,
admirable in its precision, original in conception, unanswerable in its
argument, this work, apart from the many and divers proofs of His mission
which it adduces, is noteworthy for the blame it assigns to the "seven
powerful sovereigns ruling the world" in His day, as well as for the
manner in which it stresses the responsibilities, and censures the
conduct, of the Christian divines of a former age who, had they recognized
the truth of Muhammad's mission, He contends, would have been followed by
the mass of their co-religionists.

During the Bab's confinement in the fortress of _Ch_ihriq, where He spent
almost the whole of the two remaining years of His life, the
Lawh-i-Hurufat (Tablet of the Letters) was revealed, in honor of Dayyan--a
Tablet which, however misconstrued at first as an exposition of the
science of divination, was later recognized to have unravelled, on the one
hand, the mystery of the Musta_gh_a_th_, and to have abstrusely alluded,
on the other, to the nineteen years which must needs elapse between the
Declaration of the Bab and that of Baha'u'llah. It was during these
years--years darkened throughout by the rigors of the Bab's captivity, by
the severe indignities inflicted upon Him, and by the news of the
disasters that overtook the heroes of Mazindaran and Nayriz--that He
revealed, soon after His return from Tabriz, His denunciatory Tablet to
Haji Mirza Aqasi. Couched in bold and moving language, unsparing in its
condemnation, this epistle was forwarded to the intrepid Hujjat who, as
corroborated by Baha'u'llah, delivered it to that wicked minister.

To this period of incarceration in the fortresses of Mah-Ku and
_Ch_ihriq--a period of unsurpassed fecundity, yet bitter in its
humiliations and ever-deepening sorrows--belong almost all the written
references, whether in the form of warnings, appeals or exhortations,
which the Bab, in anticipation of the approaching hour of His supreme
affliction, felt it necessary to make to the Author of a Revelation that
was soon to supersede His own. Conscious from the very beginning of His
twofold mission, as the Bearer of a wholly independent Revelation and the
Herald of One still greater than His own, He could not content Himself
with the vast number of commentaries, of prayers, of laws and ordinances,
of dissertations and epistles, of homilies and orations that had
incessantly streamed from His pen. The Greater Covenant into which, as
affirmed in His writings