w
upon sorrow was added to the burden of trials and vicissitudes which He,
since His boyhood, had borne so heroically for the sake, and in the
service, of His Father's Cause.

And yet during these somber days, the darkness of which was reminiscent of
the tribulations endured during the most dangerous period of His
incarceration in the prison-fortress of Akka, 'Abdu'l-Baha, whilst in the
precincts of His Father's Shrine, or when dwelling in the House He
occupied in Akka, or under the shadow of the Bab's sepulcher on Mt.
Carmel, was moved to confer once again, and for the last time in His life,
on the community of His American followers a signal mark of His special
favor by investing them, on the eve of the termination of His earthly
ministry, through the revelation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, with a
world mission, whose full implications even now, after the lapse of a
quarter of a century, still remain undisclosed, and whose unfoldment thus
far, though as yet in its initial stages, has so greatly enriched the
spiritual as well as the administrative annals of the first Baha'i
century.

The conclusion of this terrible conflict, the first stage in a titanic
convulsion long predicted by Baha'u'llah, not only marked the extinction
of Turkish rule in the Holy Land and sealed the doom of that military
despot who had vowed to destroy 'Abdu'l-Baha, but also shattered once and
for all the last hopes still entertained by the remnant of
Covenant-breakers who, untaught by the severe retribution that had already
overtaken them, still aspired to witness the extinction of the light of
Baha'u'llah's Covenant. Furthermore, it produced those revolutionary
changes which, on the one hand, fulfilled the ominous predictions made by
Baha'u'llah in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, and enabled, according to Scriptural
prophecy, so large an element of the "outcasts of Israel," the "remnant"
of the "flock," to "assemble" in the Holy Land, and to be brought back to
"their folds" and "their own border," beneath the shadow of the
"Incomparable Branch," referred to by 'Abdu'l-Baha in His "Some Answered
Questions," and which, on the other hand, gave birth to the institution of
the League of Nations, the precursor of that World Tribunal which, as
prophesied by that same "Incomparable Branch," the peoples and nations of
the earth must needs unitedly establish.

No need to dwell on the energetic steps which the English believers as
soon as they had been appriz