sudden downfall of the Founder of the newly established dynasty in
Persia--these are yet further instances of the infliction of the "Divine
Chastisement" foreshadowed by Baha'u'llah in that immortal Surih, and show
forth the divine reality of the arraignment pronounced by Him against the
rulers of the earth in His Most Holy Book.

No less arresting has been the extinction of the all-pervasive influence
exerted by the Muslim ecclesiastical leaders, both Sunni and _Sh_i'ah, in
the two countries in which the mightiest institutions of Islam had been
reared, and which have been directly associated with the tribulations
heaped upon the Bab and Baha'u'llah.

The Caliph, the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of Islam, known also as
the "Commander of the Faithful," the protector of the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina, whose spiritual jurisdiction extended over more than two
hundred million Muhammadans, was by the abolition of the Sultanate in
Turkey, divested of his temporal authority, hitherto regarded as
inseparable from his high office. The Caliph himself, after having
occupied for a brief period, an anomalous and precarious position, fled to
Europe; the Caliphate, the most august and powerful institution of Islam,
was, without consultation with any community in the Sunni world, summarily
abolished; the unity of the most powerful branch of the Islamic Faith was
thereby shattered; a formal, a complete and permanent separation of the
Turkish state from the Sunni faith was proclaimed; the _Sh_ari'ah
canonical Law was annulled; ecclesiastical institutions were disendowed; a
civil code was promulgated; religious orders were suppressed; the Sunni
hierarchy was dissolved; the Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet of
Islam, fell into disuse, and its script was superseded by the Latin
alphabet; the Qur'an itself was translated into Turkish; Constantinople,
the "Dome of Islam," sank to the level of a provincial city, and its
peerless jewel, the Mosque of St. Sophia, was converted into a museum--a
series of degradations recalling the fate which, in the first century of
the Christian Era, befell the Jewish people, the city of Jerusalem, the
Temple of Solomon, the Holy of Holies, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy,
whose members were the avowed persecutors of the religion of Jesus Christ.

A similar convulsion shook the foundations of the entire sacerdotal order
in Persia, though its formal divorce from the Persian state is as yet
unpro