unsupported. Surviving
'Abdu'l-Baha by almost twenty years, he who had so audaciously affirmed to
His face that he had no assurance he might outlive Him, lived long enough
to witness the utter bankruptcy of his cause, leading meanwhile a wretched
existence within the walls of a Mansion that had once housed a crowd of
his supporters; was denied by the civil authorities, as a result of the
crisis he had after 'Abdu'l-Baha's passing foolishly precipitated, the
official custody of his Father's Tomb; was compelled, a few years later,
to vacate that same Mansion, which, through his flagrant neglect, had
fallen into a dilapidated condition; was stricken with paralysis which
crippled half his body; lay bedridden in pain for months before he died;
and was buried according to Muslim rites, in the immediate vicinity of a
local Muslim shrine, his grave remaining until the present day devoid of
even a tombstone--a pitiful reminder of the hollowness of the claims he had
advanced, of the depths of infamy to which he had sunk, and of the
severity of the retribution his acts had so richly merited.

FOURTH PERIOD: THE INCEPTION OF THE FORMATIVE AGE OF THE BAHA'I FAITH
1921-1944

Chapter XXII: The Rise and Establishment of the Administrative Order

With the passing of 'Abdu'l-Baha the first century of the Baha'i era,
whose inception had synchronized with His birth, had run more than three
quarters of its course. Seventy-seven years previously the light of the
Faith proclaimed by the Bab had risen above the horizon of _Sh_iraz and
flashed across the firmament of Persia, dispelling the age-long gloom
which had enveloped its people. A blood bath of unusual ferocity, in which
government, clergy and people, heedless of the significance of that light
and blind to its splendor, had jointly participated, had all but
extinguished the radiance of its glory in the land of its birth.
Baha'u'llah had at the darkest hour in the fortunes of that Faith been
summoned, while Himself a prisoner in Tihran, to reinvigorate its life,
and been commissioned to fulfil its ultimate purpose. In Ba_gh_dad, upon
the termination of the ten-year delay interposed between the first
intimation of that Mission and its Declaration, He had revealed the
Mystery enshrined in the Bab's embryonic Faith, and disclosed the fruit
which it had yielded. In Adrianople Baha'u'llah's Message, the promise of
the Babi as well as of all previous Dispensations, had been pr