corruptible loyalty of its administrators and teachers achieved the
distinction of an undisputed leadership among its sister communities of
East and West in hastening the advent of the Golden Age anticipated by
Baha'u'llah.

And yet how grave the crises which this infant, this blessed, community
has weathered in the course of its checkered history! How slow and painful
the process that gradually brought it forth from the obscurity of
unmitigated neglect to the broad daylight of public recognition! How
severe the shocks which the ranks of its devoted adherents have sustained
through the defection of the faint in heart, the malice of the
mischief-maker, the treachery of the proud and the ambitious! What storms
of ridicule, of abuse and of calumny its representatives have had to face
in their staunch support of the integrity, and their valiant defense of
the fair name, of the Faith they had espoused! How persistent the
vicissitudes and disconcerting the reverses with which its privileged
members, young and old alike, individually and collectively, have had to
contend in their heroic endeavors to scale the heights which a loving
Master had summoned them to attain!

Many and powerful have been its enemies who, as soon as they discovered
the evidences of the growing ascendancy of its declared supporters, have
vied with one another in hurling at its face the vilest imputations and in
pouring out upon the Object of its devotion the vials of their fiercest
wrath. How often have these sneered at the scantiness of its resources and
the seeming stagnation of its life! How bitterly they ridiculed its
origins and, misconceiving its purpose, dismissed it as a useless
appendage of an expiring creed! Have they not in their written attacks
stigmatized the heroic person of the Forerunner of so holy a Revelation as
a coward recanter, a perverted apostate, and denounced the entire range of
His voluminous writings as the idle chatter of a thoughtless man? Have
they not chosen to ascribe to its divine Founder the basest motives which
an unscrupulous plotter and usurper can conceive, and regarded the Center
of His Covenant as the embodiment of ruthless tyranny, a stirrer of
mischief, and a notorious exponent of expediency and fraud? Its
world-unifying principles these impotent enemies of a steadily-rising
Faith have time and again denounced as fundamentally defective, have
pronounced its all-embracing program as utterly fantastic, and regarded