consolidation of His Faith directly depended. Indeed, in their scope and
volume, His writings, during the years of His confinement in the Most
Great Prison, surpassed the outpourings of His pen in either Adrianople or
Ba_gh_dad. More remarkable than the radical transformation in the
circumstances of His own life in Akka, more far-reaching in its spiritual
consequences than the campaign of repression pursued so relentlessly by
the enemies of His Faith in the land of His birth, this unprecedented
extension in the range of His writings, during His exile in that Prison,
must rank as one of the most vitalizing and fruitful stages in the
evolution of His Faith.

The tempestuous winds that swept the Faith at the inception of His
ministry and the wintry desolation that marked the beginnings of His
prophetic career, soon after His banishment from Tihran, were followed
during the latter part of His sojourn in Ba_gh_dad, by what may be
described as the vernal years of His Mission--years which witnessed the
bursting into visible activity of the forces inherent in that Divine Seed
that had lain dormant since the tragic removal of His Forerunner. With His
arrival in Adrianople and the proclamation of His Mission the Orb of His
Revelation climbed as it were to its zenith, and shone, as witnessed by
the style and tone of His writings, in the plenitude of its summer glory.
The period of His incarceration in Akka brought with it the ripening of a
slowly maturing process, and was a period during which the choicest fruits
of that mission were ultimately garnered.

The writings of Baha'u'llah during this period, as we survey the vast
field which they embrace, seem to fall into three distinct categories. The
first comprises those writings which constitute the sequel to the
proclamation of His Mission in Adrianople. The second includes the laws
and ordinances of His Dispensation, which, for the most part, have been
recorded in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, His Most Holy Book. To the third must be
assigned those Tablets which partly enunciate and partly reaffirm the
fundamental tenets and principles underlying that Dispensation.

The Proclamation of His Mission had been, as already observed, directed
particularly to the kings of the earth, who, by virtue of the power and
authority they wielded, were invested with a peculiar and inescapable
responsibility for the destinies of their subjects. It was to these kings,
as well as to the world's religious le