a commotion that rocked the entire country. The fire
which the declaration of His mission had lit was being fanned into flame
through the dispersal and activities of His appointed disciples. Already
within the space of less than two years it had kindled the passions of
friend and foe alike. The outbreak of the conflagration did not even await
the return to His native city of the One Who had generated it. The
implications of a Revelation, thrust so dramatically upon a race so
degenerate, so inflammable in temper, could indeed have had no other
consequence than to excite within men's bosoms the fiercest passions of
fear, of hate, of rage and envy. A Faith Whose Founder did not content
Himself with the claim to be the Gate of the Hidden Imam, Who assumed a
rank that excelled even that of the Sahibu'z-Zaman, Who regarded Himself
as the precursor of one incomparably greater than Himself, Who
peremptorily commanded not only the subjects of the _Sh_ah, but the
monarch himself, and even the kings and princes of the earth, to forsake
their all and follow Him, Who claimed to be the inheritor of the earth and
all that is therein--a Faith Whose religious doctrines, Whose ethical
standards, social principles and religious laws challenged the whole
structure of the society in which it was born, soon ranged, with startling
unanimity, the mass of the people behind their priests, and behind their
chief magistrate, with his ministers and his government, and welded them
into an opposition sworn to destroy, root and branch, the movement
initiated by One Whom they regarded as an impious and presumptuous
pretender.

With the Bab's return to _Sh_iraz the initial collision of irreconcilable
forces may be said to have commenced. Already the energetic and audacious
Mulla 'Aliy-i-Bastami, one of the Letters of the Living, "the first to
leave the House of God (_Sh_iraz) and the first to suffer for His sake,"
who, in the presence of one of the leading exponents of _Sh_i'ah Islam,
the far-famed _Sh_ay_kh_ Muhammad Hasan, had audaciously asserted that
from the pen of his new-found Master within the space of forty-eight
hours, verses had streamed that equalled in number those of the Qur'an,
which it took its Author twenty-three years to reveal, had been
excommunicated, chained, disgraced, imprisoned, and, in all probability,
done to death. Mulla Sadiq-i-_Kh_urasani, impelled by the injunction of
the Bab in the _Kh_asa'il-i-Sab'ih to alter the sacrosan