish, and made Muhammad to weep over
Him, and Jesus to beat Himself upon the head, and the Bab 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 Islam 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 Imam, who would
not only seize the reins of authority from the _sh_ah, 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, derang