dismissal of his
colleague, Prime Minister 'Ali Pa_sh_a, the overthrow and death of the
Sultan, and the loss of Turkish territories in Europe, a series of
disasters which followed on the heels of one another.(78)

A letter to Emperor Napoleon III warned that, because of his insincerity
and the misuse of his power: "...thy kingdom shall be thrown into
confusion, and thine empire shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment
for that which thou hast wrought.... Hath thy pomp made thee proud? By My
life! It shall not endure..."(79) Of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War
and the resulting overthrow of Napoleon III, which occurred less than a
year after this statement, Alistair Horne, a modern scholar of nineteenth
century French political history has written:

History knows of perhaps no more startling instance of what the Greeks
called peripateia, the terrible fall from prideful heights. Certainly no
nation in modern times, so replete with apparent grandeur and opulent in
material achievement, has ever been subjected to a worse humiliation in so
short a time.(80)

Only a few months before the unexpected series of events in Europe that
led to the invasion of the Papal States and the annexation of Rome by the
forces of the new Kingdom of Italy, a statement addressing Pope Pius IX
had urged the Pontiff "Abandon thy kingdom unto the kings, and emerge from
thy habitation, with thy face set towards the Kingdom... Be as thy Lord
hath been.... Verily, the day of ingathering is come, and all things have
been separated from each other. He hath stored away that which He chose in
the vessels of justice, and cast into the fire that which befitteth
it...."(81)

Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, whose armies had won such a sweeping victory
in the Franco-Prussian War, had been warned by Baha'u'llah in the
Kitab-i-Aqdas to heed the example of the fall of Napoleon III and of other
rulers who had been victorious in war, and not to allow pride to keep him
back from recognizing this Revelation. That Baha'u'llah foresaw the
failure of the German Emperor to respond to this warning is shown by the
ominous passage which appears later in that same Book:

O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the
swords of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have another
turn. And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be today in
conspicuous glory.(82)

A strikingly different note characterizes two of the major p