cup of martyrdom, and its pristine
foundations been established--a period whose splendors no victories in this
or any future age, however brilliant, can rival--had now terminated with
the passing of One Whose mission may be regarded as the link binding the
Age in which the seed of the newborn Message had been incubating and those
which are destined to witness its efflorescence and ultimate fruition.

The Formative Period, the Iron Age, of that Dispensation was now
beginning, the Age in which the institutions, local, national and
international, of the Faith of Baha'u'llah were to take shape, develop and
become fully consolidated, in anticipation of the third, the last, the
Golden Age destined to witness the emergence of a world-embracing Order
enshrining the ultimate fruit of God's latest Revelation to mankind, a
fruit whose maturity must signalize the establishment of a world
civilization and the formal inauguration of the Kingdom of the Father upon
earth as promised by Jesus Christ Himself.

To this World Order the Bab Himself had, whilst a prisoner in the mountain
fastnesses of A_dh_irbayjan, explicitly referred in His Persian Bayan, the
Mother-Book of the Babi Dispensation, had announced its advent, and
associated it with the name of Baha'u'llah, Whose Mission He Himself had
heralded. "Well is it with Him," is His remarkable statement in the
sixteenth chapter of the third Vahid, "who fixeth his gaze upon the Order
of Baha'u'llah, and rendereth thanks unto his Lord! For He will assuredly
be made manifest..." To this same Order Baha'u'llah Who, in a later
period, revealed the laws and principles that must govern the operation of
that Order, had thus referred in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Mother-Book of His
Dispensation: "The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the
vibrating influence of this Most Great Order. Mankind's ordered life hath
been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous
System, the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed." Its features
'Abdu'l-Baha, its great Architect, delineated in His Will and Testament,
whilst the foundations of its rudimentary institutions are now being laid
after Him by His followers in the East and in the West in this, the
Formative Age of the Baha'i Dispensation.

The last twenty-three years of the first Baha'i century may thus be
regarded as the initial stage of the Formative Period of the Faith, an Age
of Transition to be identified with the ris