nificant statements recorded in any of the Bab's
writings. "Well is it with him," is His prophetic announcement, "who
fixeth his gaze upon the Order of Baha'u'llah, and rendereth thanks unto
his Lord. For He will assuredly be made manifest. God hath indeed
irrevocably ordained it in the Bayan." It is with that self-same Order
that the Founder of the promised Revelation, twenty years
later--incorporating that same term in His Kitab-i-Aqdas--identified the
System envisaged in that Book, affirming that "this most great Order" had
deranged the world's equilibrium, and revolutionized mankind's ordered
life. It is the features of that self-same Order which, at a later stage
in the evolution of the Faith, the Center of Baha'u'llah's Covenant and
the appointed Interpreter of His teachings, delineated through the
provisions of His Will and Testament. It is the structural basis of that
self-same Order which, in the Formative Age of that same Faith, the
stewards of that same Covenant, the elected representatives of the
world-wide Baha'i community, are now laboriously and unitedly
establishing. It is the superstructure of that self-same Order, attaining
its full stature through the emergence of the Baha'i World
Commonwealth--the Kingdom of God on earth--which the Golden Age of that same
Dispensation must, in the fullness of time, ultimately witness.

The Bab was still in Mah-Ku when He wrote the most detailed and
illuminating of His Tablets to Muhammad _Sh_ah. Prefaced by a laudatory
reference to the unity of God, to His Apostles and to the twelve Imams;
unequivocal in its assertion of the divinity of its Author and of the
supernatural powers with which His Revelation had been invested; precise
in the verses and traditions it cites in confirmation of so audacious a
claim; severe in its condemnation of some of the officials and
representatives of the _Sh_ah's administration, particularly of the
"wicked and accursed" Husayn _Kh_an; moving in its description of the
humiliation and hardships to which its writer had been subjected, this
historic document resembles, in many of its features, the Lawh-i-Sultan,
the Tablet addressed, under similar circumstances, from the
prison-fortress of Akka by Baha'u'llah to Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, and
constituting His lengthiest epistle to any single sovereign.

The Dala'il-i-Sab'ih (Seven Proofs), the most important of the polemical
works of the Bab, was revealed during that same period. Remarkably lucid