ers 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 Baha'u'llah, 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," Baha'u'llah 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." "