enging. This memorable period
commemorates, if we pause and call to mind the stirring events and bloody
episodes linking the Dispensation of the Bab with the dawning Mission of
the Founder of our Faith, the centenary of what may be truly regarded as
the darkest, the most tragic, the most heroic, period in the annals of a
hundred-year-old Revelation. This period, moreover, affords the last and
irretrievable chance to a ceaselessly striving, repeatedly victorious
community of setting the seal of triumph upon a momentous undertaking, on
whose fate hinges the launching of yet another glorious Crusade, the
consummation of which will mark the successful conclusion of the initial
epoch in the unfoldment of 'Abdu'l-Baha's Divine Plan--an evolution that
must continue to blossom and fructify in the course of successive epochs
of the Formative Ages of the Faith, and yield its fairest fruit in the
Golden Age that is yet to come.

A PERIOD OF HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE

The historic significance of this period cannot indeed be overestimated.
For it was a hundred years ago that a Faith, which had already been
oppressed by a staggering weight of untold tribulations; which had
sustained shattering blows in Mazindaran, Nayriz, Tihran and Zanjan, and
indeed throughout every province in the land of its birth; which had lost
its greatest exponents through the tragic martyrdom of most of the Letters
of the Living, and particularly of the valiant Mulla Husayn and of the
erudite Vahid and which had been afflicted with the supreme calamity of
losing its Divine Founder; was being subjected to still more painful
ordeals--ordeals which robbed it of both the heroic Hujjat and of the
far-famed Tahirih; which caused it to pass through a reign of terror, and
to experience a blood-bath of unprecedented severity, which inflicted on
it one of the greatest humiliations it has ever suffered through the
attempted assassination of the sovereign himself, and which unloosed a
veritable deluge of barbarous atrocities in Tihran, Mazindaran, Nayriz and
_Sh_iraz before which paled the horrors of the siege of Zanjan, and which
swept no less a figure than Baha'u'llah Himself--the last remaining pillar
of a Faith that had been so rudely shaken, so ruthlessly denuded of its
chief buttresses--into the subterranean dungeon of Tihran, an imprisonment
that was soon followed by His cruel banishment, in the depths of an
exceptionally severe winter, from His native lan