dignity of imprisonment soon after His arrival in Akka;
the object of repeated investigations and the target of continual assaults
and insults under the despotic rule of Sultan 'Abdu'l-Hamid, and later
under the ruthless military dictatorship of the suspicious and merciless
Jamal Pa_sh_a--He, too, the Center and Pivot of Baha'u'llah'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 Bab and Baha'u'llah, 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
Bab and Baha'u'llah; 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