en enormously expanded, its aims and purposes fearlessly
defended, and its nascent institutions solidly established. In direct
consequence of the unsupported and indefatigable endeavors of the most
distinguished of its itinerant teachers the spontaneous allegiance of
Royalty to the Faith of Baha'u'llah has been secured and unmistakably
proclaimed in several testimonies transmitted to posterity by the pen of
the royal convert herself. And finally, to the members of this community,
the spiritual descendants of the dawn-breakers of the Heroic Age of the
Baha'i Dispensation, must be ascribed the eternal honor of having arisen,
on numerous occasions, with marvelous alacrity, zeal and determination, to
champion the cause of the oppressed, to relieve the needy, and to defend
the interests of the edifices and institutions reared by their brethren in
countries such as Persia, Russia, Egypt, 'Iraq and Germany, countries
where the adherents of the Faith have had to sustain, in varying measure,
the rigors of racial and religious persecution.

Strange, indeed, that in a country, invested with such a unique function
among its sister-nations throughout the West, the first public reference
to the Author of so glorious a Faith should have been made through the
mouth of one of the members of that ecclesiastical order with which that
Faith has had so long to contend, and from which it has frequently
suffered. Stranger still that he who first established it in the city of
Chicago, fifty years after the Bab had declared His Mission in _Sh_iraz,
should himself have forsaken, a few years later, the standard which he,
single-handed, had implanted in that city.

It was on September 23, 1893, a little over a year after Baha'u'llah's
ascension, that, in a paper written by Rev. Henry H. Jessup, D.D.,
Director of Presbyterian Missionary Operations in North Syria, and read by
Rev. George A. Ford of Syria, at the World Parliament of Religions, held
in Chicago, in connection with the Columbian Exposition, commemorating the
four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, it was announced
that "a famous Persian Sage," "the Babi Saint," had died recently in Akka,
and that two years previous to His ascension "a Cambridge scholar" had
visited Him, to whom He had expressed "sentiments so noble, so
Christ-like" that the author of the paper, in his "closing words," wished
to share them with his audience. Less than a year later, in February 1894,
a Syr