, in their proper
perspective and despite the comparatively brief space of time which
separates us from them, the events which the revolution of a hundred
years, unique alike in glory and tribulation, has unrolled before our
eyes. I shall seek to represent and correlate, in however cursory a
manner, those momentous happenings which have insensibly, relentlessly,
and under the very eyes of successive generations, perverse, indifferent
or hostile, transformed a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of
the _Sh_ay_kh_i school of the I_th_na-'A_sh_'ariyyih sect of _Sh_i'ah
Islam into a world religion whose unnumbered followers are organically and
indissolubly united; whose light has overspread the earth as far as
Iceland in the North and Magellanes in the South; whose ramifications have
spread to no less than sixty countries of the world; whose literature has
been translated and disseminated in no less than forty languages; whose
endowments in the five continents of the globe, whether local, national or
international, already run into several million dollars; whose
incorporated elective bodies have secured the official recognition of a
number of governments in East and West; whose adherents are recruited from
the diversified races and chief religions of mankind; whose
representatives are to be found in hundreds of cities in both Persia and
the United States of America; to whose verities royalty has publicly and
repeatedly testified; whose independent status its enemies, from the ranks
of its parent religion and in the leading center of both the Arab and
Muslim worlds, have proclaimed and demonstrated; and whose claims have
been virtually recognized, entitling it to rank as the fourth religion of
a Land in which its world spiritual center has been established, and which
is at once the heart of Christendom, the holiest shrine of the Jewish
people, and, save Mecca alone, the most sacred spot in Islam.

It is not my purpose--nor does the occasion demand it,--to write a detailed
history of the last hundred years of the Baha'i Faith, nor do I intend to
trace the origins of so tremendous a Movement, or to portray the
conditions under which it was born, or to examine the character of the
religion from which it has sprung, or to arrive at an estimate of the
effects which its impact upon the fortunes of mankind has produced. I
shall rather content myself with a review of the salient features of its
birth and rise, as well as of t