hing implications could be directly divulged to
even those who had been intimately associated with Him--a period of great
spiritual ferment, during which the Recipient of so weighty a Message
restlessly anticipated the hour at which He could unburden His heavily
laden soul, so replete with the potent energies released by God's nascent
Revelation. All He did, in the course of this pre-ordained interval, was
to hint, in veiled and allegorical language, in epistles, commentaries,
prayers and treatises, which He was moved to reveal, that the Bab's
promise had already been fulfilled, and that He Himself was the One Who
had been chosen to redeem it. A few of His fellow-disciples, distinguished
by their sagacity, and their personal attachment and devotion to Him,
perceived the radiance of the as yet unrevealed glory that had flooded His
soul, and would have, but for His restraining influence, divulged His
secret and proclaimed it far and wide.

Chapter VII: Baha'u'llah's Banishment to 'Iraq

The attempt on the life of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, as stated in a previous
chapter, was made on the 28th of the month of _Sh_avval, 1268 A.H.,
corresponding to the 15th of August, 1852. Immediately after, Baha'u'llah
was arrested in Niyavaran, was conducted with the greatest ignominy to
Tihran and cast into the Siyah-_Ch_al. His imprisonment lasted for a
period of no less than four months, in the middle of which the "year nine"
(1269), anticipated in such glowing terms by the Bab, and alluded to as
the year "after Hin" by _Sh_ay_kh_ Ahmad-i-Ahsa'i, was ushered in,
endowing with undreamt-of potentialities the whole world. Two months after
that year was born, Baha'u'llah, the purpose of His imprisonment now
accomplished, was released from His confinement, and set out, a month
later, for Ba_gh_dad, on the first stage of a memorable and life-long
exile which was to carry Him, in the course of years, as far as Adrianople
in European Turkey, and which was to end with His twenty-four years'
incarceration in Akka.

Now that He had been invested, in consequence of that potent dream, with
the power and sovereign authority associated with His Divine mission, His
deliverance from a confinement that had achieved its purpose, and which if
prolonged would have completely fettered Him in the exercise of His
newly-bestowed functions, became not only inevitable, but imperative and
urgent. Nor were the means and instruments lacking whereby his
emancip