blet which may well be regarded as the harbinger of the rank which was
to be bestowed upon Him, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, and which was to be later
elucidated and confirmed in the Book of His Covenant. And finally, it was
during that period that the first pilgrimages were made to the residence
of One Who was now the visible Center of a newly-established
Faith--pilgrimages which by reason of their number and nature, an alarmed
government in Persia was first impelled to restrict, and later to
prohibit, but which were the precursors of the converging streams of
Pilgrims who, from East and West, at first under perilous and arduous
circumstances, were to direct their steps towards the prison-fortress of
Akka--pilgrimages which were to culminate in the historic arrival of a
royal convert at the foot of Mt. Carmel, who, at the very threshold of a
longed-for and much advertised pilgrimage, was so cruelly thwarted from
achieving her purpose.

These notable developments, some synchronizing with, and others flowing
from, the proclamation of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, and from the internal
convulsion which the Cause had undergone, could not escape the attention
of the external enemies of the Movement, who were bent on exploiting to
the utmost every crisis which the folly of its friends or the perfidy of
renegades might at any time precipitate. The thick clouds had hardly been
dissipated by the sudden outburst of the rays of a Sun, now shining from
its meridian, when the darkness of another catastrophe--the last the Author
of that Faith was destined to suffer--fell upon it, blackening its
firmament and subjecting it to one of the severest trials it had as yet
experienced.

Emboldened by the recent ordeals with which Baha'u'llah had been so
cruelly afflicted, these enemies, who had been momentarily quiescent,
began to demonstrate afresh, and in a number of ways, the latent animosity
they nursed in their hearts. A persecution, varying in the degree of its
severity, began once more to break out in various countries. In
A_dh_irbayjan and Zanjan, in Ni_sh_apur and Tihran, the adherents of the
Faith were either imprisoned, vilified, penalized, tortured or put to
death. Among the sufferers may be singled out the intrepid
Najaf-'Aliy-i-Zanjani, a survivor of the struggle of Zanjan, and
immortalized in the "Epistle to the Son of the Wolf," who, bequeathing the
gold in his possession to his executioner, was heard to shout aloud "Ya
Rabbiya'l-Abha