h scenes of
horror... Since my whole soul revolts against such infamy ... I will no
longer maintain my connection with the scene of such crimes." Little
wonder that a man as far-famed as Renan should, in his "Les Apotres" have
characterized the hideous butchery perpetrated in a single day, during the
great massacre of Tihran, as "a day perhaps unparalleled in the history of
the world!"

The hand that was stretched to deal so grievous a blow to the adherents of
a sorely-tried Faith did not confine itself to the rank and file of the
Bab's persecuted followers. It was raised with equal fury and
determination against, and struck down with equal force, the few remaining
leaders who had survived the winnowing winds of adversity that had already
laid low so vast a number of the supporters of the Faith. Tahirih, that
immortal heroine who had already shed imperishable luster alike on her sex
and on the Cause she had espoused, was swept into, and ultimately engulfed
by, the raging storm. Siyyid Husayn, the amanuensis of the Bab, the
companion of His exile, the trusted repository of His last wishes, and the
witness of the prodigies attendant upon His martyrdom, fell likewise a
victim of its fury. That hand had even the temerity to lift itself against
the towering figure of Baha'u'llah. But though it laid hold of Him it
failed to strike Him down. It imperilled His life, it imprinted on His
body indelible marks of a pitiless cruelty, but was impotent to cut short
a career that was destined not only to keep alive the fire which the
Spirit of the Bab had kindled, but to produce a conflagration that would
at once consummate and outshine the glories of His Revelation.

During those somber and agonizing days when the Bab was no more, when the
luminaries that had shone in the firmament of His Faith had been
successively extinguished, when His nominee, a "bewildered fugitive, in
the guise of a dervish, with ka_sh_kul (alms-basket) in hand" roamed the
mountains and plains in the neighborhood of Ra_sh_t, Baha'u'llah, by
reason of the acts He had performed, appeared in the eyes of a vigilant
enemy as its most redoubtable adversary and as the sole hope of an as yet
unextirpated heresy. His seizure and death had now become imperative. He
it was Who, scarce three months after the Faith was born, received,
through the envoy of the Bab, Mulla Husayn, the scroll which bore to Him
the first tidings of a newly announced Revelation, Who instantly accl