blication
has made selections from Baha'u'llah's writings accessible to people
everywhere, in over eight hundred languages.

BIRTH OF A NEW REVELATION

Baha'u'llah's mission began in a subterranean dungeon in Teheran in August
1852. Born into a noble family that could trace its ancestry back to the
great dynasties of Persia's imperial past, He declined the ministerial
career open to Him in government, and chose instead to devote His energies
to a range of philanthropies which had, by the early 1840s, earned Him
widespread renown as "Father of the Poor." This privileged existence
swiftly eroded after 1844, when Baha'u'llah became one of the leading
advocates of a movement that was to change the course of His country's
history.

The early nineteenth century was a period of messianic expectations in
many lands. Deeply disturbed by the implications of scientific inquiry and
industrialization, earnest believers from many religious backgrounds
turned to the scriptures of their faiths for an understanding of the
accelerating processes of change. In Europe and America groups like the
Templers and the Millerites believed they had found in the Christian
scriptures evidence supporting their conviction that history had ended and
the return of Jesus Christ was at hand. A markedly similar ferment
developed in the Middle East around the belief that the fulfillment of
various prophecies in the Qur'an and Islamic Traditions was imminent.

By far the most dramatic of these millennialist movements had been the one
in Persia, which had focused on the person and teachings of a young
merchant from the city of Shiraz, known to history as the Bab.(4) For nine
years, from 1844 to 1853, Persians of all classes had been caught up in a
storm of hope and excitement aroused by the Bab's announcement that the
Day of God was at hand and that He was himself the One promised in Islamic
scripture. Humanity stood, He said, on the threshold of an era that would
witness the restructuring of all aspects of life. New fields of learning,
as yet inconceivable, would permit even the children of the new age to
surpass the most erudite of nineteenth-century scholars. The human race
was called by God to embrace these changes through undertaking a
transformation of its moral and spiritual life. His own mission was to
prepare humanity for the event that lay at the heart of these
developments, the coming of that universal Messenger of God, "He Whom God
w