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inconstancy and opposition. They made common cause with the hostile, the
biased, the mockers, who were arrayed against the Faith of the Blessed
Beauty, flattering them and paying them bribes and holding out promises
and hopes; they worked hand in glove with those occupying the seats of the
judiciary, and those authorized to interpret the law and pronounce
judgment, and those who sat on despots' thrones, and with still others who
were engaged in affairs remote from God's; and by all manner of deceits
and stratagems incited them to utterly extirpate the Covenant of Almighty
God and the Centre of it. They even, with a liberal distribution of funds,
hired assassins to shed the sacred blood of that Vicegerent of the
Glorious Lord.

Could any just person imagine that such as these have any relationship or
spiritual connection whatever with the Beauty of the One true God, or that
they could be accounted as members of the Baha'i community? Would not such
as these be only plucked-out eyes and palsied hands?

Look at the treatise that their second chief wrote, regarding their first
chief and his associates--in which he described, with his own pen, in
minute detail, their shameful purposes and actions relative to the Centre
of the divine Covenant--aims and acts that no perverse and godless tyrant
would consider permissible treatment for anyone. Their second chief tells
how, to a despotic and oppressive government, they brought false and
malicious accusations against 'Abdu'l-Baha; how they undertook to uproot
the holy Tree; how they forged Tablets, in Baha'u'llah's name, that
denounced the Centre of His Covenant; how they altered and corrupted the
holy Texts to such a degree that he said his confidence in the reliability
of the holy Tablets was virtually shattered.(153) These and their other
shameless activities are all set forth; and strangest of all is this, that
he, their second chief--the very one who wrote the confession so full of
the abominable acts of their first chief and his associates--now cleaves to
the first one like flesh to bone.

They are setting the axe to the root of the Cause of God; nor are they in
the least ashamed, nor put to the blush, before the Lord God and His
watchful and perceptive servants. There even exists a paper in the hand of
_Sh_u'a', son of their first chief, in which he tells of a person who was
commissioned and was ready and waiting to martyr the Centre of the
Covenant.

If I my tale cou