s brought on by the strains and stresses of a tragic life spent
almost wholly in exile and imprisonment. He was on the threshold of
three-score years and ten. Yet as soon as He was released from His
forty-year long captivity, as soon as He had laid the Bab's body in a safe
and permanent resting-place, and His mind was free of grievous anxieties
connected with the execution of that priceless Trust, He arose with
sublime courage, confidence and resolution to consecrate what little
strength remained to Him, in the evening of His life, to a service of such
heroic proportions that no parallel to it is to be found in the annals of
the first Baha'i century.

Indeed His three years of travel, first to Egypt, then to Europe and later
to America, mark, if we would correctly appraise their historic
importance, a turning point of the utmost significance in the history of
the century. For the first time since the inception of the Faith,
sixty-six years previously, its Head and supreme Representative burst
asunder the shackles which had throughout the ministries of both the Bab
and Baha'u'llah so grievously fettered its freedom. Though repressive
measures still continued to circumscribe the activities of the vast
majority of its adherents in the land of its birth, its recognized Leader
was now vouchsafed a freedom of action which, with the exception of a
brief interval in the course of the War of 1914-18, He was to continue to
enjoy to the end of His life, and which has never since been withdrawn
from its institutions at its world center.

So momentous a change in the fortunes of the Faith was the signal for such
an outburst of activity on His part as to dumbfound His followers in East
and West with admiration and wonder, and exercise an imperishable
influence on the course of its future history. He Who, in His own words,
had entered prison as a youth and left it an old man, Who never in His
life had faced a public audience, had attended no school, had never moved
in Western circles, and was unfamiliar with Western customs and language,
had arisen not only to proclaim from pulpit and platform, in some of the
chief capitals of Europe and in the leading cities of the North American
continent, the distinctive verities enshrined in His Father's Faith, but
to demonstrate as well the Divine origin of the Prophets gone before Him,
and to disclose the nature of the tie binding them to that Faith.

Inflexibly resolved to undertake this arduo