so decreed that this house of
sorrows should be encompassed by unending calamity and pain. Even before
the dark clouds of one disaster are scattered, the lowering storm of yet a
new grief takes over, casting its darkness across the inner skies of the
heart. Such has been the lot of this broken-hearted one and the other
leaves of the Holy Tree, from earliest childhood until this hour; such has
been the fruit we have plucked from the tree of our lives.

We can see before us the Holy Shrine where lies the blessed, riddled body
of the Primal Point, and memory of the delicate and tender remains of
other martyrs passes before our eyes. The remembrance of the Ancient
Beauty's dungeon in Tihran, and that most noble Being's exile from city to
city, culminating in the murk of the Akka prison, is engraved upon our
minds. The calamities, the massive afflictions, endured by 'Abdu'l-Baha
throughout His entire life, and His wailing at the break of dawn are
recorded for all time upon the tablets of the soul, and those cries that
rose out of His luminous heart will linger on in the mind's ear.

It is clear, too, how the most dire of all ordeals, the ascension of the
divine Beauty, made the structure of our existence to topple down; how
being deprived of Him consumed the very limbs of our bodies. And when our
fiery tears brought on by this were not yet dried, and the heart's wound
had not healed over, then the bearer of God's decree called us to yet
another anguish, that dire calamity, that terrible disaster, the passing
of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Then were we, the sorrow-stricken, thrust again into the
fires of separation, and the pitch darkness of deep mourning enshrouded
this family.

Beloved friends of the Blessed Beauty: what could have been the purpose of
those holy Beings in enduring such agonies? Why did those precious and
luminous souls accept all that hardship and pain? Any just observer will
acknowledge that They had no other end in view but to better the human
race, and cleanse it from the imperfections of this contingent world, and
see to its advancement, and endow all peoples with the wondrous virtues of
humankind. Thanks be to God's bounties, the signs of such perfections, the
lights of such bestowals, have become clearly manifest throughout the
world. The tree of His Cause grows ever more massive, day by day, and
heavier with fruit, and from moment to moment taller, and it shall cast
its wondrous shade over all who seek its shelt