e said to reflect and bear witness to the
revolt, the discontent, and the confused aspirations of the disillusioned
masses that have deserted the cause of the Christian churches and seceded
from their membership.

A parallel might almost be drawn between these confused and confusing
systems of thought that are the direct outcome of the helplessness and
confusion afflicting the Christian Faith and the great variety of popular
cults, of fashionable and evasive philosophies which flourished in the
opening centuries of the Christian Era, and which attempted to absorb and
pervert the state religion of that Roman people. The pagan worshipers who
constituted, at that time, the bulk of the population of the Western Roman
Empire, found themselves surrounded, and in certain instances menaced, by
the prevailing sect of the Neo-Platonists, by the followers of nature
religions, by Gnostic philosophers, by Philonism, Mithraism, the adherents
of the Alexandrian cult, and a multitude of kindred sects and beliefs, in
much the same way as the defenders of the Christian Faith, the
preponderating religion of the western world, are realizing, in the first
century of the Baha'i Era, how their influence is being undermined by a
flood of conflicting beliefs, practices and tendencies which their own
bankruptcy had helped to create. It was, however, this same Christian
Religion, which has now fallen into such a state of impotence, that
eventually proved itself capable of sweeping away the institutions of
paganism and of swamping and suppressing the cults that had flourished in
that age.

Such institutions as have strayed far from the spirit and teachings of
Jesus Christ must of necessity, as the embryonic World Order of
Baha'u'llah takes shape and unfolds, recede into the background, and make
way for the progress of the divinely-ordained institutions that stand
inextricably interwoven with His teachings. The indwelling Spirit of God
which, in the Apostolic Age of the Church, animated its members, the
pristine purity of its teachings, the primitive brilliancy of its light,
will, no doubt, be reborn and revived as the inevitable consequence of
this redefinition of its fundamental verities, and the clarification of
its original purpose.

For the Faith of Baha'u'llah--if we would faithfully appraise it--can never,
and in no aspect of its teachings, be at variance, much less conflict,
with the purpose animating, or the authority invested in, the Fa