New Zealand and Tasmania are assembled, and are to deliberate
on the needs and requirements of the recently launched triple Campaign
embracing the Asiatic mainland, the Australian continent and the islands
of the Pacific Ocean--a campaign which may well be regarded as the most
extensive, the most arduous and the most momentous of all the campaigns of
a world-girdling Crusade, and which, in its scope, is unparalleled in the
history of the Faith in the entire eastern Hemisphere--my thoughts, on such
an occasion, go back to the early dawn of our Faith, to those
unforgettable scenes of matchless heroism, of dark tragedy, of
imperishable glory which heralded its birth, and accompanied the spread,
of its infant Light, in the heart of the Asiatic continent.

I vividly recall the meteoric rise of the Faith of the Bab in the
provinces of Persia and the stirring episodes associated with His cruel
incarceration in the mountain-fastnesses of Adhirbayjan, with the
revelation of the laws of His Dispensation, with the proclamation of the
independence of His Faith, with the peerless heroism of His disciples,
with the fiendish cruelty of His foes--the Chief Magistrate, the civil
authorities, the ecclesiastical dignitaries and the masses of the people,
of His native land--with the humiliation, the spoliation, the dispersal,
the eventual massacre of a vast number of His followers, and, above all,
with His own execution in the City of Tabriz.

With a throb of wonder I call to mind the early and sudden fruition of His
Dispensation in the capital city of that land, and the dramatic
circumstances attending the birth of Baha'u'llah's Revelation culminating
in His precipitate banishment to Iraq.

I am reminded, moreover, of the initial spread of the light of this
Revelation, in consequence of the banishment of Baha'u'llah, to the
adjoining territories of Iraq, and, as far as the western fringes of that
continent, to Turkey and the neighbouring territories of Lebanon, Jordan
and Syria, and, at a later stage, to the Indian sub-continent and China,
situated on the southern and eastern extremities of that continent as well
as to the Caucasus and Russian Turkistan.

Nor can I fail to remember the series of alternating crises and
victories--each constituting a landmark in the evolution of the Faith--which
it has experienced in some of these territories, associated with the
distressful withdrawal of its Author to the mountains of Sulaymaniyyih;
wit