ond major crisis of His ministry, external in nature and hardly
less severe than the one precipitated by the rebellion of Mirza
Muhammad-'Ali, gravely imperiled His life, deprived Him, for a number of
years, of the relative freedom He had enjoyed, plunged into anguish His
family and the followers of the Faith in East and West, and exposed as
never before, the degradation and infamy of His relentless adversaries. It
originated two years after the departure of the first American pilgrims
from the Holy Land. It persisted, with varying degrees of intensity,
during more than seven years, and was directly attributable to the
incessant intrigues and monstrous misrepresentations of the Arch-Breaker
of Baha'u'llah's Covenant and his supporters.

Embittered by his abject failure to create a schism on which he had fondly
pinned his hopes; stung by the conspicuous success which the
standard-bearers of the Covenant had, despite his machinations, achieved
in the North American continent; encouraged by the existence of a regime
that throve in an atmosphere of intrigue and suspicion, and which was
presided over by a cunning and cruel potentate; determined to exploit to
the full the opportunities for mischief afforded him by the arrival of
Western pilgrims at the prison-fortress of Akka, as well as by the
commencement of the construction of the Bab's sepulcher on Mt. Carmel,
Mirza Muhammad-'Ali, seconded by his brother, Mirza Badi'u'llah, and aided
by his brother-in-law, Mirza Majdi'd-Din, succeeded through strenuous and
persistent endeavors in exciting the suspicion of the Turkish government
and its officials, and in inducing them to reimpose on 'Abdu'l-Baha the
confinement from which, in the days of Baha'u'llah, He had so grievously
suffered.

This very brother, Mirza Muhammad-'Ali's chief accomplice, in a written
confession signed, sealed and published by him, on the occasion of his
reconciliation with 'Abdu'l-Baha, has borne testimony to the wicked plots
that had been devised. "What I have heard from others," wrote Mirza
Badi'u'llah, "I will ignore. I will only recount what I have seen with my
own eyes, and heard from his (Mirza Muhammad-'Ali) lips." "It was arranged
by him (Mirza Muhammad-'Ali)," he, then, proceeds to relate, "to dispatch
Mirza Majdi'd-Din with a gift and a letter written in Persian to Nazim
Pa_sh_a, the Vali (governor) of Damascus, and to seek his assistance....
As he (Mirza Majdi'd-Din) himself informed me in Hai