ail 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 Safavi monarchs, who delighted to call themselves "dogs of the
threshold of the Immaculate Imams," how one of those kings was induced to
go on foot before the mujtahid as he rode through the maydan-i-_Sh_ah, the
main square of Isfahan, as a mark of royal subservience to the favorite
minister of the Hidden Imam, a minister who, as distinct from the _Sh_ah's
title, styled himself "the servant of the Lord of Saintship (Imam 'Ali)."

Was it not, he might well ponder, this same _Sh_ah Abbas 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 Imam, and was held by the _Sh_ah solely in the
capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same _Sh_ah who walked
the entire distance of eight hundred miles from Isfahan to Ma_sh_had, the
"special glory of the _Sh_i'ih world," to offer his prayers, in the only
way that befitted the _sh_ahan_sh_ah, at the shrine of the Imam Rida, and
who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts? Had not _Sh_ah
Tahmasp, 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 mulla 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
Baha'u'llah 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
equilibriu