nied the impartial consideration, the disinterested and
fair treatment which its cause had rightly demanded. It had, on the
contrary, been atrociously harassed, consistently betrayed and prosecuted.
The martyrdom of the Bab; the banishment of Baha'u'llah; the confiscation
of His earthly possessions; His incarceration in Mazindaran; the reign of
terror that confined Him in the most pestilential of dungeons; the
intrigues, the protests, and calumnies which thrice renewed His exile and
led to His ultimate imprisonment in the most desolate of cities; the
shameful sentences passed, with the connivance of the judicial and
ecclesiastical authorities, against the person, the property, and the
honor of His innocent followers--these stand out as among the blackest acts
for which posterity will hold this blood-stained dynasty responsible. One
more barrier that had sought to obstruct the forward march of the Faith
was now removed.

Though Baha'u'llah had been banished from His native land, the tide of
calamity which had swept with such fury over Him and over the followers of
the Bab, was by no means receding. Under the jurisdiction of the Sultan of
Turkey, the arch-enemy of His Cause, a new chapter in the history of His
ever-recurring trials had opened. The overthrow of the Sultanate and the
Caliphate, the twin pillars of Sunni Islam, can be regarded in no other
light except as the inevitable consequence of the fierce, the sustained
and deliberate persecution which the monarchs of the tottering House of
U_th_man, the recognized successors of the Prophet Muhammad, had launched
against it. From the city of Constantinople, the traditional seat of both
the Sultanate and the Caliphate, the rulers of Turkey had, for a period
covering almost three quarters of a century, striven, with unabated zeal,
to stem the tide of a Faith they feared and abhorred. From the time
Baha'u'llah set foot on Turkish soil and was made a virtual prisoner of
the most powerful potentate of Islam to the year of the Holy Land's
liberation from Turkish yoke, successive Caliphs, and in particular the
Sultans 'Abdu'l-'Aziz and 'Abdu'l-Hamid, had, in the full exercise of the
spiritual and temporal authority which their exalted office had conferred
upon them, afflicted both the Founder of our Faith and the Center of His
Covenant with such pain and tribulation as no mind can fathom nor pen or
tongue describe. They alone could have measured or borne them.

To these affli