waxed so great as to lead him to perpetrate himself, and permit Siyyid
Muhammad to repeat after him, an act so odious that Baha'u'llah
characterized it as "a most grievous betrayal," inflicting dishonor upon
the Bab, and which "overwhelmed all lands with sorrow." He even, as a
further evidence of the enormity of his crimes, ordered that the cousin of
the Bab, Mirza 'Ali-Akbar, a fervent admirer of Dayyan, be secretly put to
death--a command which was carried out in all its iniquity. As to Siyyid
Muhammad, now given free rein by his master, Mirza Yahya, he had
surrounded himself, as Nabil who was at that time with him in Karbila
categorically asserts, with a band of ruffians, whom he allowed, and even
encouraged, to snatch at night the turbans from the heads of wealthy
pilgrims who had congregated in Karbila, to steal their shoes, to rob the
shrine of the Imam Husayn of its divans and candles, and seize the
drinking cups from the public fountains. The depths of degradation to
which these so-called adherents of the Faith of the Bab had sunk could not
but evoke in Nabil the memory of the sublime renunciation shown by the
conduct of the companions of Mulla Husayn, who, at the suggestion of their
leader, had scornfully cast by the wayside the gold, the silver and
turquoise in their possession, or shown by the behavior of Vahid who
refused to allow even the least valuable amongst the treasures which his
sumptuously furnished house in Yazd contained to be removed ere it was
pillaged by the mob, or shown by the decision of Hujjat not to permit his
companions, who were on the brink of starvation, to lay hands on the
property of others, even though it were to save their own lives.

Such was the audacity and effrontery of these demoralized and misguided
Babis that no less than twenty-five persons, according to 'Abdu'l-Baha's
testimony, had the presumption to declare themselves to be the Promised
One foretold by the Bab! Such was the decline in their fortunes that they
hardly dared show themselves in public. Kurds and Persians vied with each
other, when confronting them in the streets, in heaping abuse upon them,
and in vilifying openly the Cause which they professed. Little wonder that
on His return to Ba_gh_dad Baha'u'llah should have described the situation
then existing in these words: "We found no more than a handful of souls,
faint and dispirited, nay utterly lost and dead. The Cause of God had
ceased to be on any one's lips, n