mpair the unity, or stay the
march, of the Faith they had so shamelessly forsaken. Ministers,
ambassadors and other state dignitaries had plotted assiduously to pervert
its purpose, had instigated the successive banishments of its Founders,
and maliciously striven to undermine its foundations. They had, through
such plottings, unwittingly brought about their own downfall, forfeited
the confidence of their sovereigns, drunk the cup of disgrace to its
dregs, and irrevocably sealed their own doom. Humanity itself, perverse
and utterly heedless, had refused to lend a hearing ear to the insistent
appeals and warnings sounded by the twin Founders of the Faith, and later
voiced by the Center of the Covenant in His public discourses in the West.
It had plunged into two desolating wars of unprecedented magnitude, which
have deranged its equilibrium, mown down its youth, and shaken it to its
roots. The weak, the obscure, the down-trodden had, on the other hand,
through their allegiance to so mighty a Cause and their response to its
summons, been enabled to accomplish such feats of valor and heroism as to
equal, and in some cases to dwarf, the exploits of those men and women of
undying fame whose names and deeds adorn the spiritual annals of mankind.

Despite the blows leveled at its nascent strength, whether by the wielders
of temporal and spiritual authority from without, or by black-hearted foes
from within, the Faith of Baha'u'llah had, far from breaking or bending,
gone from strength to strength, from victory to victory. Indeed its
history, if read aright, may be said to resolve itself into a series of
pulsations, of alternating crises and triumphs, leading it ever nearer to
its divinely appointed destiny. The outburst of savage fanaticism that
greeted the birth of the Revelation proclaimed by the Bab, His subsequent
arrest and captivity, had been followed by the formulation of the laws of
His Dispensation, by the institution of His Covenant, by the inauguration
of that Dispensation in Bada_sh_t, and by the public assertion of His
station in Tabriz. Widespread and still more violent uprisings in the
provinces, His own execution, the blood bath which followed it and
Baha'u'llah's imprisonment in the Siyah-_Ch_al had been succeeded by the
breaking of the dawn of the Baha'i Revelation in that dungeon.
Baha'u'llah's banishment to 'Iraq, His withdrawal to Kurdistan and the
confusion and distress that afflicted His fellow-disciples i