THE PROMISED DAY IS COME
(U.S., Revised Edition 1980)
FILENAME: PDC
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PREFACE
The fundamental principle enunciated by &Baha'u'llah ... is that
religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is a
continuous and progressive process, that all the great religions of the
world are divine in origin, that their basic principles are in complete
harmony, that their aims and purposes are one and the same, that their
teachings are but facets of one truth, that their functions are complementary,
that they differ only in the nonessential aspects of their
doctrines, and that their missions represent successive stages in the
spiritual evolution of human society....
...His mission is to proclaim that the ages of the infancy and of the
childhood of the human race are past, that the convulsions associated
with the present stage of its adolescence are slowly and painfully preparing
it to attain the stage of manhood, and are heralding the approach of
that Age of Ages when swords will be beaten into plowshares, when the
Kingdom promised by Jesus Christ will have been established, and the
peace of the planet definitely and permanently ensured. Nor does
&Baha'u'llah claim finality for His own Revelation, but rather stipulates
that a fuller measure of the truth He has been commissioned by the
Almighty to vouchsafe to humanity, at so critical a juncture in its
fortunes, must needs be disclosed at future stages in the constant and
limitless evolution of mankind.
The &Baha'i Faith upholds the unity of God, recognizes the unity of
His Prophets, and inculcates the principle of the oneness and wholeness
of the entire human race. It proclaims the necessity and the inevitability
of the unification of mankind, asserts that it is gradually approaching,
and claims that nothing short of the transmuting spirit of God, working
through His chosen Mouthpiece in this day, can ultimately succeed in
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bringing it about. It, moreover, enjoins upon its followers the primary
duty of an unfettered search after truth, condemns all manner of
prejudice and superstition, declares the purpose of religion to be the
promotion of amity and concord, proclaims its essential harmony with
science, and recognizes it as the foremost agency for the pacification and
the orderly progress of human society....
&Mirza &Husayn-'Ali, surnamed &Baha'u'llah (the Glory of God), a
native of &Mazindaran, Whose advent the &Bab [Herald and Forerunner
of &Baha'u'llah] had foretold, ... was imprisoned in &Tihran, was
banished, in 1852, from His native land to &Baghdad, and thence to
Constantinople and Adrianople, and finally to the prison city of &Akka,
where He remained incarcerated for no less than twenty-four years, and
in whose neighborhood He passed away in 1892. In the course of His
banishment, and particularly in Adrianople and &Akka, He formulated
the laws and ordinances of His Dispensation, expounded, in over a
hundred volumes, the principles of His Faith, proclaimed His Message
to the kings and rulers of both the East and the West, both Christian and
Muslim, addressed the Pope, the Caliph of &Islam, the Chief Magistrates
of the Republics of the American continent, the entire Christian sacerdotal
order, the leaders of &Shi'ih and &Sunni &Islam, and the high priests of
the Zoroastrian religion. In these writings He proclaimed His Revelation,
summoned those whom He addressed to heed His call and espouse
His Faith, warned them of the consequences of their refusal, and
denounced, in some cases, their arrogance and tyranny....
The Faith which this order serves, safeguards and promotes
is ... essentially supernatural, supranational, entirely non-political,
non-partisan, and diametrically opposed to any policy or school of
thought that seeks to exalt any particular race, class or nation. It is free
from any form of ecclesiasticism, has neither priesthood nor rituals, and
is supported exclusively by voluntary contributions made by its avowed
adherents. Though loyal to their respective governments, though imbued
with the love of their own country, and anxious to promote at all
times, its best interests, the followers of the &Baha'i Faith, nevertheless,
viewing mankind as one entity, and profoundly attached to its vital
interests, will not hesitate to subordinate every particular interest, be it
personal, regional or national, to the over-riding interests of the generality
of mankind, knowing full well that in a world of interdependent
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peoples and nations the advantage of the part is best to be reached by the
advantage of the whole, and that no lasting result can be achieved by any
of the component parts if the general interests of the entity itself are
neglected....
--Shoghi Effendi
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THE PROMISED DAY IS COME
Friends and fellow-heirs of the Kingdom of &Baha'u'llah:
A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course,
catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate
consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its
driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its
cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every
passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power,
is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive
its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered,
agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God
invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its
foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the
homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings,
pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light,
and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.
"The time for the destruction of the world and its people," &Baha'u'llah's
prophetic pen has proclaimed, "hath arrived." "The hour
is approaching," He specifically affirms, "when the most great convulsion
will have appeared." "The promised day is come, the day when
tormenting trials will have surged above your heads, and beneath your
feet, saying: `Taste ye what your hands have wrought!'" "Soon shall the
blasts of His chastisement beat upon you, and the dust of hell enshroud
you." And again: "And when the appointed hour is come, there shall
suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake."
"The day is approaching when its [civilization's] flame will devour the
cities, when the Tongue of Grandeur will proclaim: `The Kingdom is
God's, the Almighty, the All-Praised!'" "The day will soon come," He,
referring to the foolish ones of the earth, has written, "whereon they will
cry out for help and receive no answer." "The day is approaching," He
moreover has prophesied, "when the wrathful anger of the Almighty will
have taken hold of them. He, verily, is the Omnipotent, the All-Subduing,
the Most Powerful. He shall cleanse the earth from the
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defilement of their corruption, and shall give it for an heritage unto such
of His servants as are nigh unto Him."
"As to those who deny Him Who is the Sublime Gate of God," the &Bab,
for His part, has affirmed in the &Qayyum-i-Asma', "for them We have
prepared, as justly decreed by God, a sore torment. And He, God, is the
Mighty, the Wise." And further, "O peoples of the earth! I swear by your
Lord! Ye shall act as former generations have acted. Warn ye, then,
yourselves of the terrible, the most grievous vengeance of God. For God is,
verily, potent over all things." And again: "By My glory! I will make the
infidels to taste, with the hands of My power, retributions unknown of
anyone except Me, and will waft over the faithful those musk-scented
breaths which I have nursed in the midmost heart of My throne."
Dear friends! The powerful operations of this titanic upheaval are
comprehensible to none except such as have recognized the claims of
both &Baha'u'llah and the &Bab. Their followers know full well whence it
comes, and what it will ultimately lead to. Though ignorant of how far it
will reach, they clearly recognize its genesis, are aware of its direction,
acknowledge its necessity, observe confidently its mysterious processes,
ardently pray for the mitigation of its severity, intelligently labor to
assuage its fury, and anticipate, with undimmed vision, the consummation
of the fears and the hopes it must necessarily engender.
This Judgment of God
This judgment of God, as viewed by those who have recognized
&Baha'u'llah as His Mouthpiece and His greatest Messenger on earth, is
both a retributory calamity and an act of holy and supreme discipline. It
is at once a visitation from God and a cleansing process for all mankind.
Its fires punish the perversity of the human race, and weld its component
parts into one organic, indivisible, world-embracing community. Mankind,
in these fateful years, which at once signalize the passing of the
first century of the &Baha'i Era and proclaim the opening of a new one, is,
as ordained by Him Who is both the Judge and the Redeemer of the
human race, being simultaneously called upon to give account of its
past actions, and is being purged and prepared for its future mission. It
can neither escape the responsibilities of the past, nor shirk those of the
future. God, the Vigilant, the Just, the Loving, the All-Wise Ordainer,
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can, in this supreme Dispensation, neither allow the sins of an unregenerate
humanity, whether of omission or of commission, to go unpunished,
nor will He be willing to abandon His children to their fate,
and refuse them that culminating and blissful stage in their long, their
slow and painful evolution throughout the ages, which is at once their
inalienable right and their true destiny.
"Bestir yourselves, O people," is, on the one hand, the ominous
warning sounded by &Baha'u'llah Himself, "in anticipation of the days of
Divine Justice, for the promised hour is now come." "Abandon that
which ye possess, and seize that which God, Who layeth low the necks of
men, hath brought. Know ye of a certainty that if ye turn not back from
that which ye have committed, chastisement will overtake you on every
side, and ye shall behold things more grievous than that which ye beheld
aforetime." And again: "We have fixed a time for you, O people! If ye fail,
at the appointed hour, to turn towards God, He, verily, will lay violent
hold on you, and will cause grievous afflictions to assail you from every
direction. How severe indeed is the chastisement with which your Lord
will then chastise you!" And again: "God assuredly dominateth the lives
of them that wronged Us, and is well aware of their doings. He will most
certainly lay hold on them for their sins. He, verily, is the fiercest of
Avengers." And finally: "O ye peoples of the world! Know verily that an
unforeseen calamity is following you and that grievous retribution
awaiteth you. Think not the deeds ye have committed have been blotted
from My sight. By My Beauty! All your doings hath My pen graven with
open characters upon tablets of chrysolite."
"The whole earth," &Baha'u'llah, on the other hand, forecasting the
bright future in store for a world now wrapt in darkness, emphatically
asserts, "is now in a state of pregnancy. The day is approaching when it
will have yielded its noblest fruits, when from it will have sprung forth the
loftiest trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the most heavenly blessings."
"The time is approaching when every created thing will have cast
its burden. Glorified be God Who hath vouchsafed this grace that
encompasseth all things, whether seen or unseen!" "These great
oppressions," He, moreover, foreshadowing humanity's golden age, has
written, "are preparing it for the advent of the Most Great Justice." This
Most Great Justice is indeed the Justice upon which the structure of the
Most Great Peace can alone, and must eventually, rest, while the Most
Great Peace will, in turn, usher in that Most Great, that World Civilization
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which shall remain forever associated with Him Who beareth the
Most Great Name.
Beloved friends! Well nigh a hundred years have elapsed since the
Revelation of &Baha'u'llah dawned upon the world--a Revelation, the
nature of which, as affirmed by Himself, "none among the Manifestations
of old, except to a prescribed degree, hath ever completely
apprehended." For a whole century God has respited mankind, that it
might acknowledge the Founder of such a Revelation, espouse His
Cause, proclaim His greatness, and establish His Order. In a hundred
volumes, the repositories of priceless precepts, mighty laws, unique
principles, impassioned exhortations, reiterated warnings, amazing
prophecies, sublime invocations, and weighty commentaries, the
Bearer of such a Message has proclaimed, as no Prophet before Him has
done, the Mission with which God had entrusted Him. To emperors,
kings, princes and potentates, to rulers, governments, clergy and peoples,
whether of the East or of the West, whether Christian, Jew,
Muslim, or Zoroastrian, He addressed, for well-nigh fifty years, and in
the most tragic circumstances, these priceless pearls of knowledge and
wisdom that lay hid within the ocean of His matchless utterance.
Forsaking fame and fortune, accepting imprisonment and exile, careless
of ostracism and obloquy, submitting to physical indignities and
cruel deprivations, He, the Vicegerent of God on earth, suffered Himself
to be banished from place to place and from country to country, till
at length He, in the Most Great Prison, offered up His martyred son as a
ransom for the redemption and unification of all mankind. "We verily,"
He Himself has testified, "have not fallen short of Our duty to exhort
men, and to deliver that whereunto I was bidden by God, the Almighty,
the All-Praised. Had they hearkened unto Me, they would have beheld
the earth another earth." And again: "Is there any excuse left for anyone
in this Revelation? No, by God, the Lord of the Mighty Throne! My signs
have encompassed the earth, and My power enveloped all mankind, and
yet the people are wrapped in a strange sleep!"
What Response to His Call?
How--we may well ask ourselves--has the world, the object of such
Divine solicitude, repaid Him Who sacrificed His all for its sake? What
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manner of welcome did it accord Him, and what response did His call
evoke? A clamor, unparalleled in the history of &Shi'ih &Islam, greeted, in
the land of its birth, the infant light of the Faith, in the midst of a people
notorious for its crass ignorance, its fierce fanaticism, its barbaric
cruelty, its ingrained prejudices, and the unlimited sway held over the
masses by a firmly entrenched ecclesiastical hierarchy. A persecution,
kindling a courage which, as attested by no less eminent an authority
than the late Lord Curzon of Kedleston, has been unsurpassed by that
which the fires of Smithfield evoked, mowed down, with tragic swiftness,
no less than twenty thousand of its heroic adherents, who refused
to barter their newly born faith for the fleeting honors and security of a
mortal life.
To the bodily agonies inflicted upon these sufferers, the charges, so
unmerited, of Nihilism, occultism, anarchism, eclecticism, immorality,
sectarianism, heresy, political partisanship--each conclusively disproved
by the tenets of the Faith itself and by the conduct of its
followers--were added, swelling thereby the number of those who,
unwittingly or maliciously, were injuring its cause.
Unmitigated indifference on the part of men of eminence and rank;
unrelenting hatred shown by the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the Faith
from which it had sprung; the scornful derision of the people among
whom it was born; the utter contempt which most of those kings and
rulers who had been addressed by its Author manifested towards it; the
condemnations pronounced, the threats hurled, and the banishments
decreed by those under whose sway it arose and first spread; the distortion
to which its principles and laws were subjected by the envious and
the malicious, in lands and among peoples far beyond the country of its
origin--all these are but the evidences of the treatment meted out by a
generation sunk in self-content, careless of its God, and oblivious of the
omens, prophecies, warnings and admonitions revealed by His Messengers.
The blows so heavily dealt the followers of so precious, so glorious, so
potent a Faith failed, however, to assuage the animosity that inflamed its
persecutors. Nor did the deliberate and mischievous misrepresentations
of its fundamental teachings, its aims and purposes, its hopes and
aspirations, its institutions and activities, suffice to stay the hand of the
oppressor and the calumniator, who sought by every means in their
power to abolish its name and extirpate its system. The hand which had
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struck down so vast a number of its blameless and humble lovers and
servants was now raised to deal its Founders the heaviest and cruelest
blows.
The &Bab--"the Point," as affirmed by &Baha'u'llah, "round Whom the
realities of the Prophets and Messengers revolve"--was the One first
swept into the maelstrom which engulfed His supporters. Sudden arrest
and confinement in the very first year of His short and spectacular
career; public affront deliberately inflicted in the presence of the
ecclesiastical dignitaries of &Shiraz; strict and prolonged incarceration in
the bleak fastnesses of the mountains of &Adhirbayjan; a contemptuous
disregard and a cowardly jealousy evinced respectively by the Chief
Magistrate of the realm and the foremost minister of his government; the
carefully staged and farcical interrogatory sustained in the presence of
the heir to the Throne and the distinguished divines of &Tabriz; the
shameful infliction of the bastinado in the prayer house, and at the
hands of the &Shaykhu'l-Islam of that city; and finally suspension in the
barrack-square of &Tabriz and the discharge of a volley of above seven
hundred bullets at His youthful breast under the eyes of a callous
multitude of about ten thousand people, culminating in the ignominious
exposure of His mangled remains on the edge of the moat without
the city gate--these were the progressive stages in the tumultuous and
tragic ministry of One Whose age inaugurated the consummation of all
ages, and Whose Revelation fulfilled the promise of all Revelations.
"I swear by God!" the &Bab Himself in His Tablet to &Muhammad &Shah
has written, "Shouldst thou know the things which in the space of these
four years have befallen Me at the hands of thy people and thine army,
thou wouldst hold thy breath from fear of God.... Alas, alas, for the
things which have touched Me!... I swear by the Most Great Lord! Wert
thou to be told in what place I dwell, the first person to have mercy on Me
would be thyself. In the heart of a mountain is a fortress [&Maku] ... the
inmates of which are confined to two guards and four dogs. Picture, then,
My plight.... In this mountain I have remained alone, and have come
to such a pass that none of those gone before Me have suffered what I have
suffered, nor any transgressor endured what I have endured!"
"How veiled are ye, O My creatures," He, speaking with the voice of
God, has revealed in the &Bayan, "...who, without any right, have
consigned Him unto a mountain [&Maku], not one of whose inhabitants is
worthy of mention.... With Him, which is with Me, there is no one
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except him who is one of the Letters of the Living of My Book. In His
presence, which is My Presence, there is not at night even a lighted lamp!
And yet, in places [of worship] which in varying degrees reach out unto
Him, unnumbered lamps are shining! All that is on earth hath been
created for Him, and all partake with delight of His benefits, and yet they
are so veiled from Him as to refuse Him even a lamp!"
What of &Baha'u'llah, the germ of Whose Revelation, as attested by
the &Bab, is endowed with a potency superior to the combined forces of
the &Babi Dispensation? Was He not--He for Whom the &Bab had
suffered and died in such tragic and miraculous circumstances--made,
for nearly half a century and under the domination of the two most
powerful potentates of the East, the object of a systematic and concerted
conspiracy which, in its effects and duration, is scarcely paralleled in the
annals of previous religions?
"The cruelties inflicted by My oppressors," He Himself in His anguish
has cried out, "have bowed Me down, and turned My hair white.
Shouldst thou present thyself before My throne, thou wouldst fail to
recognize the Ancient Beauty, for the freshness of His countenance is
altered and its brightness hath faded, by reason of the oppression of the
infidels. I swear by God! His heart, His soul, and His vitals are melted!"
"Wert thou to hear with Mine ear," He also declares, "thou wouldst hear
how &Ali [the &Bab] bewaileth Me in the presence of the Glorious Companion,
and how &Muhammad weepeth over Me in the all-highest Horizon,
and how the Spirit [Jesus] beateth Himself upon the head in the
heaven of My decree, by reason of what hath befallen this Wronged One
at the hands of every impious sinner." "Before Me," He elsewhere has
written, "riseth up the Serpent of wrath with jaws stretched to engulf Me,
and behind Me stalketh the lion of anger intent on tearing Me in pieces,
and above Me, O My Well-Beloved, are the clouds of Thy decree, raining
upon Me the showers of tribulations, whilst beneath Me are fixed the
spears of misfortune, ready to wound My limbs and My body." "Couldst
thou be told," He further affirms, "what hath befallen the Ancient
Beauty, thou wouldst flee into the wilderness, and weep with a great
weeping. In thy grief, thou wouldst smite thyself on the head, and cry out
as one stung by the sting of the adder.... By the righteousness of God!
Every morning I arose from My bed I discovered the hosts of countless
afflictions massed behind My door, and every night when I lay down, lo!
My heart was torn with agony at what it had suffered from the fiendish
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cruelty of its foes. With every piece of bread the Ancient Beauty breaketh
is coupled the assault of a fresh affliction, and with every drop He
drinketh is mixed the bitterness of the most woeful of trials. He is preceded
in every step He taketh by an army of unforeseen calamities, while in His
rear follow legions of agonizing sorrows."
Was it not He Who, at the early age of twenty-seven, spontaneously
arose to champion, in the capacity of a mere follower, the nascent
Cause of the &Bab? Was He not the One Who by assuming the actual
leadership of a proscribed and harrassed sect exposed Himself, and His
kindred, and His possessions, and His rank, and His reputation to the
grave perils, the bloody assaults, the general spoliation and furious
defamations of both government and people? Was it not He--the Bearer
of a Revelation, Whose day "every Prophet hath announced," for which
"the soul of every Divine Messenger hath thirsted," and in which "God
hath proved the hearts of the entire company of His Messengers and
Prophets"--was not the Bearer of such a Revelation, at the instigation of
&Shi'ih ecclesiastics and by order of the &Shah himself forced, for no less
than four months, to breathe, in utter darkness, whilst in the company
of the vilest criminals and freighted down with galling chains, the
pestilential air of the vermin-infested subterranean dungeon of
&Tihran--a place which, as He Himself subsequently declared, was
mysteriously converted into the very scene of the annunciation made to
Him by God of His Prophethood?
"We were consigned," He wrote in His "Epistle to the Son of the
Wolf," "for four months to a place foul beyond comparison. As to the
dungeon in which this Wronged One and others similarly wronged were
confined, a dark and narrow pit were preferable.... The dungeon was
wrapped in thick darkness, and Our fellow prisoners numbered nearly a
hundred and fifty souls: thieves, assassins, and highwaymen. Though
crowded, it had no other outlet than the passage by which We entered. No
pen can depict that place, nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell.
Most of these men had neither clothes nor bedding to lie on. God alone
knoweth what befell Us in that most foul-smelling and gloomy place!"
"&Abdu'l-Baha," writes Dr. J.E. Esslemont, "tells how one day He was
allowed to enter the prison-yard to see His beloved Father when He
came out for His daily exercise. &Baha'u'llah was terribly altered, so ill He
could hardly walk. His hair and beard unkempt, His neck galled and
swollen from the pressure of a heavy steel collar, His body bent by the
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weight of His chains." "For three days and three nights," &Nabil has
recorded in his chronicle, "no manner of food or drink was given to
&Baha'u'llah. Rest and sleep were both impossible to Him. The place was
infested with vermin, and the stench of that gloomy abode was enough
to crush the very spirits of those who were condemned to suffer its
horrors." "Such was the intensity of His suffering that the marks of that
cruelty remained imprinted upon His body all the days of His life."
And what of the other tribulations which, before and immediately
after this dreadful episode, touched Him? What of His confinement in
the home of one of the &kad-khudas of &Tihran? What of the savage
violence with which He was stoned by the angry people in the neighborhood
of the village of &Niyala? What of His incarceration by the emissaries
of the army of the &Shah in &Mazindaran, and His receiving the
bastinado by order, and in the presence, of the assembled siyyids and
mujtahids into whose hands He had been delivered by the civil authorities
of &Amul? What of the howls of derision and abuse with which a
crowd of ruffians subsequently pursued Him? What of the monstrous
accusation brought against Him by the Imperial household, the Court
and the people, when the attempt was made on the life of &Nasiri'd-Din
&Shah? What of the infamous outrages, the abuse and ridicule heaped on
Him when He was arrested by responsible officers of the government,
and conducted from &Niyavaran "on foot and in chains, with bared head
and bare feet," and exposed to the fierce rays of the midsummer sun, to
the &Siyah-Chal of &Tihran? What of the avidity with which corrupt
officials sacked His house and carried away all His possessions and
disposed of His fortune? What of the cruel edict that tore Him from the
small band of the &Bab's bewildered, hounded, and shepherdless followers,
separated Him from His kinsmen and friends, and banished Him,
in the depth of winter, despoiled and defamed, to &Iraq?
Severe as were these tribulations which succeeded one another with
bewildering rapidity as a result of the premeditated attacks and the
systematic machinations of the court, the clergy, the government and
the people, they were but the prelude to a harrowing and extensive
captivity which that edict had formally initiated. Extending over a
period of more than forty years, and carrying Him successively to &Iraq,
&Sulaymaniyyih, Constantinople, Adrianople and finally to the penal
colony of &Akka, this long banishment was at last ended by His death, at
the age of over three score years and ten, terminating a captivity which,
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in its range, its duration and the diversity and severity of its afflictions,
is unexampled in the history of previous Dispensations.
No need to expatiate on the particular episodes which cast a lurid light
on the moving annals of those years. No need to dwell on the character
and actions of the peoples, rulers and divines who have participated in,
and contributed to heighten the poignancy of the scenes of this, the
greatest drama in the world's spiritual history.
Features of This Moving Drama
To enumerate a few of the outstanding features of this moving drama
will suffice to evoke in the reader of these pages, already familiar with
the history of the Faith, the memory of those vicissitudes which it has
experienced, and which the world has until now viewed with such frigid
indifference. The forced and sudden retirement of &Baha'u'llah to the
mountains of &Sulaymaniyyih, and the distressing consequences that
flowed from His two years' complete withdrawal; the incessant intrigues
indulged in by the exponents of &Shi'ih &Islam in Najaf and &Karbila,
working in close and constant association with their confederates in
Persia; the intensification of the repressive measures decreed by &Sultan
&Abdu'l-'Aziz which brought to a head the defection of certain prominent
members of the exiled community; the enforcement of yet another
banishment by order of that same &Sultan, this time to that far off and
most desolate of cities, causing such despair as to lead two of the exiles to
attempt suicide; the unrelaxing surveillance to which they were subjected
upon their arrival in &Akka, by hostile officials, and the insufferable
imprisonment for two years in the barracks of that town; the
interrogatory to which the Turkish &pasha subsequently subjected his
Prisoner at the headquarters of the government; His confinement for no
less than eight years in a humble dwelling surrounded by the befouled
air of that city, His sole recreation being confined to pacing the narrow
space of His room--these, as well as other tribulations, proclaim, on the
one hand, the nature of the ordeal and the indignities He suffered, and
point, on the other, the finger of accusation at those mighty ones of the
earth who had either so sorely maltreated Him, or deliberately withheld
from Him their succor.
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No wonder that from the Pen of Him Who bore this anguish with
such sublime patience these words should have been revealed: "He Who
is the Lord of the seen and unseen is now manifest unto all men. His
blessed Self hath been afflicted with such harm that if all the seas, visible
and invisible, were turned into ink, and all that dwell in the kingdom
into pens, and all that are in the heavens and all that are on earth into
scribes, they would, of a certainty, be powerless to record it." And again:
"I have been, most of the days of My life, even as a slave, sitting under a
sword hanging on a thread, knowing not whether it would fall soon or
late upon him." "All this generation," He affirms, "could offer Us were
wounds from its darts, and the only cup it proffered to Our lips was the
cup of its venom. On Our neck We still bear the scar of chains, and upon
Our body are imprinted the evidences of an unyielding cruelty." "Twenty
years have passed, O kings!" He, addressing the kings of Christendom, at
the height of His mission, has written, "during which We have, each
day, tasted the agony of a fresh tribulation. No one of them that were
before Us hath endured the things We have endured. Would that ye could
perceive it! They that rose up against Us have put Us to death, have shed
Our blood, have plundered Our property, and violated Our honor.
Though aware of most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to
stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to restrain the
tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with your subjects, that
your high sense of justice may be fully demonstrated to all mankind?"
Who is the ruler, may it not be confidently asked, whether of the East
or of the West, who, at any time since the dawn of so transcendent a
Revelation, has been prompted to raise his voice either in its praise or
against those who persecuted it? Which people has, in the course of so
long a captivity, felt urged to arise and stem the tide of such tribulations?
Who is the sovereign, excepting a single woman, shining in solitary
glory, who has, in however small a measure, felt impelled to respond to
the poignant call of &Baha'u'llah? Who amongst the great ones of the
earth was inclined to extend this infant Faith of God the benefit of his
recognition or support? Which one of the multitudes of creeds, sects,
races, parties and classes and of the highly diversified schools of human
thought, considered it necessary to direct its gaze towards the rising light
of the Faith, to contemplate its unfolding system, to ponder its hidden
processes, to appraise its weighty message, to acknowledge its regenerative
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power, to embrace its salutary truth, or to proclaim its eternal
verities? Who among the worldly wise and the so-called men of insight
and wisdom can justly claim, after the lapse of nearly a century, to have
disinterestedly approached its theme, to have considered impartially its
claims, to have taken sufficient pains to delve into its literature, to have
assiduously striven to separate facts from fiction, or to have accorded its
cause the treatment it merits? Where are the preeminent exponents,
whether of the arts or sciences, with the exception of a few isolated cases,
who have lifted a finger, or whispered a word of commendation, in
either the defense or the praise of a Faith that has conferred upon the
world so priceless a benefit, that has suffered so long and so grievously,
and which enshrines within its shell so enthralling a promise for a world
so woefully battered, so manifestly bankrupt?
To the mounting tide of trials which laid low the &Bab, to the
long-drawn-out calamities which rained on &Baha'u'llah, to the warnings
sounded by both the Herald and the Author of the &Baha'i Revelation,
must be added the sufferings which, for no less than seventy years, were
endured by &Abdu'l-Baha, as well as His pleas, and entreaties, uttered in
the evening of His life, in connection with the dangers that increasingly
threatened the whole of mankind. Born in the very year that witnessed
the inception of the &Babi Revelation; baptized with the initial fires of
persecution that raged around that nascent Cause; an eyewitness, when
a boy of eight, of the violent upheavals that rocked the Faith which His
Father had espoused; sharing with Him, the ignominy, the perils, and
rigors consequent upon the successive banishments from His native-land
to countries far beyond its confines; arrested and forced to support,
in a dark cell, the indignity of imprisonment soon after His arrival in
&Akka; the object of repeated investigations and the target of continual
assaults and insults under the despotic rule of &Sultan &Abdu'l-Hamid,
and later under the ruthless military dictatorship of the suspicious and
merciless &Jamal &Pasha--He, too, the Center and Pivot of &Baha'u'llah's
peerless Covenant and the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, was made
to taste, at the hands of potentates, ecclesiastics, governments and
peoples, the cup of woe which the &Bab and &Baha'u'llah, as well as so
many of their followers, had drained.
With the warnings which both His pen and voice have given in
countless Tablets and discourses, during an almost lifelong incarceration
and in the course of His extended travels in both the European and
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American continents, they who labor for the spread of His Father's
Faith in the Western world are sufficiently acquainted. How often and
how passionately did He appeal to those in authority and to the public at
large to examine dispassionately the precepts enunciated by His Father?
With what precision and emphasis He unfolded the system of the Faith
He was expounding, elucidated its fundamental verities, stressed its
distinguishing features, and proclaimed the redemptive character of its
principles? How insistently did He foreshadow the impending chaos,
the approaching upheavals, the universal conflagration which, in the
concluding years of His life, had only begun to reveal the measure of
its force and the significance of its impact on human society?
A co-sharer in the woeful trials and momentary frustrations afflicting
the &Bab and &Baha'u'llah; reaping a harvest in His lifetime wholly
incommensurate to the sublime, the incessant and strenuous efforts He
had exerted; experiencing the initial perturbations of the world-shaking
catastrophe in store for an unbelieving humanity; bent with age, and
with eyes dimmed by the gathering storm which the reception accorded
by a faithless generation to His Father's Cause was raising, and with a
heart bleeding over the immediate destiny of God's wayward children--
He, at last, sank beneath a weight of troubles for which they
who had imposed them upon Him, and upon those gone before
Him, were soon to be summoned to a dire reckoning.
"Hasten, O my God!" He cried, at a time when adversity had sore
beset Him, "the days of my ascension unto Thee, and of my coming
before Thee, and of my entry into Thy presence, that I may be delivered
from the darkness of the cruelty inflicted by them upon me, and may enter
the luminous atmosphere of Thy nearness, O my Lord, the All-Glorious,
and may rest under the shadow of Thy most great mercy." "&Ya &Baha'u'l-Abha
[O Thou the Glory of Glories]!" He wrote in a Tablet revealed
during the last week of His life, "I have renounced the world
and the people thereof, and am heartbroken and sorely afflicted because
of the unfaithful. In the cage of this world I flutter even as a
frightened bird, and yearn every day to take my flight unto Thy Kingdom.
&Ya &Baha'u'l-Abha! Make me to drink of the cup of sacrifice, and
set me free. Relieve me from these woes and trials, from these afflictions
and troubles."
Dear friends! Alas, a thousand times alas, that a Revelation so
incomparably great, so infinitely precious, so mightily potent, so manifestly
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innocent, should have received, at the hands of a generation so
blind and so perverse, so infamous a treatment! "O My servants!"
&Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, "The one true God is My witness! This
most great, this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly
near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the
twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this
imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this
most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty."
A World Receded from Him
After a revolution of well nigh one hundred years what is it that the
eye encounters as one surveys the international scene and looks back
upon the early beginnings of &Baha'i history? A world convulsed by the
agonies of contending systems, races and nations, entangled in the mesh
of its accumulated falsities, receding farther and farther from Him Who
is the sole Author of its destinies, and sinking deeper and deeper into a
suicidal carnage which its neglect and persecution of Him Who is its
Redeemer have precipitated. A Faith, still proscribed, yet bursting
through its chrysalis, emerging from the obscurity of a century-old
repression, face to face with the awful evidences of God's wrathful
anger, and destined to arise above the ruins of a smitten civilization. A
world spiritually destitute, morally bankrupt, politically disrupted, socially
convulsed, economically paralyzed, writhing, bleeding and
breaking up beneath the avenging rod of God. A Faith Whose call
remained unanswered, Whose claims were rejected, Whose warnings
were brushed aside, Whose followers were mowed down, Whose aims
and purposes were maligned, Whose summons to the rulers of the earth
were ignored, Whose Herald drained the cup of martyrdom, over the
head of Whose Author swept a sea of unheard-of tribulations, and
Whose Exemplar sank beneath the weight of lifelong sorrows and dire
misfortunes. A world that has lost its bearings, in which the bright flame
of religion is fast dying out, in which the forces of a blatant nationalism
and racialism have usurped the rights and prerogatives of God Himself,
in which a flagrant secularism--the direct offspring of irreligion--has
raised its triumphant head and is protruding its ugly features, in which
+P17
the "majesty of kingship" has been disgraced, and they who wore its
emblems have, for the most part, been hurled from their thrones, in
which the once all-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies of &Islam, and to a
lesser extent those of Christianity, have been discredited, and in which
the virus of prejudice and corruption is eating into the vitals of an
already gravely disordered society. A Faith Whose institutions--the
pattern and crowning glory of the age which is to come--have been
ignored and in some instances trampled upon and uprooted, Whose
unfolding system has been derided and partly suppressed and crippled,
Whose rising Order--the sole refuge of a civilization in the embrace of
doom--has been spurned and challenged, Whose Mother-Temple has
been seized and misappropriated, and Whose "House"--the "cynosure
of an adoring world"--has, through a gross miscarriage of justice, as
witnessed by the world's highest tribunal, been delivered into the hands
of, and violated by, its implacable enemies.
We are indeed living in an age which, if we would correctly appraise
it, should be regarded as one which is witnessing a dual phenomenon.
The first signalizes the death pangs of an order, effete and godless, that
has stubbornly refused, despite the signs and portents of a century-old
Revelation, to attune its processes to the precepts and ideals which that
Heaven-sent Faith proffered it. The second proclaims the birth pangs of
an Order, divine and redemptive, that will inevitably supplant the
former, and within Whose administrative structure an embryonic
civilization, incomparable and world-embracing, is imperceptibly
maturing. The one is being rolled up, and is crashing in oppression,
bloodshed, and ruin. The other opens up vistas of a justice, a unity, a
peace, a culture, such as no age has ever seen. The former has spent its
force, demonstrated its falsity and barrenness, lost irretrievably its
opportunity, and is hurrying to its doom. The latter, virile and
unconquerable, is plucking asunder its chains, and is vindicating its title to
be the one refuge within which a sore-tried humanity, purged from its dross,
can attain its destiny.
"Soon," &Baha'u'llah Himself has prophesied, "will the present-day
order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead." And again: "By
Myself! The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world
and all that is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead." "The
day is approaching when God will have raised up a people who will call to
+P18
remembrance Our days, who will tell the tale of Our trials, who will
demand the restitution of Our rights, from them who, without a tittle of
evidence, have treated Us with manifest injustice."
Dear friends! For the trials which have afflicted the Faith of
&Baha'u'llah a responsibility appalling and inescapable rests upon those into
whose hands the reins of civil and ecclesiastical authority were delivered.
The kings of the earth and the world's religious leaders alike
must primarily bear the brunt of such an awful responsibility. "Everyone
well knoweth," &Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, "that all the kings have
turned aside from Him, and all the religions have opposed Him." "From
time immemorial," He declares, "they who have been outwardly invested
with authority have debarred men from setting their faces towards God.
They have disliked that men should gather together around the Most
Great Ocean, inasmuch as they have regarded, and still regard, such a
gathering as the cause of, and the motive for, the disruption of their
sovereignty." "The kings," He moreover has written, "have recognized
that it was not in their interest to acknowledge Me, as have likewise the
ministers and the divines, notwithstanding that My purpose hath been
most explicitly revealed in the Divine Books and Tablets, and the True
One hath loudly proclaimed that this Most Great Revelation hath
appeared for the betterment of the world and the exaltation of the
nations." "Gracious God!" writes the &Bab in the &Dala'il-i-Sab'ih (Seven
Proofs) with reference to the "seven powerful sovereigns ruling the world"
in His day, "None of them hath been informed of His [the &Bab's]
Manifestation, and if informed, none hath believed in Him. Who
knoweth, they may leave this world below full of desire, and without
having realized that the thing for which they were waiting had come to
pass. This is what happened to the monarchs that held fast unto the
Gospel. They awaited the coming of the Prophet of God [&Muhammad],
and when He did appear, they failed to recognize Him. Behold how great
are the sums which these sovereigns expend without even the slightest
thought of appointing an official charged with the task of acquainting
them in their own realms with the Manifestation of God! They would
thereby have fulfilled the purpose for which they have been created.
All their desires have been and are still fixed upon leaving behind them
traces of their names." The &Bab, moreover, in that same treatise, censuring
the failure of the Christian divines to acknowledge the truth of
&Muhammad's mission, makes this illuminating statement: "The blame
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falleth upon their doctors, for if these had believed, they would have been
followed by the mass of their countrymen. Behold then, that which hath
come to pass! The learned men of Christendom are held to be learned by
virtue of their safeguarding the teaching of Christ, and yet consider how
they themselves have been the cause of men's failure to accept the Faith
and attain unto salvation!"
Recipients of the Message
It should not be forgotten that it was the kings of the earth and the
world's religious leaders who, above all other categories of men, were
made the direct recipients of the Message proclaimed by both the &Bab
and &Baha'u'llah. It was they who were deliberately addressed in numerous
and historic Tablets, who were summoned to respond to the Call of
God, and to whom were directed, in clear and forcible language, the
appeals, the admonitions and warnings of His persecuted Messengers. It
was they who, when the Faith was born, and later when its mission was
proclaimed, were still, for the most part, wielding unquestioned and
absolute civil and ecclesiastical authority over their subjects and followers.
It was they who, whether glorying in the pomp and pageantry of a
kingship as yet scarcely restricted by constitutional limitations, or
entrenched within the strongholds of a seemingly inviolable ecclesiastical
power, assumed ultimate responsibility for any wrongs inflicted by those
whose immediate destinies they controlled. It would be no exaggeration
to say that in most of the countries of the European and Asiatic
continents absolutism, on the one hand, and complete subservience to
ecclesiastical hierarchies, on the other, were still the outstanding features
of the political and religious life of the masses. These, dominated
and shackled, were robbed of the necessary freedom that would enable
them to either appraise the claims and merits of the Message proffered to
them, or to embrace unreservedly its truth.
Small wonder, then, that the Author of the &Baha'i Faith, and to a
lesser degree its Herald, should have directed at the world's supreme
rulers and religious leaders the full force of Their Messages, and made
them the recipients of some of Their most sublime Tablets, and invited
them, in a language at once clear and insistent, to heed Their call.
Small wonder that They should have taken the pains to unroll before
+P20
their eyes the truths of Their respective Revelations, and should have
expatiated on Their woes and sufferings. Small wonder that They
should have stressed the preciousness of the opportunities which it was
in the power of these rulers and leaders to seize, and should have warned
them in ominous tones of the grave responsibilities which the rejection
of God's Message would entail, and should have predicted, when
rebuffed and refused, the dire consequences which such a rejection
involved. Small wonder that He Who is the King of kings and Vicegerent
of God Himself should, when abandoned, contemned and persecuted,
have uttered this epigrammatic and momentous prophecy:
"From two ranks amongst men power hath been seized: kings and
ecclesiastics."
As to the kings and emperors who not only symbolized in their
persons the majesty of earthly dominion but who, for the most part,
actually held unchallengeable sway over the multitudes of their subjects,
their relation to the Faith of &Baha'u'llah constitutes one of the
most illuminating episodes in the history of the Heroic and Formative
Ages of that Faith. The Divine summons which embraced within its
scope so large a number of the crowned heads of both Europe and Asia;
the theme and language of the Messages that brought them into direct
contact with the Source of God's Revelation; the nature of their reaction
to so stupendous an impact; and the consequences which ensued and
can still be witnessed today are the salient features of a subject upon
which I can but inadequately touch, and which will be fully and
befittingly treated by future &Baha'i historians.
The Emperor of the French, the most powerful ruler of his day on the
European continent, Napoleon III; Pope Pius IX, the supreme head of
the highest church in Christendom, and wielder of the scepter of both
temporal and spiritual authority; the omnipotent Czar of the vast Russian
Empire, Alexander II; the renowned Queen Victoria, whose
sovereignty extended over the greatest political combination the world
has witnessed; William I, the conqueror of Napoleon III, King of
Prussia and the newly acclaimed monarch of a unified Germany;
Francis Joseph, the autocratic king-emperor of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, the heir of the far-famed Holy Roman Empire; the tyrannical
&Abdu'l-'Aziz, the embodiment of the concentrated power vested in
the Sultanate and the Caliphate; the notorious &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah, the
despotic ruler of Persia and the mightiest potentate of &Shi'ih &Islam--in a
+P21
word, most of the preeminent embodiments of power and of sovereignty
in His day became, one by one, the object of &Baha'u'llah's special
attention, and were made to sustain, in varying degrees, the weight of
the force communicated by His appeals and warnings.
It should be borne in mind, however, that &Baha'u'llah has not restricted
the delivery of His Message to a few individual sovereigns, however
potent the scepters they severally wielded, and however vast the
dominions which they ruled. All the kings of the earth have been
collectively addressed by His Pen, appealed to, and warned, at a time
when the star of His Revelation was mounting its zenith, and whilst He
lay a prisoner in the hands, and in the vicinity of the court, of His royal
enemy. In a memorable Tablet, designated as the &Suriy-i-Muluk (&Surih
of Kings) in which the &Sultan himself and his ministers, and the kings of
Christendom, and the French and Persian Ambassadors accredited to
the Sublime Porte, and the Muslim ecclesiastical leaders in Constantinople,
and its wise men and its inhabitants, and the people of Persia,
and the philosophers of the world have been specifically addressed and
admonished, He thus directs His words to the entire company of the
monarchs of East and West:
Tablets to the Kings
"O kings of the earth! Give ear unto the Voice of God, calling from this
sublime, this fruit-laden Tree, that hath sprung out of the Crimson Hill,
upon the holy Plain, intoning the words: `There is none other God but
He, the Mighty, the All-Powerful, the All-Wise.'... Fear God, O concourse
of kings, and suffer not yourselves to be deprived of this most
sublime grace. Fling away, then, the things ye possess, and take fast hold
on the Handle of God, the Exalted, the Great. Set your hearts towards
the Face of God, and abandon that which your desires have bidden you to
follow, and be not of those who perish. Relate unto them, O servant, the
story of &Ali [the &Bab], when He came unto them with truth, bearing His
glorious and weighty Book, and holding in His hands a testimony and
proof from God, and holy and blessed tokens from Him. Ye, however, O
kings, have failed to heed the Remembrance of God in His days and to be
guided by the lights which arose and shone forth above the horizon of a
resplendent Heaven. Ye examined not His Cause when so to do would
+P22
have been better for you than all that the sun shineth upon, could ye but
perceive it. Ye remained careless until the divines of Persia--those cruel
ones--pronounced judgment against Him, and unjustly slew Him. His
spirit ascended unto God, and the eyes of the inmates of Paradise and the
angels that are nigh unto Him wept sore by reason of this cruelty. Beware
that ye be not careless henceforth as ye have been careless aforetime.
Return, then, unto God, your Maker, and be not of the heedless.... My
face hath come forth from the veils, and shed its radiance upon all that is
in heaven and on earth; and yet, ye turned not towards Him, notwithstanding
that ye were created for Him, O concourse of kings! Follow,
therefore, that which I speak unto you, and hearken unto it with your
hearts, and be not of such as have turned aside. For your glory consisteth
not in your sovereignty, but rather in your nearness unto God and your
observance of His command as sent down in His holy and preserved
Tablets. Should any one of you rule over the whole earth, and over all
that lieth within it and upon it, its seas, its lands, its mountains, and its
plains, and yet be not remembered by God, all these would profit him
not, could ye but know it.... Arise, then, and make steadfast your feet,
and make ye amends for that which hath escaped you, and set then
yourselves towards His holy Court, on the shore of His mighty Ocean, so
that the pearls of knowledge and wisdom, which God hath stored up
within the shell of His radiant heart, may be revealed unto you....
Beware lest ye hinder the breeze of God from blowing over your hearts, the
breeze through which the hearts of such as have turned unto Him can be
quickened...."
"Lay not aside the fear of God, O kings of the earth," He, in that same
Tablet has revealed, "and beware that ye transgress not the bounds
which the Almighty hath fixed. Observe the injunctions laid upon you in
His Book, and take good heed not to overstep their limits. Be vigilant,
that ye may not do injustice to anyone, be it to the extent of a grain of
mustard seed. Tread ye the path of justice, for this, verily, is the straight
path. Compose your differences, and reduce your armaments, that the
burden of your expenditures may be lightened, and that your minds and
hearts may be tranquilized. Heal the dissensions that divide you, and ye
will no longer be in need of any armaments except what the protection of
your cities and territories demandeth. Fear ye God, and take heed not to
outstrip the bounds of moderation, and be numbered among the extravagant.
We have learned that you are increasing your outlay every
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year, and are laying the burden thereof on your subjects. This, verily, is
more than they can bear, and is a grievous injustice. Decide justly
between men, and be ye the emblems of justice amongst them. This, if ye
judge fairly, is the thing that behooveth you, and beseemeth your station.
"Beware not to deal unjustly with anyone that appealeth to you, and
entereth beneath your shadow. Walk ye in the fear of God, and be ye of
them that lead a godly life. Rest not on your power, your armies, and
treasures. Put your whole trust and confidence in God, Who hath created
you, and seek ye His help in all your affairs. Succor cometh from Him
alone. He succoreth whom He willeth with the hosts of the heavens and of
the earth.
"Know ye that the poor are the trust of God in your midst. Watch that
ye betray not His trust, that ye deal not unjustly with them and that ye
walk not in the ways of the treacherous. Ye will most certainly be called
upon to answer for His trust on the day when the Balance of Justice shall
be set, the day when unto everyone shall be rendered his due, when the
doings of all men, be they rich or poor, shall be weighed.
"If ye pay no heed unto the counsels which, in peerless and unequivocal
language, We have revealed in this Tablet, Divine chastisement shall
assail you from every direction, and the sentence of His justice shall be
pronounced against you. On that day ye shall have no power to resist
Him, and shall recognize your own impotence. Have mercy on yourselves
and on those beneath you, and judge ye between them according to the
precepts prescribed by God in His most holy and exalted Tablet, a Tablet
wherein He hath assigned to each and every thing its settled measure, in
which He hath given, with distinctness, an explanation of all things, and
which is in itself a monition unto them that believe in Him.
"Examine Our Cause, inquire into the things that have befallen Us,
and decide justly between Us and Our enemies, and be ye of them that
act equitably towards their neighbors. If ye stay not the hand of the
oppressor, if ye fail to safeguard the rights of the downtrodden, what right
have ye then to vaunt yourselves among men? What is it of which ye can
rightly boast? Is it on your food and your drink that ye pride yourselves,
on the riches ye lay up in your treasuries, on the diversity and the cost of
the ornaments with which ye deck yourselves? If true glory were to consist
in the possession of such perishable things, then the earth on which ye
walk must needs vaunt itself over you, because it supplieth you, and
bestoweth upon you, these very things, by the decree of the Almighty. In
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its bowels are contained, according to what God hath ordained, all that
ye possess. From it, as a sign of His mercy, ye derive your riches. Behold
then your state, the thing in which ye glory! Would that ye could perceive
it! Nay! By Him Who holdeth in His grasp the kingdom of the entire
creation! Nowhere doth your true and abiding glory reside except in your
firm adherence unto the precepts of God, your wholehearted observance of
His laws, your resolution to see that they do not remain unenforced, and
to pursue steadfastly the right course...."
And again in that same Tablet: "Twenty years have passed, O kings,
during which We have, each day, tasted the agony of a fresh tribulation.
No one of them that were before Us hath endured the things We have
endured. Would that ye could perceive it! They that rose up against Us,
have put Us to death, have shed Our blood, have plundered Our property,
and violated Our honor. Though aware of most of Our afflictions,
ye, nevertheless, have failed to stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it
not your clear duty to restrain the tyranny of the oppressor, and to
deal equitably with your subjects, that your high sense of justice may
be fully demonstrated to all mankind?
"God hath committed into your hands the reins of the government of
the people, that ye may rule with justice over them, safeguard the rights of
the downtrodden, and punish the wrongdoers. If ye neglect the duty
prescribed unto you by God in His Book, your names shall be numbered
with those of the unjust in His sight. Grievous, indeed, will be your error.
Cleave ye to that which your imaginations have devised, and cast behind
your backs the commandments of God, the Most Exalted, the Inaccessible,
the All-Compelling, the Almighty? Cast away the things ye possess,
and cling to that which God hath bidden you observe. Seek ye His grace,
for he that seeketh it treadeth His straight Path.
"Consider the state in which We are, and behold ye the ills and
troubles that have tried Us. Neglect Us not, though it be for a moment,
and judge ye between Us and Our enemies with equity. This will, surely,
be a manifest advantage unto you. Thus do We relate to you Our tale,
and recount the things that have befallen Us, that ye might take off Our
ills and ease Our burden. Let him who will, relieve Us from Our trouble;
and as to him that willeth not, my Lord is assuredly the best of Helpers.
"Warn and acquaint the people, O Servant, with the things We have
sent down unto Thee, and let the fear of no one dismay Thee, and be
Thou not of them that waver. The day is approaching when God will have
+P25
exalted His Cause and magnified His testimony in the eyes of all who are
in the heavens and all who are on the earth. Place, in all circumstances,
Thy whole trust in Thy Lord, and fix Thy gaze upon Him, and turn away
from all them that repudiate His truth. Let God, Thy Lord, be Thy
sufficing Succorer and Helper. We have pledged Ourself to secure Thy
triumph upon earth and to exalt Our Cause above all men, though no
king be found who would turn his face towards Thee...."
In the &Kitab-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book), that priceless treasury
enshrining for all time the brightest emanations of the mind of
&Baha'u'llah, the Charter of His World Order, the chief repository of His
laws, the Harbinger of His Covenant, the Pivotal Work containing some
of His noblest exhortations, weightiest pronouncements, and portentous
prophecies, and revealed during the full tide of His tribulations, at a
time when the rulers of the earth had definitely forsaken Him--in such
a Book we read the following:
"O kings of the earth! He Who is the sovereign Lord of all is come. The
Kingdom is God's, the omnipotent Protector, the Self-Subsisting. Worship
none but God, and, with radiant hearts, lift up your faces unto your
Lord, the Lord of all names. This is a Revelation to which whatever ye
possess can never be compared, could ye but know it. We see you rejoicing
in that which ye have amassed for others, and shutting out yourselves
from the worlds which naught except My Guarded Tablet can reckon.
The treasures ye have laid up have drawn you far away from your
ultimate objective. This ill beseemeth you, could ye but understand it.
Wash your hearts from all earthly defilements, and hasten to enter the
Kingdom of your Lord, the Creator of earth and heaven, Who caused the
world to tremble, and all its peoples to wail, except them that have
renounced all things and clung to that which the Hidden Tablet hath
ordained...."
The Most Great Law Revealed
And further: "O kings of the earth! The Most Great Law hath been
revealed in this Spot, this Scene of transcendent splendor. Every hidden
thing hath been brought to light, by virtue of the Will of the Supreme
Ordainer, He Who hath ushered in the Last Hour, through Whom the
Moon hath been cleft, and every irrevocable decree expounded.
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"Ye are but vassals, O kings of the earth! He Who is the King of Kings
hath appeared, arrayed in His most wondrous glory, and is summoning
you unto Himself, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. Take heed lest
pride deter you from recognizing the Source of Revelation; lest the things
of this world shut you out as by a veil from Him Who is the Creator of
heaven. Arise, and serve Him Who is the Desire of all nations, Who hath
created you through a word from Him, and ordained you to be, for all
time, the emblems of His sovereignty.
"By the righteousness of God! It is not Our wish to lay hands on your
kingdoms. Our mission is to seize and possess the hearts of men. Upon
them the eyes of &Baha are fastened. To this testifieth the Kingdom of
Names, could ye but comprehend it. Whoso followeth his Lord, will
renounce the world and all that is therein; how much greater, then, must
be the detachment of Him Who holdeth so august a station! Forsake your
palaces, and haste ye to gain admittance into His Kingdom. This,
indeed, will profit you both in this world and in the next. To this testifieth
the Lord of the realm on high, did ye but know it.
"How great is the blessedness that awaiteth the king who will arise to
aid My Cause in My Kingdom, who will detach himself from all else but
Me! Such a king is numbered with the companions of the Crimson Ark,
the Ark which God hath prepared for the people of &Baha. All must glorify
his name, must reverence his station, and aid him to unlock the cities
with the keys of My Name, the omnipotent Protector of all that inhabit
the visible and invisible kingdoms. Such a king is the very eye of mankind,
the luminous ornament on the brow of creation, the fountainhead
of blessings unto the whole world. Offer up, O people of &Baha, your
substance, nay your very lives, for his assistance."
And further, this evident arraignment in that same Book: "We have
asked nothing from you. For the sake of God We, verily, exhort you, and
will be patient as We have been patient in that which hath befallen Us at
your hands, O concourse of kings!"
Moreover, in His Tablet to Queen Victoria &Baha'u'llah thus addresses
all the kings of the earth, summoning them to cleave to the Lesser
Peace, as distinct from that Most Great Peace which those who are fully
conscious of the power of His Revelation and avowedly profess the tenets
of His Faith can alone proclaim and must eventually establish:
"O kings of the earth! We see you increasing every year your
expenditures, and laying the burden thereof on your subjects. This, verily, is
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wholly and grossly unjust. Fear the sighs and tears of this Wronged One,
and lay not excessive burdens on your peoples. Do not rob them to rear
palaces for yourselves; nay rather choose for them that which ye choose for
yourselves. Thus We unfold to your eyes that which profiteth you, if ye
but perceive. Your people are your treasures. Beware lest your rule violate
the commandments of God, and ye deliver your wards to the hands of the
robber. By them ye rule, by their means ye subsist, by their aid ye
conquer. Yet, how disdainfully ye look upon them! How strange, how
very strange!
"Now that ye have refused the Most Great Peace, hold ye fast unto
this, the Lesser Peace, that haply ye may in some degree better your own
condition and that of your dependents.
"O rulers of the earth! Be reconciled among yourselves, that ye may
need no more armaments save in a measure to safeguard your territories
and dominions. Beware lest ye disregard the counsel of the All-Knowing,
the Faithful.
"Be united, O kings of the earth, for thereby will the tempest of discord
be stilled amongst you, and your peoples find rest, if ye be of them that
comprehend. Should anyone among you take up arms against another,
rise ye all against him, for this is naught but manifest justice."
To the Christian kings &Baha'u'llah, moreover, particularly directs His
words of censure, and, in a language that cannot be mistaken, He
discloses the true character of His Revelation:
"O kings of Christendom! Heard ye not the saying of Jesus, the Spirit of
God, `I go away, and come again unto you'? Wherefore, then, did ye fail,
when He did come again unto you in the clouds of heaven, to draw nigh
unto Him, that ye might behold His face, and be of them that attained
His Presence? In another passage He saith: `When He, the Spirit of
Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth.' And yet, behold how,
when He did bring the truth, ye refused to turn your faces towards Him,
and persisted in disporting yourselves with your pastimes and fancies. Ye
welcomed Him not, neither did ye seek His Presence, that ye might hear
the verses of God from His own mouth, and partake of the manifold
wisdom of the Almighty, the All-Glorious, the All-Wise. Ye have, by
reason of your failure, hindered the breath of God from being wafted over
you, and have withheld from your souls the sweetness of its fragrance. Ye
continue roving with delight in the valley of your corrupt desires. Ye and
all ye possess shall pass away. Ye shall, most certainly, return to God,
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and shall be called to account for your doings in the presence of Him Who
shall gather together the entire creation...."
The &Bab, moreover, in the &Qayyum-i-Asma', His celebrated commentary
on the &Surih of Joseph, revealed in the first year of His Mission,
and characterized by &Baha'u'llah as "the first, the greatest, and mightiest
of all books" in the &Babi Dispensation, has issued this stirring call to
the kings and princes of the earth:
"O concourse of kings and of the sons of kings! Lay aside, one and all,
your dominion which belongeth unto God.... Vain indeed is your
dominion, for God hath set aside earthly possessions for such as have
denied Him.... O concourse of kings! Deliver with truth and in all haste
the verses sent down by Us to the peoples of Turkey and of India, and
beyond them, with power and with truth, to lands in both the East and
the West.... By God! If ye do well, to your own behoof will ye do well;
and if ye deny God and His signs, We, in very truth, having God, can
well dispense with all creatures and all earthly dominion."
And again: "Fear ye God, O concourse of kings, lest ye remain afar
from Him Who is His Remembrance [the &Bab], after the Truth hath come
unto you with a Book and signs from God, as spoken through the
wondrous tongue of Him Who is His Remembrance. Seek ye grace from
God, for God hath ordained for you, after ye have believed in Him, a
Garden the vastness of which is as the vastness of the whole of Paradise."
So much for the epoch-making counsels and warnings collectively
addressed by the &Bab and &Baha'u'llah to the sovereigns of the earth, and
more particularly directed to the kings of Christendom. I would be
failing to do justice to my theme were I to ignore, or even to dismiss
briefly, those audacious, fate-laden apostrophes to individual monarchs
who, whether as kings or emperors, have either viewed with cold
indifference the tribulations, or rejected with contempt the warnings, of
the twin Founders of our Faith. I can neither quote as fully as I should
from the two thousand and more verses that have streamed from the pen
of &Baha'u'llah and, to a lesser extent, from that of the &Bab, addressed to
individual monarchs in Europe and Asia, nor is it my purpose to
expatiate upon the circumstances that have provoked, or the consequences
that have flowed from, those astounding utterances. The historian
of the future, viewing more widely and in fuller perspective the
momentous happenings of the Apostolic and Formative Ages of the
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Faith of &Baha'u'llah, will no doubt be able to evaluate accurately and to
describe in a circumstantial manner the causes, the implications and
the effects of these Divine Messages which, in their scope and effectiveness,
have certainly no parallel in the religious annals of mankind.
To the French Emperor, Napoleon III, &Baha'u'llah addressed these
words: "O King of Paris! Tell the priest to ring the bells no longer. By
God, the True One! The Most Mighty Bell hath appeared in the form of
Him Who is the Most Great Name, and the fingers of the will of thy Lord,
the Most Exalted, the Most High, toll it out in the heaven of Immortality,
in His Name, the All-Glorious. Thus have the mighty verses of thy
Lord been again sent down unto thee, that thou mayest arise to remember
God, the Creator of earth and heaven, in these days when all the
tribes of the earth have mourned, and the foundations of the cities have
trembled, and the dust of irreligion hath enwrapped all men, except such
as thy Lord, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise, was pleased to spare....
Give ear, O King, unto the Voice that calleth from the Fire which
burneth in this Verdant Tree, upon this Sinai which hath been raised
above the hallowed and snow-white Spot, beyond the Everlasting City:
`Verily, there is none other God but Me, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most
Merciful!' We, in truth, have sent Him Whom We aided with the Holy
Spirit [Jesus], that He may announce unto you this Light that hath shone
forth from the horizon of the will of your Lord, the Most Exalted, the
All-Glorious, and Whose signs have been revealed in the West, that ye may
set your faces towards Him [&Baha'u'llah], on this Day which God hath
exalted above all other days, and whereon the All-Merciful hath shed the
splendor of His effulgent glory upon all who are in heaven and all who are
on earth. Arise thou to serve God and help His Cause. He, verily, will
assist thee with the hosts of the seen and unseen, and will set thee king
over all that whereon the sun riseth. Thy Lord, in truth, is the All-Powerful,
the Almighty.... Attire thy temple with the ornament of My
Name, and thy tongue with remembrance of Me, and thine heart with
love for Me, the Almighty, the Most High. We have desired for thee
naught except that which is better for thee than what thou dost possess
and all the treasures of the earth. Thy Lord, verily, is knowing, informed
of all....
"O King! We heard the words thou didst utter in answer to the Czar of
Russia, concerning the decision made regarding the war [Crimean War].
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Thy Lord, verily, knoweth, is informed of all. Thou didst say: `I lay asleep
upon my couch, when the cry of the oppressed, who were drowned in the
Black Sea, wakened me.' This is what we heard thee say, and, verily, thy
Lord is witness unto what I say. We testify that that which wakened thee
was not their cry, but the promptings of thine own passions, for We tested
thee, and found thee wanting. Comprehend the meaning of My words,
and be thou of the discerning.... Hadst thou been sincere in thy words,
thou wouldst have not cast behind thy back the Book of God, when it was
sent unto thee by Him Who is the Almighty, the All-Wise. We have
proved thee through it, and found thee other than that which thou didst
profess. Arise, and make amends for that which escaped thee. Erelong the
world and all that thou possessest will perish, and the kingdom will
remain unto God, thy Lord and the Lord of thy fathers of old. It
behooveth thee not to conduct thine affairs according to the dictates of thy
desires. Fear the sighs of this Wronged One, and shield Him from the
darts of such as act unjustly. For what thou hast done, thy kingdom shall
be thrown into confusion, and thine empire shall pass from thine hands,
as a punishment for that which thou hast wrought. Then wilt thou know
how thou hast plainly erred. Commotions shall seize all the people in that
land, unless thou arisest to help this Cause, and followest Him Who is
the Spirit of God [Jesus] in this, the straight Path. Hath thy pomp made
thee proud? By My Life! It shall not endure; nay, it shall soon pass away,
unless thou holdest fast by this firm Cord. We see abasement hastening
after thee, while thou art of the heedless.... Abandon thy palaces to the
people of the graves, and thine empire to whosoever desireth it, and turn,
then, unto the Kingdom. This, verily, is what God hath chosen for thee,
wert thou of them that turn unto Him.... Shouldst thou desire to bear
the weight of thy dominion, bear it then to aid the Cause of thy Lord.
Glorified be this station which whoever attaineth thereunto hath attained
unto all good that proceedeth from Him Who is the All-Knowing,
the All-Wise.... Exultest thou over the treasures thou dost possess,
knowing they shall perish? Rejoicest thou in that thou rulest a span of
earth, when the whole world, in the estimation of the people of &Baha, is
worth as much as the black in the eye of a dead ant? Abandon it unto
such as have set their affections upon it, and turn thou unto Him Who is
the Desire of the world. Whither are gone the proud and their palaces?
Gaze thou into their tombs, that thou mayest profit by this example,
inasmuch as We made it a lesson unto every beholder. Were the breezes of
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Revelation to seize thee, thou wouldst flee the world, and turn unto the
Kingdom, and wouldst expend all thou possessest, that thou mayest draw
nigh unto this sublime Vision."
Revealed to the Pope
To Pope Pius IX, &Baha'u'llah revealed the following: "O Pope! Rend
the veils asunder. He Who is the Lord of Lords is come overshadowed with
clouds, and the decree hath been fulfilled by God, the Almighty, the
Unrestrained.... He, verily, hath again come down from Heaven even
as He came down from it the first time. Beware that thou dispute not with
Him even as the Pharisees disputed with Him [Jesus] without a clear
token or proof. On His right hand flow the living waters of grace, and on
His left the choice Wine of justice, whilst before Him march the angels of
Paradise, bearing the banners of His signs. Beware lest any name debar
thee from God, the Creator of earth and heaven. Leave thou the world
behind thee, and turn towards thy Lord, through Whom the whole earth
hath been illumined.... Dwellest thou in palaces whilst He Who is the
King of Revelation liveth in the most desolate of abodes? Leave them unto
such as desire them, and set thy face with joy and delight towards the
Kingdom.... Arise in the name of thy Lord, the God of Mercy, amidst
the peoples of the earth, and seize thou the Cup of Life with the hands of
confidence, and first drink thou therefrom, and proffer it then to such as
turn towards it amongst the peoples of all faiths....
"Call thou to remembrance Him Who was the Spirit [Jesus], Who,
when He came, the most learned of His age pronounced judgment
against Him in His own country, whilst he who was only a fisherman
believed in Him. Take heed, then, ye men of understanding heart! Thou,
in truth, art one of the suns of the heaven of His names. Guard thyself,
lest darkness spread its veils over thee, and fold thee away from His light....
Consider those who opposed the Son [Jesus], when He came unto them
with sovereignty and power. How many the Pharisees who were waiting
to behold Him, and were lamenting over their separation from Him! And
yet, when the fragrance of His coming was wafted over them, and His
beauty was unveiled, they turned aside from Him and disputed with
Him.... None save a very few, who were destitute of any power amongst
men, turned towards His face. And yet today every man endowed with
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power and invested with sovereignty prideth himself on His Name! In like
manner, consider how numerous, in these days, are the monks who, in
My Name, have secluded themselves in their churches, and who, when
the appointed time was fulfilled, and We unveiled Our beauty, knew Us
not, though they call upon Me at eventide and at dawn....
"The Word which the Son concealed is made manifest. It hath been
sent down in the form of the human temple in this day. Blessed be the
Lord Who is the Father! He, verily, is come unto the nations in His most
great majesty. Turn your faces towards Him, O concourse of the righteous!
...This is the day whereon the Rock [Peter] crieth out and
shouteth, and celebrateth the praise of its Lord, the All-Possessing, the
Most High, saying: `Lo! The Father is come, and that which ye were
promised in the Kingdom is fulfilled!...' My body longeth for the cross,
and Mine head waiteth the thrust of the spear, in the path of the
All-Merciful, that the world may be purged from its transgressions....
"O Supreme Pontiff! Incline thine ear unto that which the Fashioner
of moldering bones counseleth thee, as voiced by Him Who is His Most
Great Name. Sell all the embellished ornaments thou dost possess, and
expend them in the path of God, Who causeth the night to return upon
the day, and the day to return upon the night. Abandon thy kingdom
unto the kings, and emerge from thy habitation, with thy face set towards
the Kingdom, and, detached from the world, then speak forth the praises
of thy Lord betwixt earth and heaven. Thus hath bidden thee He Who is
the Possessor of Names, on the part of thy Lord, the Almighty, the
All-Knowing. Exhort thou the kings and say: `Deal equitably with men.
Beware lest ye transgress the bounds fixed in the Book.' This indeed
becometh thee. Beware lest thou appropriate unto thyself the things of the
world and the riches thereof. Leave them unto such as desire them, and
cleave unto that which hath been enjoined upon thee by Him Who is the
Lord of creation. Should anyone offer thee all the treasures of the earth,
refuse to even glance upon them. Be as thy Lord hath been. Thus hath the
Tongue of Revelation spoken that which God hath made the ornament of
the book of creation.... Should the inebriation of the wine of My verses
seize thee, and thou determinest to present thyself before the throne of thy
Lord, the Creator of earth and heaven, make My love thy vesture, and
thy shield remembrance of Me, and thy provision reliance upon God, the
Revealer of all power.... Verily, the day of ingathering is come, and all
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things have been separated from each other. He hath stored away that
which He chose in the vessels of justice, and cast into fire that which
befitteth it. Thus hath it been decreed by your Lord, the Mighty, the
Loving, in this promised Day. He, verily, ordaineth what He pleaseth.
There is none other God save He, the Almighty, the All-Compelling."
In the Tablet addressed to the Czar of Russia, Alexander II, we read:
"O Czar of Russia! Incline thine ear unto the voice of God, the King, the
Holy, and turn thou unto Paradise, the Spot wherein abideth He Who,
among the Concourse on high, beareth the most excellent titles, and
Who, in the kingdom of creation, is called by the name of God, the
Effulgent, the All-Glorious. Beware lest thy desire deter thee from turning
towards the face of thy Lord, the Compassionate, the Most Merciful.
We, verily, have heard the thing for which thou didst supplicate thy Lord,
whilst secretly communing with Him. Wherefore, the breeze of My
loving-kindness wafted forth, and the sea of My mercy surged, and We
answered thee in truth. Thy Lord, verily, is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.
Whilst I lay chained and fettered in the prison, one of thy ministers
extended Me his aid. Wherefore hath God ordained for thee a station
which the knowledge of none can comprehend except His knowledge.
Beware lest thou barter away this sublime station.... Beware lest thy
sovereignty withhold thee from Him Who is the Supreme Sovereign. He,
verily, is come with His Kingdom, and all the atoms cry aloud: `Lo! The
Lord is come in His great majesty!' He Who is the Father is come, and the
Son [Jesus], in the holy vale, crieth out: `Here am I, here am I, O Lord,
My God!', whilst Sinai circleth round the House, and the Burning Bush
calleth aloud: `The All-Bounteous is come mounted upon the clouds!
Blessed is he that draweth nigh unto Him, and woe betide them that are
far away.'
"Arise thou amongst men in the name of this all-compelling Cause,
and summon, then, the nations unto God, the Exalted, the Great. Be
thou not of them who called upon God by one of His names, but who,
when He Who is the Object of all names appeared, denied Him and
turned aside from Him, and, in the end, pronounced sentence against
Him with manifest injustice. Consider and call thou to mind the days
whereon the Spirit of God [Jesus] appeared, and Herod gave judgment
against Him. God, however, aided Him with the hosts of the unseen, and
protected Him with truth, and sent Him down unto another land,
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according to His promise. He, verily, ordaineth what He pleaseth. Thy
Lord truly preserveth whom He willeth, be he in the midst of the seas, or
in the maw of the serpent, or beneath the sword of the oppressor....
"Again I say: Hearken unto My voice that calleth from My prison, that
it may acquaint thee with the things that have befallen My Beauty, at
the hands of them that are the manifestations of My glory, and that thou
mayest perceive how great hath been My patience, notwithstanding My
might, and how immense My forebearance, notwithstanding My power.
By My life! Couldst thou but know the things sent down by My Pen, and
discover the treasures of My Cause, and the pearls of My mysteries which
lie hid in the seas of My names and in the goblets of My words, thou
wouldst, in thy love for My name, and in thy longing for My glorious and
sublime Kingdom, lay down thy life in My path. Know thou that though
My body be beneath the swords of My foes, and My limbs be beset with
incalculable afflictions, yet My spirit is filled with a gladness with which
all the joys of the earth can never compare.
"Set thine heart towards Him Who is the Point of adoration for the
world, and say: O peoples of the earth! Have ye denied the One in Whose
path He Who came with the truth, bearing the announcement of your
Lord, the Exalted, the Great, suffered martyrdom? Say: This is an
Announcement whereat the hearts of the Prophets and Messengers have
rejoiced. This is the One Whom the heart of the world remembereth, and
is promised in the Books of God, the Mighty, the All-Wise. The hands of
the Messengers were, in their desire to meet Me, upraised towards God,
the Mighty, the Glorified.... Some lamented in their separation from
Me, others endured hardships in My path, and still others laid down their
lives for the sake of My Beauty, could ye but know it. Say: I, verily, have
not sought to extol Mine Own Self, but rather God Himself, were ye to
judge fairly. Naught can be seen in Me except God and His Cause, could
ye but perceive it. I am the One Whom the tongue of Isaiah hath extolled,
the One with Whose name both the Torah and the Evangel were adorned.
...Blessed be the king whose sovereignty hath withheld him not from his
Sovereign, and who hath turned unto God with his heart. He, verily, is
accounted of those that have attained unto that which God, the Mighty,
the All-Wise, hath willed. Erelong will such a one find himself numbered
with the monarchs of the realms of the Kingdom. Thy Lord is, in truth,
potent over all things. He giveth what He willeth to whomsoever He
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willeth, and withholdeth what He pleaseth from whomsoever He willeth.
He, verily, is the All-Powerful, the Almighty."
To Queen Victoria &Baha'u'llah has written: "O Queen in London!
Incline thine ear unto the voice of thy Lord, the Lord of all mankind,
calling from the Divine Lote-Tree: Verily, no God is there but Me, the
Almighty, the All-Wise! Cast away all that is on earth, and attire the
head of thy kingdom with the crown of the remembrance of thy Lord, the
All-Glorious. He, in truth, hath come unto the world in His most great
glory, and all that hath been mentioned in the Gospel hath been fulfilled.
The land of Syria hath been honored by the footsteps of its Lord, the Lord
of all men, and north and south are both inebriated with the wine of His
presence. Blessed is the man that inhaled the fragrance of the Most
Merciful, and turned unto the Dawning-Place of His Beauty, in this
resplendent Dawn. The Mosque of &Aqsa vibrateth through the breezes of
its Lord, the All-Glorious, whilst &Batha [Mecca] trembleth at the voice of
God, the Exalted, the Most High. Whereupon every single stone of them
celebrateth the praise of the Lord, through this Great Name.
"Lay aside thy desire, and set then thine heart towards thy Lord, the
Ancient of Days. We make mention of thee for the sake of God, and desire
that thy name may be exalted through thy remembrance of God, the
Creator of earth and heaven. He, verily, is witness unto that which I say.
We have been informed that thou hast forbidden the trading in slaves,
both men and women. This, verily, is what God hath enjoined in this
wondrous Revelation. God hath, truly, destined a reward for thee,
because of this. He, verily, will pay the doer of good his due recompense,
wert thou to follow what hath been sent unto thee by Him Who is the
All-Knowing, the All-Informed. As to him who turneth aside, and
swelleth with pride, after that the clear tokens have come unto him, from
the Revealer of signs, his work shall God bring to naught. He, in truth,
hath power over all things. Man's actions are acceptable after his having
recognized [the Manifestation]. He that turneth aside from the True One
is indeed the most veiled amongst His creatures. Thus hath it been
decreed by Him Who is the Almighty, the Most Powerful.
"We have also heard that thou hast entrusted the reins of counsel into
the hands of the representatives of the people. Thou, indeed, hast done
well, for thereby the foundations of the edifice of thine affairs will be
strengthened, and the hearts of all that are beneath thy shadow, whether
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high or low, will be tranquilized. It behooveth them, however, to be
trustworthy among His servants, and to regard themselves as the representatives
of all that dwell on earth. This is what counseleth them, in
this Tablet, He Who is the Ruler, the All-Wise.... Blessed is he that
entereth the assembly for the sake of God, and judgeth between men with
pure justice. He, indeed, is of the blissful....
"Turn thou unto God and say: O my Sovereign Lord! I am but a vassal
of Thine, and Thou art, in truth, the King of kings. I have lifted my
suppliant hands unto the heaven of Thy grace and Thy bounties. Send
down, then, upon me from the clouds of Thy generosity that which will
rid me of all save Thee, and draw me nigh unto Thyself. I beseech Thee, O
my Lord, by Thy name, which Thou hast made the king of names and the
manifestation of Thyself to all who are in heaven and on earth, to rend
asunder the veils that have intervened between me and my recognition of
the Dawning-Place of Thy signs and the Dayspring of Thy Revelation.
Thou art, verily, the Almighty, the All-Powerful, the All-Bounteous.
Deprive me not, O my Lord, of the fragrances of the Robe of Thy mercy in
Thy days, and write down for me that which Thou hast written down for
Thy handmaidens who have believed in Thee and in Thy signs, and have
recognized Thee, and set their hearts towards the horizon of Thy Cause.
Thou art truly the Lord of the worlds and of those who show mercy the
Most Merciful. Assist me, then, O my God, to remember Thee amongst
Thy handmaidens, and to aid Thy Cause in Thy lands. Accept, then,
that which hath escaped me when the light of Thy countenance shone
forth. Thou, indeed, hast power over all things. Glory be to Thee, O Thou
in Whose hand is the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth."
In the &Kitab-i-Aqdas, His Most Holy Book, &Baha'u'llah thus addresses
the German Emperor, William I: "Say: O King of Berlin! Give ear
unto the Voice calling from this manifest Temple: Verily, there is none
other God but Me, the Everlasting, the Peerless, the Ancient of Days.
Take heed lest pride debar thee from recognizing the Dayspring of Divine
Revelation, lest earthly desires shut thee out, as by a veil, from the Lord of
the Throne above and of the earth below. Thus counseleth thee the Pen of
the Most High. He, verily, is the Most Gracious, the All-Bountiful. Do
thou remember the one whose power transcended thy power [Napoleon
III], and whose station excelled thy station. Where is he? Whither are
gone the things he possessed? Take warning, and be not of them that are
fast asleep. He it was who cast the Tablet of God behind him, when We
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made known unto him what the hosts of tyranny had caused Us to suffer.
Wherefore, disgrace assailed him from all sides, and he went down to dust
in great loss. Think deeply, O King, concerning him, and concerning
them who, like unto thee, have conquered cities and ruled over men. The
All-Merciful brought them down from their palaces to their graves. Be
warned, be of them who reflect."
And further, in that same Book, this remarkable prophecy: "O banks
of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the swords
of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have another turn.
And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous
glory."
Again in the &Kitab-i-Aqdas these words, directed to Emperor Francis
Joseph, are recorded: "O Emperor of Austria! He who is the Dayspring of
God's Light dwelt in the prison of &Akka, at the time when thou didst set
forth to visit the &Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem]. Thou passed Him by, and
inquired not about Him, by Whom every house is exalted, and every lofty
gate unlocked. We, verily, made it [Jerusalem] a place whereunto the
world should turn, that they might remember Me, and yet thou hast
rejected Him Who is the Object of this remembrance, when He appeared
with the Kingdom of God, thy Lord and the Lord of the worlds. We have
been with thee at all times, and found thee clinging unto the Branch and
heedless of the Root. Thy Lord, verily, is a witness unto what I say. We
grieved to see thee circle round Our Name, whilst unaware of Us, though
We were before thy face. Open thine eyes, that thou mayest behold this
glorious Vision, and recognize Him Whom thou invokest in the daytime
and in the night season, and gaze on the Light that shineth above this
luminous Horizon."
In the &Suriy-i-Muluk &Sultan &Abdu'l-'Aziz is addressed in the following
terms: "Hearken, O king, to the speech of Him that speaketh the
truth, Him that doth not ask thee to recompense Him with the things God
hath chosen to bestow upon thee, Him Who unerringly treadeth the
straight Path. He it is Who summoneth thee unto God, thy Lord, Who
showeth thee the right course, the way that leadeth to true felicity, that
haply thou mayest be of them with whom it shall be well.... He that
giveth up himself wholly to God, God shall, assuredly, be with him; and
he that placeth his complete trust in God, God shall, verily, protect him
from whatsoever may harm him, and shield him from the wickedness of
every evil plotter.
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"Wert thou to incline thine ear unto My speech and observe My
counsel, God would exalt thee to so eminent a position that the designs of
no man on the whole earth could ever touch or hurt thee. Observe, O
king, with thine inmost heart and with thy whole being, the precepts of
God, and walk not in the paths of the oppressor. Seize thou, and hold
firmly within the grasp of thy might, the reins of the affairs of thy people,
and examine in person whatever pertaineth unto them. Let nothing
escape thee, for therein lieth the highest good.
"Render thanks unto God for having chosen thee out of the whole
world, and made thee king over them that profess thy faith. It well
beseemeth thee to appreciate the wondrous favors with which God hath
favored thee, and to magnify continually His name. Thou canst best
praise Him if thou lovest His loved ones, and dost safeguard and protect
His servants from the mischief of the treacherous, that none may any
longer oppress them. Thou shouldst, moreover, arise to enforce the law of
God amongst them, that thou mayest be of those who are firmly established
in His law.
"Shouldst thou cause rivers of justice to spread their waters amongst
thy subjects, God would surely aid thee with the hosts of the unseen and
of the seen, and would strengthen thee in thine affairs. No God is there
but Him. All creation and its empire are His. Unto Him return the works
of the faithful.
"Place not thy reliance on thy treasures. Put thy whole confidence in
the grace of God, thy Lord. Let Him be thy trust in whatever thou doest,
and be of them that have submitted themselves to His Will. Let Him be
thy helper and enrich thyself with His treasures, for with Him are the
treasuries of the heavens and of the earth. He bestoweth them upon whom
He will, and from whom He will He withholdeth them. There is none
other God but Him, the All-Possessing, the All-Praised. All are but
paupers at the door of His mercy; all are helpless before the revelation of
His sovereignty, and beseech His favors.
"Overstep not the bounds of moderation, and deal justly with them
that serve thee. Bestow upon them according to their needs, and not to the
extent that will enable them to lay up riches for themselves, to deck their
persons, to embellish their homes, to acquire the things that are of no
benefit unto them, and to be numbered with the extravagant. Deal with
them with undeviating justice, so that none among them may either
suffer want, or be pampered with luxuries. This is but manifest justice.
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Allow not the abject to rule over and dominate them who are noble and
worthy of honor, and suffer not the high-minded to be at the mercy of the
contemptible and worthless, for this is what We observed upon Our
arrival in the City [Constantinople], and to it We bear witness....
"Set before thine eyes God's unerring Balance and, as one standing in
His Presence, weigh in that balance thine actions every day, every
moment of thy life. Bring thyself to account ere thou art summoned to a
reckoning, on the Day when no man shall have strength to stand for fear
of God, the Day when the hearts of the heedless ones shall be made to
tremble....
"Thou art God's shadow on earth. Strive, therefore, to act in such a
manner as befitteth so eminent, so august a station. If thou dost depart
from following the things We have caused to descend upon thee and
taught thee, thou wilt, assuredly, be derogating from that great and
priceless honor. Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse
thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of
any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine
heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God
shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one
heart. This, verily, hath been decreed and written down in His ancient
Book. And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and
undivided, it behooveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one
and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine
heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of anyone besides
Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity,
and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness....
Let the Oppressor Desist
"Let thine ear be attentive, O King, to the words We have addressed
thee. Let the oppressor desist from his tyranny, and cut off the perpetrators
of injustice from among them that profess thy faith. By the
righteousness of God! The tribulations We have sustained are such that
any pen that recounteth them cannot but be overwhelmed with anguish.
No one of them that truly believe and uphold the unity of God can bear
the burden of their recital. So great have been Our sufferings that even
the eyes of our enemies have wept over Us, and beyond those of every
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discerning person. And to all these trials have We been subjected, in spite
of Our action in approaching thee, and in bidding the people to enter
beneath thy shadow, that thou mightest be a stronghold unto them that
believe in and uphold the unity of God.
"Have I, O King, ever disobeyed thee? Have I, at any time, transgressed
any of thy laws? Can any of thy ministers that represent thee in
&Iraq produce any proof that can establish My disloyalty to thee? No, by
Him Who is the Lord of all worlds! Not for one short moment did We rebel
against thee, or against any of thy ministers. Never, God willing, shall
We revolt against thee, though We be exposed to trials more severe than
any We suffered in the past. In the daytime and in the night season, at
even and at morn, We pray to God on thy behalf, that He may graciously
aid thee to be obedient unto Him and to observe His commandments,
that He may shield thee from the hosts of the evil ones. Do, therefore, as it
pleaseth thee, and treat Us as befitteth thy station and beseemeth thy
sovereignty. Be not forgetful of the law of God in whatever thou desirest to
achieve, now or in the days to come. Say: Praise be to God, the Lord of all
worlds!"
Moreover, in the &Kitab-i-Aqdas, is this vehement apostrophe to
Constantinople: "O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas! The
throne of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the flame
of hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom, in such wise that the
Concourse on high and they who circle around the Exalted Throne have
wailed and lamented. We behold in thee the foolish ruling over the wise,
and darkness vaunting itself against the light. Thou art indeed filled with
manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious? By
Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy daughters
and thy widows and all the kindreds that dwell within thee shall lament.
Thus informeth thee the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."
As to &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah, the &Lawh-i-Sultan, despatched to him from
&Akka and constituting &Baha'u'llah's lengthiest Epistle to any single
sovereign, proclaims: "O King! I was but a man like others, asleep upon
My couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me,
and taught Me the knowledge of all that hath been. This thing is not from
Me, but from One Who is Almighty and All-Knowing. And He bade Me
lift up My voice between earth and heaven, and for this there befell Me
what hath caused the tears of every man of understanding to flow. The
learning current amongst men I studied not; their schools I entered not.
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Ask of the city wherein I dwelt, that thou mayest be well assured that I am
not of them who speak falsely. This is but a leaf which the winds of the will
of thy Lord, the Almighty, the All-Praised, have stirred. Can it be still
when the tempestuous winds are blowing? Nay, by Him Who is the Lord
of all Names and Attributes! They move it as they list. The evanescent is
as nothing before Him Who is the Ever-Abiding. His all-compelling
summons hath reached Me, and caused Me to speak His praise amidst all
people. I was indeed as one dead when His behest was uttered. The hand
of the will of thy Lord, the Compassionate, the Merciful, transformed
Me. Can anyone speak forth of his own accord that for which all men,
both high and low, will protest against him? Nay, by Him Who taught
the Pen the eternal mysteries, save him whom the grace of the Almighty,
the All-Powerful, hath strengthened. The Pen of the Most High addresseth
Me saying: Fear not. Relate unto His Majesty the &Shah that which
befell thee. His heart, verily, is between the fingers of thy Lord, the God of
Mercy, that haply the sun of justice and bounty may shine forth above
the horizon of his heart. Thus hath the decree been irrevocably fixed by
Him Who is the All-Wise.
"Look upon this Youth, O King, with the eyes of justice; judge thou,
then, with truth concerning what hath befallen Him. Of a verity, God
hath made thee His shadow amongst men, and the sign of His power unto
all that dwell on earth. Judge thou between Us and them that have
wronged Us without proof and without an enlightening Book. They that
surround thee love thee for their own sakes, whereas this Youth loveth thee
for thine own sake, and hath had no desire except to draw thee nigh unto
the seat of grace, and to turn thee toward the right hand of justice. Thy
Lord beareth witness unto that which I declare.
"O King! Wert thou to incline thine ear unto the shrill of the Pen of
Glory and the cooing of the Dove of Eternity which, on the branches of the
Lote-Tree beyond which there is no passing, uttereth praises to God, the
Maker of all names and Creator of earth and heaven, thou wouldst
attain unto a station from which thou wouldst behold in the world of
being naught save the effulgence of the Adored One, and wouldst regard
thy sovereignty as the most contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning
it to whosoever might desire it, and setting thy face toward the Horizon
aglow with the light of His countenance. Neither wouldst thou ever be
willing to bear the burden of dominion save for the purpose of helping thy
Lord, the Exalted, the Most High. Then would the Concourse on high
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bless thee. O how excellent is this most sublime station, couldst thou
ascend thereunto through the power of a sovereignty recognized as derived
from the Name of God!...
"O King of the age! The eyes of these refugees are turned towards and
fixed upon the mercy of the Most Merciful. No doubt is there whatever
that these tribulations will be followed by the outpourings of a supreme
mercy, and these dire adversities be succeeded by an overflowing prosperity.
We fain would hope, however, that His Majesty the &Shah will himself
examine these matters, and bring hope to the hearts. That which We have
submitted to thy Majesty is indeed for thine highest good. And God,
verily, is a sufficient witness unto Me....
"O would that thou wouldst permit Me, O &Shah, to send unto thee
that which would cheer the eyes, and tranquilize the souls, and persuade
every fair-minded person that with Him is the knowledge of the Book....
But for the repudiation of the foolish and the connivance of the divines, I
would have uttered a discourse that would have thrilled and carried away
the hearts unto a realm from the murmur of whose winds can be heard:
`No God is there but He!'...
"I have seen, O &Shah, in the path of God what eye hath not seen nor
ear heard.... How numerous the tribulations which have rained, and
will soon rain, upon Me! I advance with My face set towards Him Who is
the Almighty, the All-Bounteous, whilst behind Me glideth the serpent.
Mine eyes have rained down tears until My bed is drenched. I sorrow not
for Myself, however. By God! Mine head yearneth for the spear out of love
for its Lord. I never passed a tree, but Mine heart addressed it saying: `O
would that thou wert cut down in My name, and My body crucified upon
thee, in the path of My Lord!'... By God! Though weariness lay Me low,
and hunger consume Me, and the bare rock be My bed, and My fellows
the beasts of the field, I will not complain, but will endure patiently as
those endued with constancy and firmness have endured patiently,
through the power of God, the Eternal King and Creator of the nations,
and will render thanks unto God under all conditions. We pray that, out
of His bounty--exalted be He--He may release, through this imprisonment,
the necks of men from chains and fetters, and cause them to turn,
with sincere faces, towards His Face, Who is the Mighty, the Bounteous.
Ready is He to answer whosover calleth upon Him, and nigh is He unto
such as commune with Him."
In the &Qayyum-i-Asma' the &Bab, for His part, thus addresses
+P43
&Muhammad &Shah: "O King of &Islam! Aid thou, with the truth, after
having aided the Book, Him Who is Our Most Great Remembrance, for
God hath, in very truth, destined for thee, and for such as circle round
thee, on the Day of Judgment, a responsible position in His Path. I swear
by God, O &Shah! If thou showest enmity unto Him Who is His Remembrance,
God will, on the Day of Resurrection, condemn thee, before the
kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very truth, find on that Day
any helper except God, the Exalted. Purge thou, O &Shah, the Sacred
Land [&Tihran] from such as have repudiated the Book, ere the day
whereon the Remembrance of God cometh, terribly and of a sudden, with
His potent Cause, by the leave of God, the Most High. God, verily, hath
prescribed to thee to submit unto Him Who is His Remembrance, and
unto His Cause, and to subdue, with the truth and by His leave, the
countries, for in this world thou hast been mercifully invested with
sovereignty, and will, in the next, dwell, nigh unto the Seat of Holiness,
with the inmates of the Paradise of His good pleasure. Let not thy
sovereignty deceive thee, O &Shah, for `every soul shall taste of death,' and
this, in very truth, hath been written down as a decree of God."
In His Tablet to &Muhammad &Shah the &Bab, moreover, has revealed:
"I am the Primal Point from which have been generated all created
things. I am the Countenance of God Whose splendor can never be
obscured, the Light of God Whose radiance can never fade.... All the
keys of heaven God hath chosen to place on My right hand, and all the
keys of hell on My left.... I am one of the sustaining pillars of the Primal
Word of God. Whosoever hath recognized Me, hath known all that is true
and right, and hath attained all that is good and seemly.... The
substance wherewith God hath created Me is not the clay out of which
others have been formed. He hath conferred upon Me that which the
worldly-wise can never comprehend, nor the faithful discover....
"By My life! But for the obligation to acknowledge the Cause of Him
Who is the Testimony of God ... I would not have announced this unto
thee.... In that same year [year 60] I despatched a messenger and a book
unto thee, that thou mightest act towards the Cause of Him Who is the
Testimony of God as befitteth the station of thy sovereignty....
"I swear by the truth of God! Were he who hath been willing to treat
Me in such a manner to know who it is whom he hath so treated, he,
verily, would never in his life be happy. Nay--I, verily, acquaint thee
with the truth of the matter--it is as if he hath imprisoned all the
+P44
Prophets, and all the men of truth, and all the chosen ones.... Woe
betide him from whose hands floweth evil, and blessed the man from
whose hands floweth good....
"I swear by God! I seek no earthly goods from thee, be it as much as a
mustard seed.... I swear by the truth of God! Wert thou to know that
which I know, thou wouldst forego the sovereignty of this world and of the
next, that thou mightest attain My good pleasure, through thine obedience
unto the True One.... Wert thou to refuse, the Lord of the world
would raise up one who will exalt His Cause, and the Command of God
will, verily, be carried into effect."
God's Vicar on Earth
Dear friends! How vast a panorama these gemlike, these soul-searching
divinely uttered pronouncements outspread before our eyes!
What memories they evoke! How sublime the principles they inculcate!
What hopes they engender! What apprehensions they excite! And yet
how fragmentary must these above-quoted words, suited as they are to
the immediate purpose of my theme, appear when compared with the
torrential majesty which only the reading of the full text can disclose! He
Who was God's Vicar on earth, addressing, at the most critical moment
when His Revelation was attaining its zenith, those who concentrated in
their persons the splendor, the sovereignty, and the strength of earthly
dominion, could certainly not subtract one jot or tittle from the weight
and force which the presentation of so historic a Message demanded.
Neither the perils which were fast closing in upon Him, nor the
formidable power with which the doctrine of absolute sovereignty invested,
at that time, the emperors of the West and the potentates of the
East, could restrain the Exile and Prisoner of Adrianople from communicating
the full blast of His Message to His twin imperial persecutors
as well as to the rest of their fellow-sovereigns.
The magnitude and diversity of the theme, the cogency of the
argument, the sublimity and audacity of the language, arrest our attention
and astound our minds. Emperors, kings and princes, chancellors
and ministers, the Pope himself, priests, monks and philosophers, the
exponents of learning, parliamentarians and deputies, the rich ones of
the earth, the followers of all religions, and the people of &Baha--all are
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brought within the purview of the Author of these Messages, and
receive, each according to their merits, the counsels and admonitions
they deserve. No less amazing is the diversity of the subjects touched
upon in these Tablets. The transcendent majesty and unity of an
unknowable and unapproachable God is extolled, and the oneness of
His Messengers proclaimed and emphasized. The uniqueness, the
universality and potentialities of the &Baha'i Faith are stressed, and the
purpose and character of the &Babi Revelation unfolded. The
significance of &Baha'u'llah's sufferings and banishments is disclosed,
and the tribulations rained down upon His Herald and upon His
Namesake recognized and lamented. His own yearning for the crown of
martyrdom, which they both so mysteriously won, is voiced, and the
ineffable glories and wonders in store for His own Dispensation
foreshadowed. Episodes, at once moving and marvelous, at various
stages of His ministry, are recounted, and the transitoriness of worldly
pomp, fame, riches, and sovereignty, repeatedly and categorically asserted.
Appeals for the application of the highest principles in human
and international relations are forcibly and insistently made, and the
abandonment of discreditable practices and conventions, detrimental to
the happiness, the growth, the prosperity and the unity of the human
race, enjoined. Kings are censured, ecclesiastical dignitaries arraigned,
ministers and plenipotentiaries condemned, and the identification of
His advent with the coming of the Father Himself unequivocally admitted
and repeatedly announced. The violent downfall of a few of these
kings and emperors is prophesied, two of them are definitely challenged,
most are warned, all are appealed to and exhorted.
In the &Lawh-i-Sultan (Tablet to the &Shah of Persia) &Baha'u'llah
declares: "Would that the world-adorning wish of His Majesty might
decree that this Servant be brought face to face with the divines of the age,
and produce proofs and testimonies in the presence of His Majesty the
&Shah! This Servant is ready, and taketh hope in God, that such a
gathering may be convened in order that the truth of the matter may be
made clear and manifest before His Majesty the &Shah. It is then for thee
to command, and I stand ready before the throne of thy sovereignty.
Decide, then, for Me or against Me."
And moreover, in the &Lawh-i-Ra'is, &Baha'u'llah, recalling His
conversation with the Turkish officer charged with the task of enforcing His
banishment to the fortress-town of &Akka, has written: "There is a matter,
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which, if thou findest it possible, I request thee to submit to His Majesty
the &Sultan, that for ten minutes this Youth be enabled to meet him, so
that he may demand whatsoever he deemeth as a sufficient testimony and
regardeth as proof of the veracity of Him Who is the Truth. Should God
enable Him to produce it, let him, then, release these wronged ones, and
leave them to themselves." "He promised," &Baha'u'llah adds in that
Tablet, "to transmit this message, and to give Us his reply. We received,
however, no news from him. Although it becometh not Him Who is the
Truth to present Himself before any person, inasmuch as all have been
created to obey Him, yet in view of the condition of these little children
and the large number of women so far removed from their friends and
countries, We have acquiesced in this matter. In spite of this nothing
hath resulted. &Umar himself is alive and accessible. Inquire from him,
that the truth may be made known unto you."
Referring to these Tablets addressed to the sovereigns of the earth, and
which &Abdu'l-Baha has acclaimed as a "miracle," &Baha'u'llah has
written: "Each one of them hath been designated by a special name. The
first hath been named `The Rumbling,' the second, `The Blow,' the third,
`The Inevitable,' the fourth, `The Plain,' the fifth, `The Catastrophe,' and
the others, `The Stunning Trumpet Blast,' `The Near Event,' `The Great
Terror,' `The Trumpet,' `The Bugle,' and their like, so that all the peoples
of the earth may know, of a certainty, and may witness, with outward
and inner eyes, that He Who is the Lord of Names hath prevailed, and
will continue to prevail, under all conditions, over all men.... Never
since the beginning of the world hath the Message been so openly
proclaimed.... Glorified be this Power which hath shone forth and
compassed the worlds! This act of the Causer of Causes hath, when
revealed, produced two results. It hath at once sharpened the swords of
the infidels, and unloosed the tongues of such as have turned towards
Him in His remembrance and praise. This is the effect of the fertilizing
winds, mention of which hath been made aforetime in the &Lawh-i-Haykal.
The whole earth is now in a state of pregnancy. The day is
approaching when it will have yielded its noblest fruits, when from it will
have sprung forth the loftiest trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the
most heavenly blessings. Immeasurably exalted is the breeze that wafteth
from the garment of thy Lord, the Glorified! For lo, it hath breathed its
fragrance and made all things new! Well it is with them that comprehend.
It is indubitably clear and evident that in these things He Who
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is the Lord of Revelation hath sought nothing for Himself. Though aware
that they would lead to tribulations, and be the cause of troubles and
afflictive trials, He, solely as a token of His loving-kindness and favor,
and for the purpose of quickening the dead and of manifesting the Cause
of the Lord of all Names and Attributes, and of redeeming all who are on
earth, hath closed His eyes to His own well-being and borne that which
no other person hath borne or will bear."
The most important of His Tablets addressed to individual sovereigns
&Baha'u'llah ordered to be written in the form of a pentacle, symbolizing
the temple of man, including therein, as a conclusion, the following
words which reveal the importance He attached to those Messages, and
indicate their direct association with the prophecy of the Old Testament:
"Thus have We built the Temple with the hands of power and might,
could ye but know it. This is the Temple promised unto you in the Book.
Draw ye nigh unto it. This is that which profiteth you, could ye but
comprehend it. Be fair, O peoples of the earth! Which is preferable, this,
or a temple which is built of clay? Set your faces towards it. Thus have ye
been commanded by God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. Follow
ye His bidding, and praise ye God, your Lord, for that which He hath
bestowed upon you. He, verily, is the Truth. No God is there but He. He
revealeth what He pleaseth, through His words `Be and it is.'"
Referring to this same subject, He, in one of His Tablets, thus
addresses the followers of Jesus Christ: "O concourse of the followers of
the Son! Verily, the Temple hath been built with the hands of the will of
your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Bounteous. Bear, then, witness, O
people, unto that which I say: Which is preferable, that which is built of
clay, or that which is built by the hands of your Lord, the Revealer of
verses? This is the Temple promised unto you in the Tablets. It calleth
aloud: `O followers of religions! Haste ye to attain unto Him Who is the
Source of all causes, and follow not every infidel and doubter.'"
It should not be forgotten that, apart from these specific Tablets in
which the kings of the earth are severally and collectively addressed,
&Baha'u'llah has revealed other Tablets--the &Lawh-i-Ra'is being an
outstanding example--and interspersed the mass of His voluminous
writings with unnumbered passages, in which direct addresses, as well as
references, have been made to ministers, governments, and their
accredited representatives. I am not concerned, however, with such
addresses and references, which, vital as they are, cannot be regarded as
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being endowed with that peculiar pregnancy which direct and specific
messages, voiced by the Manifestation of God and directed to the
world's Chief Magistrates in His day, must possess.
Dear friends! Enough has been said to portray the tribulations which,
for so long a time, overwhelmed the Founders of so preeminent a
Revelation, and which the world has so disastrously ignored. Sufficient
attention has also been directed to the Messages addressed to those
sovereign rulers who, either in the exercise of their unconditioned
authority, have deliberately provoked these sufferings, or could have, in
the plenitude of their power, arisen to mitigate their effect or deflect
their tragic course. Let us now consider the consequences that have
ensued. The reaction of these monarchs was, as already stated, varied
and unmistakable and, as the march of events has gradually unfolded,
disastrous in its consequences. One of the most outstanding amongst
these sovereigns treated the Divine Summons with gross disrespect,
dismissing it with a curt and insolent reply, written by one of his
ministers. Another laid violent hold on the bearer of the Message,
tortured, branded, and brutally slew him. Others preferred to maintain
a contemptuous silence. All failed completely in their duty to arise and
extend their assistance. Two of them, in particular, prompted by the
dual impulse of fear and anger, tightened their grip on the Cause they
had jointly resolved to uproot. The one condemned his Divine Prisoner
to yet another banishment, to "the most unsightly of cities in appearance,
the most detestable in climate, and the foulest in water," whilst the
other, powerless to lay hands on the Prime Mover of a hated Faith,
subjected its adherents under his sway to abject and savage cruelties.
The recital of &Baha'u'llah's sufferings, embodied in those Messages,
failed to evoke compassion in their hearts. His appeals, the like of which
neither the annals of Christianity nor even those of &Islam have recorded,
were disdainfully rejected. The dark warnings He uttered were haughtily
scorned. The bold challenges He issued were ignored. The chastisements
He predicted they derisively brushed aside.
What, then--might we not consider--has, in the face of so complete
and ignominious a rejection, happened, and is still happening, in the
course, and particularly in the closing years, of this, the first &Baha'i
century, a century fraught with such tumultuous sufferings and violent
outrages for the persecuted Faith of &Baha'u'llah? Empires fallen in dust,
kingdoms subverted, dynasties extinguished, royalty besmirched, kings
+P49
assassinated, poisoned, driven into exile, subjugated in their own
realms, whilst the few remaining thrones are trembling with the repercussions
of the fall of their fellows.
This process, so gigantic, so catastrophic, may be said to have had its
inception on that memorable night when, in an obscure corner of
&Shiraz, the &Bab, in the presence of the First Letter to believe in Him,
revealed the first chapter of His celebrated commentary on the &Surih of
Joseph (The &Qayyum-i-Asma'), in which He trumpeted His Call to the
sovereigns and princes of the earth. It passed from incubation to visible
manifestation when &Baha'u'llah's prophecies, enshrined for all time in
the &Suriy-i-Haykal, and uttered before Napoleon III's dramatic downfall
and the self-imposed imprisonment of Pope Pius IX in the Vatican,
were fulfilled. It gathered momentum when, in the days of
&Abdu'l-Baha, the Great War extinguished the Romanov, the Hohenzollern,
and Hapsburg dynasties, and converted powerful time-honored
monarchies into republics. It was further accelerated, soon after
&Abdu'l-Baha's passing, by the demise of the effete &Qajar dynasty in
Persia, and the stupendous collapse of both the Sultanate and the
Caliphate. It is still operating, under our very eyes, as we behold the fate
which, in the course of this colossal and ravaging struggle, is successively
overtaking the crowned heads of the European continent. Surely,
no man, contemplating dispassionately the manifestations of this relentless
revolutionizing process, within comparatively so short a time, can
escape the conclusion that the last hundred years may well be regarded,
in so far as the fortunes of royalty are concerned, as one of the most
cataclysmic periods in the annals of mankind.
Humiliation Immediate and Complete
Of all the monarchs of the earth, at the time when &Baha'u'llah,
proclaiming His Message to them, revealed the &Suriy-i-Muluk in Adrianople,
the most august and influential were the French Emperor and
the Supreme Pontiff. In the political and religious spheres they respectively
held the foremost rank, and the humiliation both suffered was
alike immediate and complete.
Napoleon III, son of Louis Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon I), was,
few historians will deny, the most outstanding monarch of his day in the
+P50
West. "The Emperor," it was said of him, "was the state." The French
capital was the most attractive capital in Europe, the French court "the
most brilliant and luxurious of the XIX century." Possessed of a fixed
and indestructible ambition, he aspired to emulate the example, and
finish the interrupted work, of his imperial uncle. A dreamer, a conspirator,
of a shifting nature, hypocritical and reckless, he, the heir to
the Napoleonic throne, taking advantage of the policy which sought to
foster the reviving interest in the career of his great prototype, had sought
to overthrow the monarchy. Failing in his attempt, he was deported to
America, was later captured in the course of an attempted invasion of
France, was condemned to perpetual captivity, and escaped to London,
until, in 1848, the Revolution brought about his return, and enabled
him to overthrow the constitution, after which he was proclaimed
emperor. Though able to initiate far-reaching movements, he possessed
neither the sagacity nor the courage required to control them.
To this man, the last emperor of the French, who, through foreign
conquest, had striven to endear his dynasty to the people, who even
cherished the ideal of making France the center of a revived Roman
Empire--to such a man the Exile of &Akka, already thrice banished by
&Sultan &Abdu'l-'Aziz, had transmitted, from behind the walls of the
barracks in which He lay imprisoned, an Epistle which bore this
indubitably clear arraignment and ominous prophecy: "We testify that
that which wakened thee was not their cry [Turks drowned in the Black
Sea], but the promptings of thine own passions, for We tested thee, and
found thee wanting.... Hadst thou been sincere in thy words, thou
wouldst not have cast behind thy back the Book of God [previous Tablet],
when it was sent unto thee by Him Who is the Almighty, the All-Wise.
...For what thou hast done, thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion,
and thine empire shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment for
that which thou hast wrought."
&Baha'u'llah's previous Message, forwarded through one of the French
ministers to the Emperor, had been accorded a welcome the nature of
which can be conjectured from the words recorded in the "Epistle to the
Son of the Wolf": "To this [first Tablet], however, he did not reply. After
Our arrival in the Most Great Prison there reached Us a letter from his
minister, the first part of which was in Persian, and the latter in his own
handwriting. In it he was cordial, and wrote the following: `I have, as
requested by you, delivered your letter, and until now have received no
+P51
answer. We have, however, issued the necessary recommendations to our
Minister in Constantinople and our consuls in those regions. If there be
anything you wish done, inform us, and we will carry it out.' From his
words it became apparent that he understood the purpose of this Servant
to have been a request for material assistance."
In His first Tablet &Baha'u'llah, wishing to test the sincerity of the
Emperor's motives, and deliberately assuming a meek and unprovocative
tone, had, after expatiating on the sufferings He had endured,
addressed him the following words: "Two statements graciously uttered
by the king of the age have reached the ears of these wronged ones. These
pronouncements are, in truth, the king of all pronouncements, the like of
which have never been heard from any sovereign. The first was the answer
given the Russian government when it inquired why the war [Crimean]
was waged against it. Thou didst reply: `The cry of the oppressed who,
without guilt or blame, were drowned in the Black Sea wakened me at
dawn. Wherefore, I took up arms against thee.' These oppressed ones,
however, have suffered a greater wrong, and are in greater distress.
Whereas the trials inflicted upon those people lasted but one day, the
troubles borne by these servants have continued for twenty and five years,
every moment of which has held for us a grievous affliction. The other
weighty statement, which was indeed a wondrous statement, manifested
to the world, was this: `Ours is the responsibility to avenge the oppressed
and succor the helpless.' The fame of the Emperor's justice and fairness
hath brought hope to a great many souls. It beseemeth the king of the age
to inquire into the condition of such as have been wronged, and it
behooveth him to extend his care to the weak. Verily, there hath not been,
nor is there now, on earth anyone as oppressed as we are, or as helpless as
these wanderers."
It is reported that upon receipt of this first Message that superficial,
tricky, and pride-intoxicated monarch flung down the Tablet saying: "If
this man is God, I am two gods!" The transmitter of the second Tablet
had, it is reliably stated, in order to evade the strict surveillance of the
guards, concealed it in his hat, and was able to deliver it to the French
agent, who resided in &Akka, and who, as attested by &Nabil in his
Narrative, translated it into French and sent it to the Emperor, he
himself becoming a believer when he had later witnessed the fulfillment
of so remarkable a prophecy.
The significance of the somber and pregnant words uttered by
+P52
&Baha'u'llah in His second Tablet was soon revealed. He who was
actuated in provoking the Crimean War by his selfish desires, who was
prompted by a personal grudge against the Russian Emperor, who was
impatient to tear up the Treaty of 1815 in order to avenge the disaster of
Moscow, and who sought to shed military glory over his throne, was
soon himself engulfed by a catastrophe that hurled him in the dust, and
caused France to sink from her preeminent station among the nations to
that of a fourth power in Europe.
The Battle of Sedan in 1870 sealed the fate of the French Emperor.
The whole of his army was broken up and surrendered, constituting the
greatest capitulation hitherto recorded in modern history. A crushing
indemnity was exacted. He himself was taken prisoner. His only son,
the Prince Imperial, was killed, a few years later, in the Zulu War. The
Empire collapsed, its program unrealized. The Republic was proclaimed.
Paris was subsequently besieged and capitulated. "The terrible
Year" marked by civil war, exceeding in its ferocity the Franco-German
War, followed. William I, the Prussian king, was proclaimed German
Emperor in the very palace which stood as a "mighty monument and
symbol of the power and pride of Louis XIV, a power which had been
secured to some extent by the humiliation of Germany." Deposed by a
disaster "so appalling that it resounded throughout the world," this false
and boastful monarch suffered in the end, and till his death, the same
exile as that which, in the case of &Baha'u'llah, he had so heartlessly
ignored.
A humiliation less spectacular yet historically more significant
awaited Pope Pius IX. It was to him who regarded himself as the Vicar of
Christ that &Baha'u'llah wrote that "the Word which the Son [Jesus]
concealed is made manifest," that "it hath been sent down in the form of
the human temple," that the Word was Himself, and He Himself the
Father. It was to him who styling himself "the servant of the servants of
God" that the Promised One of all ages, unveiling His station in its
plenitude, announced that "He Who is the Lord of Lords is come
overshadowed with clouds." It was he, who, claiming to be the successor
of St. Peter, was reminded by &Baha'u'llah that "this is the day whereon
the Rock [Peter] crieth out and shouteth ... saying: `Lo, the Father is
come, and that which ye were promised in the Kingdom is fulfilled.'" It
was he, the wearer of the triple crown, who later became the first
prisoner of the Vatican, who was commanded by the Divine Prisoner of
+P53
&Akka to "leave his palaces unto such as desire them," to "sell all the
embellished ornaments" he possessed, and to "expend them in the path of
God," and to "abandon his kingdom unto the kings," and emerge from
his habitation with his face "set towards the Kingdom."
Count Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, the 254th pope since the
inception of St. Peter's primacy, who had been elevated to the apostolic
throne two years after the Declaration of the &Bab, and the duration of
whose pontificate exceeded that of any of his predecessors, will be
permanently remembered as the author of the Bull which declared the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin (1854), referred to in the
&Kitab-i-Iqan, to be a doctrine of the Church, and as the promulgator of
the new dogma of Papal Infallibility (1870). Authoritarian by nature, a
poor statesman, disinclined to conciliation, determined to preserve all
his authority, he, while he succeeded through his assumption of an
ultramontane attitude in defining further his position and in reinforcing
his spiritual authority, failed, in the end, to maintain that temporal rule
which, for so many centuries, had been exercised by the heads of the
Catholic Church.
This temporal power had, throughout the ages, shrunk to insignificant
proportions. The decades preceding its extinction were
fraught with the gravest vicissitudes. As the sun of &Baha'u'llah's Revelation
was mounting to full meridian splendor, the shadows that beset the
dwindling patrimony of St. Peter were correspondingly deepening. The
Tablet of &Baha'u'llah, addressed to Pius IX, precipitated its extinction. A
hasty glance at the course of its ebbing fortunes, during those decades,
will suffice. Napoleon I had driven the Pope from his estates. The
Congress of Vienna had reestablished him as their head and their
administration in the hands of the priests. Corruption, disorganization,
impotence to ensure internal security, the restoration of the inquisition,
had induced an historian to assert that "no land of Italy, perhaps of
Europe, except Turkey, is ruled as is this ecclesiastical state." Rome was
"a city of ruins, both material and moral." Insurrections led to Austria's
intervention. Five great Powers demanded the introduction of far-reaching
reforms, which the Pope promised but failed to carry out.
Austria again reasserted herself, and was opposed by France. Both
watched each other on the Papal estates until 1838, when, on their
withdrawal, absolutism was again restored. The Pope's temporal power
was now denounced by some of his own subjects, heralding its extinction
+P54
in 1870. Internal complications forced him to flee, in the dead of
night and in the disguise of a humble priest, from Rome which was
declared a republic. It was later restored by the French to its former
status. The creation of the kingdom of Italy, the shifting policy of
Napoleon III, the disaster of Sedan, the misdeeds of the Papal government
denounced by Clarendon, at the Congress of Paris, terminating
the Crimean War, as a "disgrace to Europe," sealed the fate of that
tottering dominion.
In 1870, after &Baha'u'llah had revealed His Epistle to Pius IX, King
Victor Emmanuel II went to war with the Papal states, and his troops
entered Rome and seized it. On the eve of its seizure, the Pope repaired
to the Lateran and, despite his age and with his face bathed in tears,
ascended on bended knees the Scala Santa. The following morning, as
the cannonade began, he ordered the white flag to be hoisted above the
dome of St. Peter. Despoiled, he refused to recognize this "creation of
revolution," excommunicated the invaders of his states, denounced
Victor Emmanuel as the "robber King" and as "forgetful of every
religious principle, despising every right, trampling upon every law."
Rome, "the Eternal City, on which rest twenty-five centuries of glory,"
and over which the Popes had ruled in unchallengeable right for ten
centuries, finally became the seat of the new kingdom, and the scene of
that humiliation which &Baha'u'llah had anticipated and which the
Prisoner of the Vatican had imposed upon himself.
"The last years of the old Pope," writes a commentator on his life,
"were filled with anguish. To his physical infirmities was added the
sorrow of beholding, all too often, the Faith outraged in the very heart of
Rome, the religious orders despoiled and persecuted, the Bishops and
priests debarred from exercising their functions."
Every effort to retrieve the situation created in 1870 proved fruitless.
The Archbishop of Posen went to Versailles to solicit Bismarck's intervention
in behalf of the Papacy, but was coldly received. Later a
Catholic party was organized in Germany to bring political pressure on
the German Chancellor. All, however, was in vain. The mighty process
already referred to had to pursue inexorably its course. Even now, after
the lapse of above half a century, the so-called restoration of temporal
sovereignty has but served to throw into greater relief the helplessness of
this erstwhile potent Prince, at whose name kings trembled and to whose
dual sovereignty they willingly submitted. This temporal sovereignty,
+P55
practically confined to the miniscule City of the Vatican, and leaving
Rome the undisputed possession of a secular monarchy, has been
obtained at the price of unreserved recognition, so long withheld, of the
Kingdom of Italy. The Treaty of the Lateran, claiming to have resolved
once and for all the Roman Question, has indeed assured to a secular
Power, in respect of the Enclaved City, a liberty of action which is
fraught with uncertainty and peril. "The two souls of the Eternal City,"
a Catholic writer has observed, "have been separated from each other,
only to collide more severely than ever before."
Well might the Sovereign Pontiff recall the reign of the most powerful
among his predecessors, Innocent III who, during the eighteen years of
his pontificate, raised and deposed the kings and the emperors, whose
interdicts deprived nations of the exercise of Christian worship, at the
feet of whose legate the King of England surrendered his crown, and at
whose voice the fourth and the fifth crusades were both undertaken.
Might not the process, to which reference has already been made,
manifest, in the course of its operation, during the tumultuous years in
store for mankind, and in this same domain, a commotion still more
devastating than it has yet produced?
The dramatic collapse of both the Third Empire and the Napoleonic
dynasty, the virtual extinction of the temporal sovereignty of the Supreme
Pontiff, in the lifetime of &Baha'u'llah, were but the precursors of
still greater catastrophes that may be said to have marked the ministry of
&Abdu'l-Baha. The forces unleashed by a conflict, the full significance
of which still remains unfathomed, and which may be considered as a
prelude to this, the most devastating of all wars, can well be regarded as
the occasion of these dreadful catastrophes. The progress of the War of
1914-18 dethroned the House of Romanov, while its termination
precipitated the downfall of both the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern
dynasties.
The Rise of Bolshevism
The rise of Bolshevism, born amidst the fires of that inconclusive
struggle, shook the throne of the Czars and overthrew it. Alexander II
Nicolaevich, whom &Baha'u'llah had commanded in His Tablet to "arise
... and summon the nations unto God," who had been thrice warned:
+P56
"beware lest thy desire deter thee from turning towards the face of thy
Lord," "beware lest thou barter away this sublime station," "beware lest
thy sovereignty withhold thee from Him Who is the Supreme Sovereign,"
was not indeed the last of the Czars to rule his country, but rather the
inaugurator of a retrogressive policy which in the end proved fatal to
both himself and his dynasty.
In the latter part of his reign he initiated a reactionary policy which,
causing widespread disillusionment, gave rise to Nihilism, which, as it
spread, ushered in a period of terrorism of unexampled violence, leading
in its turn to several attempts on his life, and culminating in his
assassination. Stern repression guided the policy of his successor, Alexander
III, who "assumed an attitude of defiant hostility to innovators
and liberals." The tradition of unqualified absolutism, of extreme
religious orthodoxy was maintained by the still more severe Nicolas II,
the last of the Czars, who, guided by the counsels of a man who was "the
very incarnation of a narrow-minded, stiff-necked despotism," and
aided by a corrupt bureaucracy, and humiliated by the disastrous effects
of a foreign war, increased the general discontent of the masses, both
intellectuals and peasants. Driven for a time into subterranean channels,
and intensified by military reverses, it exploded at last in the midst
of the Great War, in the form of a Revolution which, in the principles it
challenged, the institutions it subverted, and the havoc it wrought, has
scarcely a parallel in modern history.
A great trembling seized and rocked the foundations of that country.
The light of religion was dimmed. Ecclesiastical institutions of every
denomination were swept away. The state religion was disendowed,
persecuted, and abolished. A far-flung empire was dismembered. A
militant, triumphant proletariat exiled the intellectuals, and plundered
and massacred the nobility. Civil war and disease decimated a population,
already in the throes of agony and despair. And, finally, the Chief
Magistrate of a mighty dominion, together with his consort, and his
family, and his dynasty, were swept into the vortex of this great convulsion,
and perished.
The very ordeal that heaped such dire misfortunes on the empire of
the Czars brought about, in its concluding stages, the fall of the almighty
German Kaiser as well as that of the inheritor of the once famed
Holy Roman Empire. It shattered the whole fabric of Imperial Germany,
+P57
which arose out of the disaster that engulfed the Napoleonic
dynasty, and dealt the Dual Monarchy its death blow.
Almost half a century before, &Baha'u'llah, Who had predicted, in
clear and resounding terms, the ignominious fall of the successor of the
great Napoleon, had, in the &Kitab-i-Aqdas, addressed to Kaiser William
I, the newly acclaimed victor, a no less significant warning, and
prophesied, in His apostrophe to the banks of the Rhine, in words
equally unambiguous, the mourning that would afflict the capital of the
newly federated empire.
"Do thou remember," &Baha'u'llah thus addressed him, "the one
[Napoleon] whose power transcended thy power, and whose station
excelled thy station.... Think deeply, O king, concerning him, and
concerning them who, like unto thee, have conquered cities and ruled
over men." And again: "O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered
with gore, inasmuch as the swords of retribution were drawn against you;
and you shall have another turn. And We hear the lamentations of
Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous glory."
On him who, in his old age, sustained two attempts upon his life by
the advocates of the rising tide of socialism; on his son Frederick III,
whose three months' reign was overshadowed by mortal disease; and
finally on his grandson, William II, the self-willed and overweening
monarch and wrecker of his own empire--on these fell, in varying
degrees, the full weight of the responsibilities consequent to these dire
pronouncements.
William I, first German Emperor and seventh king of Prussia, whose
entire lifetime had, up to the date of his accession, been spent in the
army, was a militaristic, autocratic ruler, imbued with antiquated ideas,
who initiated, with the aid of a statesman rightly regarded as "one of the
geniuses of his century," a policy which may be said to have inaugurated
a new era not only for Prussia but for the world. This policy was pursued
with characteristic thoroughness and perfected through the repressive
measures that were taken to safeguard and uphold it, through the wars
that were waged for its realization, and the political combinations that
were subsequently formed to exalt and consolidate it, combinations that
were fraught with such dreadful consequences to the European continent.
William II, temperamentally dictatorial, politically inexperienced,
+P58
militarily aggressive, religiously insincere, posed as the apostle of European
peace, yet actually insisted on "the mailed fist" and "the shining
armor." Irresponsible, indiscreet, inordinately ambitious, his first act
was to dismiss that sagacious statesman, the true founder of his empire,
to whose sagacity &Baha'u'llah had paid tribute, and to the unwisdom of
whose imperial and ungrateful master &Abdu'l-Baha had testified. War
indeed became a religion of his country, and by enlarging the scope of
his multifarious activities, he proceeded to prepare the way for that final
catastrophe that was to dethrone him and his dynasty. And when the war
broke out, and the might of his armies seemed to have overpowered his
adversaries, and the news of his triumphs was noised abroad, reverberating
as far as Persia, voices were raised ridiculing those passages of the
&Kitab-i-Aqdas which so clearly foreshadowed the misfortunes that were
to befall his capital. Suddenly, however, swift and unforeseen reverses
fatally overtook him. Revolution broke out. William II, deserting his
armies, fled ignominiously to Holland, followed by the Crown Prince.
The princes of the German states abdicated. A period of chaos ensued.
The communist flag was hoisted in the capital, which became a caldron
of confusion and civil strife. The Kaiser signed his abdication. The
Constitution of Weimar established the Republic, bringing the tremendous
structure, so elaborately reared through a policy of blood and
iron, crashing to the ground. All the efforts to that end, which through
internal legislation and foreign wars had, ever since the accession of
William I to the Prussian throne, been assiduously exerted, came to
naught. "The lamentations of Berlin," tortured by the terms of a treaty
monstrous in its severity, were raised, contrasting with the hilarious
shouts of victory that rang, half a century before, in the Hall of Mirrors
of the Palace of Versailles.
The Hapsburg monarch, heir of centuries of glorious history,
simultaneously toppled from his throne. It was Francis Joseph, whom
&Baha'u'llah chided in the &Kitab-i-Aqdas for having failed in his duty to
investigate His Cause, let alone to seek His presence, when so easily
accessible to him in the course of his visit to the Holy Land. "Thou
passed Him by," He thus reproves the pilgrim-emperor, "and inquired
not about Him.... We have been with thee at all times, and found thee
clinging unto the Branch and heedless of the Root.... Open thine eyes,
that thou mayest behold this Glorious Vision and recognize Him Whom
+P59
thou invokest in the daytime and in the night season, and gaze on the
Light that shineth above this luminous Horizon."
The House of Hapsburg, in which the Imperial Title had remained
practically hereditary for almost five centuries, was, ever since those
words were uttered, being increasingly menaced by the forces of internal
disintegration, and was sowing the seeds of an external conflict, to both
of which it ultimately succumbed. Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria,
King of Hungary, a reactionary ruler, reestablished old abuses, ignored
the rights of nationalities, and restored that bureaucratic centralization
that proved in the end so injurious to his empire. Repeated tragedies
darkened his reign. His brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico. The
Crown Prince Rudolph perished in a dishonorable affair. The Empress
was assassinated in Geneva. Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife
were murdered in Sarajevo, kindling a war in the midst of which the
Emperor himself died, closing a reign which is unsurpassed by any other
reign in the disasters it brought to the nation.
End of the Holy Roman Empire
Belated efforts had been made to steady his tottering throne. The
"ramshackle empire," a medley of states, races, and languages, was,
however, relentlessly and rapidly disintegrating. The political and
economic situation was desperate. The defeat of Austria and Hungary,
in that same war, sounded its death knell and brought its dismemberment.
Hungary sundered its connection. The conglomerate realm was
carved up, and all that was left of the once formidable Holy Roman
Empire was a shrunken republic that led a miserable existence until, in
more recent times, it was, unlike its sister nation, completely extinguished
and wiped off the political map of Europe.
Such was the fate of the Napoleonic, the Romanov, the Hohenzollern,
and the Hapsburg empires, whose rulers, together with the
sovereign occupant of the Papal throne, were individually addressed by
the Pen of the Most High, and who were respectively chastised,
forewarned, condemned, rebuked and admonished. What of the fate of
those sovereigns who, exercising direct political jurisdiction over the
Faith, its Founders, and followers, and within the radius of whose
+P60
domains that Faith was born and first spread, were at liberty to crucify its
Herald, banish its Founder, and mow down its adherents?
What of Turkey and Persia?
Already in the lifetime of &Baha'u'llah, and later during the ministry of
&Abdu'l-Baha, the first blows of a slow yet steady and relentless retribution
were falling alike upon the rulers of the Turkish House of &Uthman
and of the &Qajar dynasty in Persia--the archenemies of God's infant
Faith. &Sultan &Abdu'l-'Aziz fell from power, and was murdered soon
after &Baha'u'llah's banishment from Adrianople, while &Nasiri'd-Din
&Shah succumbed to an assassin's pistol, during &Abdu'l-Baha's incarceration
in the fortress-town of &Akka. It was reserved, however, for the
Formative Period of the Faith of God--the Age of the birth and rise of its
Administrative Order--which, as stated in a previous communication,
is through its unfoldment casting such a turmoil in the world, to witness
not only the extinction of both of these dynasties, but also the abolition
of the twin institutions of the Sultanate and the Caliphate.
Of the two despots &Abdu'l-'Aziz was the more powerful, the more
exalted in rank, the more preeminent in guilt, and the more concerned
with the tribulations and fortunes of the Founder of our Faith. He it was
who, through his &farmans, had thrice banished &Baha'u'llah, and in
whose dominions the Manifestation of God spent almost the whole of
His forty years' captivity. It was during his reign and that of his nephew
and successor, &Abdu'l-Hamid II, that the Center of the Covenant of
God had to endure, for no less than forty years, in the fortress-town of
&Akka, an incarceration fraught with so many perils, affronts and privations.
"Hearken, O king!" is the summons issued to &Sultan &Abdu'l-'Aziz by
&Baha'u'llah, "to the speech of Him that speaketh the truth, Him that
doth not ask thee to recompense Him with the things God hath chosen to
bestow upon thee, Him Who unerringly treadeth the Straight Path....
Observe, O king, with thine inmost heart and with thy whole being, the
precepts of God, and walk not in the paths of the oppressor.... Place not
thy reliance on thy treasures. Put thy whole confidence in the grace of
God, thy Lord.... Overstep not the bounds of moderation, and deal
justly with them that serve thee.... Set before thine eyes God's unerring
+P61
Balance, and, as one standing in His presence, weigh in that Balance
thine actions, every day, every moment of thy life. Bring thyself to
account ere thou art summoned to a reckoning, on the Day when no man
shall have strength to stand for fear of God, the Day when the hearts of
the heedless ones shall be made to tremble."
"The day is approaching," &Baha'u'llah thus prophesies in the
&Lawh-i-Ra'is, "when the Land of Mystery [Adrianople], and what is
beside it shall be changed, and shall pass out of the hands of the king, and
commotions shall appear, and the voice of lamentation shall be raised,
and the evidences of mischief shall be revealed on all sides, and confusion
shall spread by reason of that which hath befallen these captives at the
hands of the hosts of oppression. The course of things shall be altered, and
conditions shall wax so grievous, that the very sands on the desolate hills
will moan, and the trees on the mountain will weep, and blood will flow
out of all things. Then wilt thou behold the people in sore distress."
"Soon," He, moreover has written, "will He seize you in His wrathful
anger, and sedition will be stirred up in your midst, and your
dominions will be disrupted. Then will ye bewail and lament, and will
find none to help or succor you.... Several times calamities have
overtaken you, and yet ye failed utterly to take heed. One of them was the
conflagration which devoured most of the City [Constantinople] with the
flames of justice, and concerning which many poems were written,
stating that no such fire had ever been witnessed. And yet, ye waxed more
heedless.... Plague, likewise, broke out, and ye still failed to give heed!
Be expectant, however, for the wrath of God is ready to overtake you.
Erelong will ye behold that which hath been sent down from the Pen of
My command."
"By your deeds," He, in another Tablet, anticipating the fall of the
Sultanate and the Caliphate, thus reproves the combined forces of
&Sunni and &Shi'ih &Islam, "the exalted station of the people hath been
abased, the standard of &Islam hath been reversed, and its mighty throne
hath fallen."
And finally, in the &Kitab-i-Aqdas, revealed soon after &Baha'u'llah's
banishment to &Akka, He thus apostrophizes the seat of Turkish imperial
power: "O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas! The throne
of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the flame of
hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom.... Thou art indeed filled
with manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious?
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By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy
daughters, and thy widows, and all the kindreds that dwell within thee
shall lament. Thus informeth thee, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."
Indeed, in a most remarkable passage in the &Lawh-i-Fu'ad, wherein
mention has been made of the death of &Fu'ad &Pasha, the Turkish
Minister of Foreign Affairs, the fall of the &Sultan himself is unmistakably
foretold: "Soon will We dismiss the one who was like unto him, and
will lay hold on their Chief who ruleth the land, and I, verily, am the
Almighty, the All-Compelling."
The &Sultan's reaction to these words, bearing upon his person, his
empire, his throne, his capital, and his ministers, can be gathered from
the recital of the sufferings he inflicted on &Baha'u'llah, and already
referred to in the beginning of these pages. The extinction of the
"outward splendor" surrounding that proud seat of Imperial power is the
theme I now proceed to expose.
The Doom of Imperial Turkey
A cataclysmic process, one of the most remarkable in modern history,
was set in motion ever since &Baha'u'llah, while a prisoner in Constantinople,
delivered to a Turkish official His Tablet, addressed to &Sultan
&Abdu'l-'Aziz and his ministers, to be transmitted to &Ali &Pasha, the
Grand Vizir. It was this Tablet which, as attested by that officer and
affirmed by &Nabil in his chronicle, affected the Vizir so profoundly that
he paled while reading it. This process received fresh impetus after the
&Lawh-i-Ra'is was revealed on the morrow of its Author's final banishment
from Adrianople to &Akka. Relentless, devastating, and with ever-increasing
momentum, it ominously unfolded, damaging the prestige
of the Empire, dismembering its territory, dethroning its &sultans, sweeping
away their dynasty, degrading and deposing its Caliph, disestablishing
its religion, and extinguishing its glory. The "sick man" of Europe,
whose condition had been unerringly diagnosed by the Divine Physician,
and whose doom was pronounced inevitable, fell a prey, during
the reign of five successive &sultans, all degenerate, all deposed, to a series
of convulsions which, in the end, proved fatal to his life. Imperial
Turkey that had, under &Abdu'l-Majid, been admitted into the European
Concert, and had emerged victorious from the Crimean War,
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entered, under his successor, &Abdu'l-'Aziz, upon a period of swift
decline, culminating, soon after &Abdu'l-Baha's passing, in the doom
which the judgment of God had pronounced against it.
Risings in Crete and the Balkans marked the reign of this, the 32nd
&sultan of his dynasty, a despot whose mind was vacuous, whose recklessness
was extreme, whose extravagance knew no bounds. The Eastern
Question entered upon an acute phase. His gross misrule gave rise to
movements which were to exercise far-reaching effects upon his realm,
while his continual and enormous borrowings, leading to a state of
semibankruptcy, introduced the principle of foreign control over the
finances of his empire. A conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution,
finally deposed him. A &fatva of the &mufti denounced his incapacity and
extravagance. Four days later he was assassinated, and was succeeded by
his nephew, &Murad V, whose mind had been reduced to a nullity by
intemperance and by a long seclusion in the Cage. Declared to be
imbecile, he, after a reign of three months, was deposed and was
succeeded by the subtle, the resourceful, the suspicious, the tyrannical
&Abdu'l-Hamid II who "proved to be the most mean, cunning, untrustworthy
and cruel intriguer of the long dynasty of &Uthman." "No one
knew," it was written of him, "from day to day who was the person on
whose advice the &sultan overruled his ostensible ministers, whether a
favorite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some fanatical dervish, or an
astrologer, or a spy." The Bulgarian atrocities heralded the black reign of
this "Great Assassin," which thrilled Europe with horror, and were
characterized by Gladstone as "the basest and blackest outrages upon
record in that [XIX] century." The War of 1877-78 accelerated the
process of the empire's dismemberment. No less than eleven million
people were emancipated from Turkish yoke. The Russian troops occupied
Adrianople. Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania proclaimed their
independence. Bulgaria became a self-governing state, tributary to the
&sultan. Cyprus and Egypt were occupied. The French assumed a
protectorate over Tunis. Eastern Rumelia was ceded to Bulgaria. The
wholesale massacres of Armenians, involving directly and indirectly a
hundred thousand souls, were but a foretaste of the still more extensive
bloodbaths to come in a later reign. Bosnia and Herzegovina were lost to
Austria. Bulgaria obtained her independence. Universal contempt and
hatred of an infamous sovereign, shared alike by his Christian and
Muslim subjects, finally culminated in a revolution, swift and sweeping.
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The Committee of Young Turks secured from the &Shaykhu'l-Islam
the condemnation of the &sultan. Deserted and friendless, execrated by
his subjects, and despised by his fellow-rulers, he was forced to abdicate,
and was made a prisoner of state, thus ending a reign "more disastrous in
its immediate losses of territory and in the certainty of others to follow,
and more conspicuous for the deterioration of the condition of his
subjects, than that of any other of his twenty-three degenerate predecessors
since the death of Soliman the Magnificent."
The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of a new era
which, however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined to witness the
collapse of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten state. &Muhammad
V, a brother of &Abdu'l-Hamid II, an absolute nonentity, failed
to improve the status of his subjects. The follies of his government
ultimately sealed the doom of the empire. The War of 1914-18 provided
the occasion. Military reverses brought to a head the forces that
were sapping its foundations. While the war was still being fought the
defection of the Sherif of Mecca and the revolt of the Arabian provinces
portended the convulsion which was to seize the Turkish throne. The
precipitate flight and complete destruction of the army of &Jamal &Pasha,
the commander-in-chief in Syria--he who had sworn to raze to the
ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the Tomb of &Baha'u'llah,
and to publicly crucify the Center of His Covenant in a public
square of Constantinople--was the signal for the nemesis that was to
overtake an empire in distress. Nine-tenths of the large Turkish armies
had melted away. A fourth of the whole population had perished from
war, disease, famine and massacre.
A new ruler, &Muhammad VI, the last of the twenty-five successive
degenerate &sultans, had meanwhile succeeded his wretched brother.
The edifice of the empire was now quaking and tottering to its fall.
&Mustafa &Kamal dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk
to a small Asiatic state, became a republic. The &sultan was deposed, the
Ottoman Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had remained unbroken
for six and a half centuries was extinguished. An empire which had
stretched from the center of Hungary to the Persian Gulf and the Sudan,
and from the Caspian Sea to Oran in Africa, had now dwindled to a
small Asiatic republic. Constantinople itself, which, after the fall of
Byzantium, had been honored as the splendid metropolis of the Roman
Empire, and had been made the capital of the Ottoman government,
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was abandoned by its conquerors, and stripped of its pomp and glory--a
mute reminder of the base tyranny that had for so long stained its throne.
Such, in their bare outline, were the awful evidences of that retributive
justice which so tragically afflicted &Abdu'l-'Aziz, his successors, his
throne and his dynasty. What of &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah, the other partner in
that imperial conspiracy which sought to extirpate, root and branch, the
budding Faith of God? His reaction to the Divine Message borne to him
by the fearless &Badi', the "Pride of Martyrs," who had spontaneously
dedicated himself to this purpose, was characteristic of that implacable
hatred which, throughout his reign, glowed so fiercely in his breast.
Divine Retribution on the &Qajar Dynasty
The French Emperor had, it was reported, flung away &Baha'u'llah's
Tablet, and directed his minister, as &Baha'u'llah Himself asserts, to
address to its Author an irreverent reply. The Grand Vizir of
&Abdu'l-'Aziz, it is reliably stated, blanched while reading the communication
addressed to his Imperial master and his ministers, and
made the following comment: "It is as if the king of kings were issuing
his behest to his humblest vassal king, and regulating his conduct!"
Queen Victoria, it is said, upon reading the Tablet revealed for her
remarked: "If this is of God, it will endure; if not, it can do no harm." It
was reserved for &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah, however, to wreak, at the instigation
of the divines, his vengeance on One Whom he could no longer
personally chastise by arresting His messenger, a lad of about seventeen,
by freighting him with chains, by torturing him on the rack, and finally
slaying him.
To this despotic sovereign &Baha'u'llah, Who denounced him as the
"Prince of Oppressors," and as one who would soon be made "an
object-lesson for the world," had written: "Look upon this Youth, O king,
with the eyes of justice; judge thou, then, with truth concerning what
hath befallen Him. Of a verity, God hath made thee His shadow amongst
men, and the sign of His power unto all that dwell on earth." And again:
"O king! Wert thou to incline thine ears unto the shrill of the Pen of Glory
and the cooing of the Dove of Eternity ... thou wouldst attain unto a
station from which thou wouldst behold in the world of being naught save
the effulgence of the Adored One, and wouldst regard thy sovereignty as
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the most contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning it to whosoever
might desire it, and setting thy face toward the horizon aglow with the
light of His countenance." And again: "We fain would hope, however,
that His Majesty the &Shah will himself examine these matters, and bring
hope to the hearts. That which We have submitted to thee is indeed for
thine highest good."
This hope, however, was to remain unfulfilled. It was indeed shattered
by a reign which had been inaugurated by the execution of the
&Bab, and the imprisonment of &Baha'u'llah in the &Siyah-Chal of &Tihran,
by a sovereign who had repeatedly instigated &Baha'u'llah's successive
banishments, and by a dynasty that had been sullied by the slaughter of
no less than twenty thousand of His followers. The &Shah's dramatic
assassination, the ignoble rule of the last sovereigns of the House of
&Qajar, and the extinction of that dynasty, were signal instances of the
Divine retribution which these horrid atrocities had provoked.
The &Qajars, members of the alien Turkoman tribe, had, indeed,
usurped the Persian throne. &Aqa &Muhammad &Khan, the eunuch &Shah
and founder of the dynasty, was such an atrocious, avaricious, bloodthirsty
tyrant that the memory of no Persian is so detested and universally
execrated as his memory. The record of his reign and that of his
immediate successors is one of vandalism, of internal warfare, of recalcitrant
and rebellious chieftains, of brigandage, and medieval oppression,
whilst the annals of the reigns of the later &Qajars are marked by the
stagnation of the nation, the illiteracy of the people, the corruption and
incompetence of the government, the scandalous intrigues of the court,
the decadence of the princes, the irresponsibility and extravagance of
the sovereign, and his abject subservience to a notoriously degraded
clerical order.
The successor of &Aqa &Muhammad &Khan, the uxorious, philoprogenetive
&Fath-'Ali &Shah, the so-called "Darius of the Age," was a
vain, an arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous
number of his wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his
incalculable progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon his
country. He it was who commanded that his vizir, to whom he owed his
throne, be cast into a caldron of boiling oil. As to his successor, the
bigoted &Muhammad &Shah, one of his earliest acts, definitely condemned
by the pen of &Baha'u'llah, was the order to strangle his first
minister, the illustrious &Qa'im-Maqam, immortalized by that same pen
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as the "Prince of the City of Statesmanship and Literary Accomplishment,"
and to have him replaced by that lowbred, consummate
scoundrel, &Haji &Mirza &Aqasi, who brought the country to the verge of
bankruptcy and revolution. It was this same &Shah who refused to
interview the &Bab and imprisoned Him in &Adhirbayjan, and who, at the
age of forty, was afflicted by a complication of maladies to which he
succumbed, hastening the doom forecast in these words of the
&Qayyum-i-Asma': "I swear by God, O &Shah! If thou showest enmity unto
Him Who is His Remembrance, God will, on the Day of Resurrection,
condemn thee, before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very
truth, find on that day any helper except God, the Exalted."
&Nasiri'd-Din &Shah, a selfish, capricious, imperious monarch, succeeded
to the throne, and, for half a century, was destined to remain the
sole arbiter of the fortunes of his hapless country. A disastrous
obscurantism, a chaotic administration in the provinces, the disorganization of
the finances of the realm, the intrigues, the vindictiveness, and
profligacy of the pampered and greedy courtiers, who buzzed and
swarmed round his throne, his own despotism which, but for the
restraining fear of European public opinion and the desire to be thought
well of in the capitals of the West, would have been more cruel and
savage, were the distinguishing features of the bloody reign of one who
styled himself "Footpath of Heaven," and "Asylum of the Universe." A
triple darkness of chaos, bankruptcy and oppression enveloped the
country. His own assassination was the first portent of the revolution
which was to restrict the prerogatives of his son and successor, depose
the last two monarchs of the House of &Qajar, and extinguish their
dynasty. On the eve of his jubilee, which was to inaugurate a new era,
and the celebration of which had been elaborately prepared, he fell, in
the shrine of &Shah &Abdu'l-'Azim, a victim to an assassin's pistol, his
dead body driven back to his capitol, propped up in the royal carriage in
front of his Grand Vizir, in order to defer the news of his murder.
"It was whispered," writes an eyewitness of both the ceremony and
the assassination, "that the day of the &Shah's celebration was to be the
greatest in the history of Persia.... Prisoners were to be released without
condition, and a general amnesty was to be proclaimed; peasants were
promised exemption from taxes for at least two years. ...the poor were
to be fed for months. Ministers and officials were already intriguing for
honors and pension from the &Shah. Shrines and sacred places were to
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open their gates to all wayfarers and pilgrims, and the siyyids and &mullas
were taking cough medicine to clear their throats to sing and chant the
praises of the &Shah in all the pulpits. The mosques were swept and
prepared for general meetings and public prayers in behalf of the
Sovereign.... Sacred fountains were enlarged to hold more holy water,
and the rightful authorities had foreseen that many miracles might take
place on the day of the jubilee, with the aid of these fountains.... The
&Shah had declared ... that he would renounce his prerogatives as
despot, and proclaim himself `The Majestic Father of all the Persians.'
The city authority was to relax its vigilant watch. No record was to be
kept of the strangers who flocked to the caravanserais, and the population
was to be left free to wander the streets during the whole night."
Even the great mujtahids had, according to what had been reported to
that same eyewitness, "decided, for the time being, to discontinue
persecuting the &Babis and other infidels."
Thus fell the one whose reign will remain forever associated with the
most heinous crime in history--the martyrdom of that One Whom the
Supreme Manifestation of God proclaimed to be the "Point round
Whom the realities of the Prophets and Messengers revolve." In a Tablet
in which the pen of &Baha'u'llah condemns him, we read: "Among them
[kings of the earth] is the King of Persia, who suspended Him Who is the
Temple of the Cause [the &Bab] in the air, and put Him to death with such
cruelty that all created things, and the inmates of Paradise, and the
Concourse on high wept for Him. He slew, moreover, some of Our
kindred, and plundered Our property, and made Our family captives in
the hands of the oppressors. Once and again he imprisoned Me. By God,
the True One! None can reckon the things which befell Me in prison, save
God, the Reckoner, the Omniscient, the Almighty. Subsequently he
banished Me and My family from My country, whereupon We arrived in
&Iraq in evident sorrow. We tarried there until the time when the King of
&Rum [&Sultan of Turkey] arose against Us, and summoned Us unto the
seat of his sovereignty. When We reached it there flowed over Us that
whereat the King of Persia rejoiced. Later We entered this Prison, wherein
the hands of Our loved ones were torn from the hem of Our robe. In such a
manner hath he dealt with Us!"
The days of the &Qajar dynasty were now numbered. The torpor of the
national consciousness had vanished. The reign of &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah's
successor, &Muzaffari'd-Din &Shah, a weak and timid creature, extravagant
+P69
and lavish to his courtiers, led the country down the broad road to
ruin. The movement in favor of a constitution, limiting the sovereign's
prerogatives, gathered force, and culminated in the signature of the
constitution by the dying &Shah, who expired a few days later. &Muhammad-'Ali
&Shah, a despot of the worst type, unprincipled and avaricious,
succeeded to the throne. Hostile to the constitution, he, by
his summary action, involving the bombardment of the &Baharistan,
where the Assembly met, precipitated a revolution which led to his
deposition by the nationalists. Accepting, after much bargaining, a large
pension, he ignominiously withdrew to Russia. The boy-king, &Ahmad
&Shah, who succeeded him, was a mere cipher and careless of his duties.
The crying needs of his country continued to be ignored. Increasing
anarchy, the impotence of the central government, the state of the
national finances, the progressive deterioration of the general condition
of the country, practically abandoned by a sovereign who preferred the
gaieties and frivolities of society life in the European capitals to the
discharge of the stern and urgent responsibilities which the plight of his
nation demanded, sounded the death knell of a dynasty which, it was
generally felt, had forfeited the crown. Whilst abroad, on one of his
periodic visits, Parliament deposed him, and proclaimed the extinction
of his dynasty, which had occupied the throne of Persia for a hundred
and thirty years, whose rulers proudly claimed no less a descent than
from Japhet, son of Noah, and whose successive monarchs, with only
one exception, were either assassinated, deposed, or struck down by
mortal disease.
Their myriad progeny, a veritable "beehive of princelings," a "race of
royal drones," were both a disgrace and a menace to their countrymen.
Now, however, these luckless descendants of a fallen house, shorn of all
power, and some of them reduced even to beggary, proclaim, in their
distress, the consequences of the abominations which their progenitors
have perpetrated. Swelling the ranks of the ill-fated scions of the House
of &Uthman, and of the rulers of the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, the
Hapsburg, and the Napoleonic dynasties, they roam the face of the
earth, scarcely aware of the character of those forces which have operated
such tragic revolutions in their lives, and so powerfully contributed
to their present plight.
Already grandsons of both &Nasiri'd-Din &Shah and of &Sultan
&Abdu'l-'Aziz have, in their powerlessness and destitution, turned to the
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World Center of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah, and sought respectively
political aid and pecuniary assistance. In the case of the former, the
request was promptly and firmly refused, whilst in the case of the latter it
was unhesitatingly offered.
The Decline in the Fortunes of Royalty
And as we survey in other fields the decline in the fortunes of royalty,
whether in the years immediately preceding the Great War or after, and
contemplate the fate that has overtaken the Chinese Empire, the Portuguese
and Spanish Monarchies, and more recently the vicissitudes
that have afflicted, and are still afflicting, the sovereigns of Norway, of
Denmark and of Holland, and observe the impotence of their fellow-sovereigns,
and note the fear and trembling that has seized their thrones,
may we not associate their plight with the opening passages of the
&Suriy-i-Muluk, which, in view of their momentous significance, I feel
impelled to quote a second time: "Fear God, O concourse of kings, and
suffer not yourselves to be deprived of this most sublime grace.... Set
your hearts towards the face of God, and abandon that which your desires
have bidden you to follow, and be not of those who perish.... Ye
examined not His [the &Bab's] Cause, when so to do had been better for
you than all that the sun shineth upon, could ye but perceive it....
Beware that ye be not careless henceforth, as ye have been careless
aforetime.... My face hath come forth from the veils, and shed its
radiance upon all that is in heaven and on earth, and yet ye turned not
towards Him.... Arise then ... and make ye amends for that which hath
escaped you.... If ye pay no heed unto the counsels which, in peerless
and unequivocal language, We have revealed in this Tablet, Divine
chastisement shall assail you from every direction, and the sentence of
His justice shall be pronounced against you.... Twenty years have
passed, O kings, during which We have, each day, tasted the agony of a
fresh tribulation.... Though aware of most of Our afflictions, ye,
nevertheless, have failed to stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not
your clear duty to restrain the tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal
equitably with your subjects, that your high sense of justice may be fully
demonstrated to all mankind?"
No wonder that &Baha'u'llah, in view of the treatment meted out to
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Him by the sovereigns of the earth, should, as already quoted, have
written these words: "From two ranks amongst men power hath been
seized: kings and ecclesiastics." Indeed, He even goes further, and states
in His Tablet addressed to &Shaykh &Salman: "One of the signs of the
maturity of the world is that no one will accept to bear the weight of
kingship. Kingship will remain with none willing to bear alone its
weight. That day will be the day whereon wisdom will be manifested
among mankind. Only in order to proclaim the Cause of God and spread
abroad His Faith will anyone be willing to bear this grievous weight.
Well is it with him who, for love of God and His Cause, and for the sake of
God and for the purpose of proclaiming His Faith, will expose himself
unto this great danger, and will accept this toil and trouble."
Recognition of Kingship
Let none, however, mistake or unwittingly misrepresent the purpose
of &Baha'u'llah. Severe as has been His condemnation pronounced
against those sovereigns who persecuted Him, and however strict the
censure expressed collectively against those who failed signally in their
clear duty to investigate the truth of His Faith and to restrain the hand of
the wrongdoer, His teachings embody no principle that can, in any way,
be construed as a repudiation, or even a disparagement, however veiled,
of the institution of kingship. The catastrophic fall, and the extinction of
the dynasties and empires of those monarchs whose disastrous end He
particularly prophesied, and the declining fortunes of the sovereigns of
His Own generation, whom He generally reproved--both constituting a
passing phase of the evolution of the Faith--should, in no wise, be
confounded with the future position of that institution. Indeed if we
delve into the writings of the Author of the &Baha'i Faith, we cannot fail
to discover unnumbered passages in which, in terms that none can
misrepresent, the principle of kingship is eulogized, the rank and
conduct of just and fair-minded kings is extolled, the rise of monarchs,
ruling with justice and even professing His Faith, is envisaged, and the
solemn duty to arise and ensure the triumph of &Baha'i sovereigns is
inculcated. To conclude from the above quoted words, addressed by
&Baha'u'llah to the monarchs of the earth, to infer from the recital of the
woeful disasters that have overtaken so many of them, that His followers
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either advocate or anticipate the definite extinction of the institution of
kingship, would indeed be tantamount to a distortion of His teaching.
I can do no better than quote some of &Baha'u'llah's Own testimonies,
leaving the reader to shape his own judgment as to the falsity of such a
deduction. In His "Epistle to the Son of the Wolf" He indicates the true
source of kingship: "Regard for the rank of sovereigns is divinely ordained,
as is clearly attested by the words of the Prophets of God and His
chosen ones. He Who is the Spirit [Jesus]--may peace be upon Him--
was asked: `O Spirit of God! Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or
not?' And He made reply: `Yea, render to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.' He forbade it not. These
two sayings are, in the estimation of men of insight, one and the same, for
if that which belonged to Caesar had not come from God He would have
forbidden it. And likewise in the sacred verse: `Obey God and obey the
Apostle, and those among you invested with authority.' By `those invested
with authority' is meant primarily and more specially the
&Imams--the blessings of God rest upon them. They verily are the
manifestations of the power of God and the sources of His authority, and the
repositories of His knowledge, and the daysprings of His commandments.
Secondarily these words refer unto the kings and rulers--those through
the brightness of whose justice the horizons of the world are resplendent
and luminous."
And again: "In the Epistle to the Romans Saint Paul hath written:
`Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power
but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever, therefore,
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.' And further: `For he is
the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth
evil.' He saith that the appearance of the kings, and their majesty and
power, are of God."
And again: "A just king enjoyeth nearer access unto God than anyone.
Unto this testifieth He Who speaketh in His Most Great Prison."
Likewise in the &Bisharat (Glad-Tidings) &Baha'u'llah asserts that "the
majesty of kingship is one of the signs of God." "We do not wish," He
adds, "that the countries of the world should be deprived thereof."
In the &Kitab-i-Aqdas He sets forth His purpose, and eulogizes the king
who will profess His Faith: "By the Righteousness of God! It is not Our
wish to lay hands on your kingdoms. Our mission is to seize and possess
the hearts of men. Upon them the eyes of &Baha are fastened. To this
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testifieth the Kingdom of Names, could ye but comprehend it. Whoso
followeth his Lord, will renounce the world and all that is therein; how
much greater, then, must be the detachment of Him Who holdeth so
august a station!" "How great the blessedness that awaiteth the king who
will arise to aid My Cause in My Kingdom, who will detach himself from
all else but Me! Such a king is numbered with the Companions of the
Crimson Ark--the Ark which God hath prepared for the people of &Baha.
All must glorify his name, must reverence his station, and aid him to
unlock the cities with the keys of My Name, the Omnipotent Protector of
all that inhabit the visible and invisible kingdoms. Such a king is the very
eye of mankind, the luminous ornament on the brow of creation, the
fountainhead of blessings unto the whole world. Offer up, O people of
&Baha, your substance, nay your very lives, for his assistance."
In the &Lawh-i-Sultan &Baha'u'llah further reveals the significance of
kingship: "A just king is the shadow of God on earth. All should seek
shelter under the shadow of his justice, and rest in the shade of his favor.
This is not a matter which is either specific or limited in its scope, that it
might be restricted to one or another person, inasmuch as the shadow
telleth of the One Who casteth it. God, glorified be His remembrance,
hath called Himself the Lord of the worlds, for He hath nurtured and still
nurtureth everyone. Glorified be, then, His grace that hath preceded all
created things, and His mercy that hath surpassed the worlds."
In one of His Tablets &Baha'u'llah has also written: "The one true God,
exalted be His glory, hath bestowed the government of the earth upon the
kings. To none is given the right to act in any manner that would run
counter to the considered views of them who are in authority. That which
He hath reserved for Himself are the cities of men's hearts; and of these the
loved ones of Him Who is the Sovereign Truth are, in this Day, as the
keys."
In the following passage He expresses this wish: "We cherish the hope
that one of the kings of the earth will, for the sake of God, arise for the
triumph of this wronged, this oppressed people. Such a king will be
eternally extolled and glorified. God hath prescribed unto this people the
duty of aiding whosoever will aid them, of serving his best interests, and
of demonstrating to him their abiding loyalty."
In the &Lawh-i-Ra'is He actually and categorically prophesies the rise
of such a king: "Erelong will God raise up from among the kings one who
will aid His loved ones. He, verily, encompasseth all things. He will
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instill in the hearts the love of His loved ones. This, indeed, is irrevocably
decreed by One Who is the Almighty, the Beneficent." In the &Ridvanu'l-'Adl,
wherein the virtue of justice is exalted, He makes a parallel
prediction: "Erelong will God make manifest on earth kings who will
recline on the couches of justice, and will rule amongst men even as they
rule their own selves. They, indeed, are among the choicest of My
creatures in the entire creation."
In the &Kitab-i-Aqdas He visualizes in these words the elevation to the
throne of His native city, "the Mother of the World" and "the Dayspring
of Light," of a king who will be adorned with the twin ornaments of
justice and of devotion to His Faith: "Let nothing grieve thee, O Land of
&Ta, for God hath chosen thee to be the source of the joy of all mankind. He
shall, if it be His will, bless thy throne with one who will rule with justice,
who will gather together the flock of God which the wolves have scattered.
Such a ruler will, with joy and gladness, turn his face towards and extend
his favors unto, the people of &Baha. He indeed is accounted in the sight of
God as a jewel among men. Upon him rest forever the glory of God, and
the glory of all that dwell in the kingdom of His Revelation."
The Crumbling of Religious Orthodoxy
Dear friends! The decline in the fortunes of the crowned wielders of
temporal power has been paralleled by a no less startling deterioration in
the influence exercised by the world's spiritual leaders. The colossal
events that have heralded the dissolution of so many kingdoms and
empires have almost synchronized with the crumbling of the seemingly
inviolable strongholds of religious orthodoxy. That same process which,
swiftly and tragically, sealed the doom of kings and emperors, and
extinguished their dynasties, has operated in the case of the ecclesiastical
leaders of both Christianity and &Islam, damaging their prestige, and,
in some cases, overthrowing their highest institutions. "Power hath been
seized" indeed from both "kings and ecclesiastics." The glory of the
former has been eclipsed, the power of the latter irretrievably lost.
Those leaders who exercised guidance and control over the ecclesiastical
hierarchies of their respective religions have, likewise, been appealed
to, warned, and reproved by &Baha'u'llah, in terms no less
uncertain than those in which the sovereigns who presided over the
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destinies of their subjects have been addressed. They, too, and more
particularly the heads of Muslim ecclesiastical orders, have, in conjunction
with despots and potentates, launched their assaults and thundered
their anathemas against the Founders of the Faith of God, its followers,
its principles, and its institutions. Were not the divines of Persia the first
who hoisted the standard of revolt, who inflamed the ignorant and
subservient masses against it, and who instigated the civil authorities,
through their outcry, their threats, their lies, their calumnies, and
denunciations, to decree the banishments, to enact the laws, to launch
the punitive campaigns, and to carry out the executions and massacres
that fill the pages of its history? So abominable and savage was the
butchery committed in a single day, instigated by these divines, and so
typical of the "callousness of the brute and the ingenuity of the fiend"
that Renan, in his "Les &Apotres," characterized that day as "perhaps
unparalleled in the history of the world."
It was these divines, who, by these very acts, sowed the seeds of the
disintegration of their own institutions, institutions that were so potent,
so famous, and appeared so invulnerable when the Faith was born. It
was they who, by assuming so lightly and foolishly, such awful responsibilities
were primarily answerable for the release of those violent and
disruptive influences that have unchained disasters as catastrophic as
those which overwhelmed kings, dynasties, and empires, and which
constitute the most noteworthy landmarks in the history of the first
century of the &Baha'i era.
This process of deterioration, however startling in its initial
manifestations, is still operating with undiminished force, and will, as the
opposition to the Faith of God, from various sources and in distant
fields, gathers momentum, be further accelerated and reveal still more
remarkable evidences of its devastating power. I cannot, in view of the
proportions which this communication has already assumed, expatiate,
as fully as I would wish, on the aspects of this weighty theme which,
together with the reaction of the sovereigns of the earth to the Message of
&Baha'u'llah, is one of the most fascinating and edifying episodes in the
dramatic story of His Faith. I will only consider the repercussions of the
violent assaults made by the ecclesiastical leaders of &Islam and, to a
lesser degree, by certain exponents of Christian orthodoxy upon their
respective institutions. I will preface these observations with some
passages gleaned from the great mass of &Baha'u'llah's Tablets which,
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both directly and indirectly, bear reference to Muslim and Christian
divines, and which throw such a powerful light on the dismal disasters
that have overtaken, and are still overtaking, the ecclesiastical hierarchies
of the two religions with which the Faith has been immediately
concerned.
It must not be inferred, however, that &Baha'u'llah directed His
historic addresses exclusively to the leaders of &Islam and Christianity, or
that the impact of an all-pervading Faith on the strongholds of religious
orthodoxy is to be confined to the institutions of these two religious
systems. "The time foreordained unto the peoples and kindreds of the
earth," affirms &Baha'u'llah, "is now come. The promises of God, as
recorded in the Holy Scriptures, have all been fulfilled.... This is the
Day which the Pen of the Most High hath glorified in all the Holy
Scriptures. There is no verse in them that doth not declare the glory of His
holy Name, and no Book that doth not testify unto the loftiness of this
most exalted theme." "Were We," He adds, "to make mention of all that
hath been revealed in these heavenly Books and Holy Scriptures concerning
this Revelation, this Tablet would assume impossible dimensions."
As the promise of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah is enshrined in all the
Scriptures of past religions, so does its Author address Himself to their
followers, and particularly to their responsible leaders who have intervened
between Him and their respective congregations. "At one time,"
writes &Baha'u'llah, "We address the people of the Torah and summon
them unto Him Who is the Revealer of verses, Who hath come from Him
Who layeth low the necks of men.... At another, We address the people
of the Evangel and say: `The All-Glorious is come in this Name whereby
the Breeze of God hath wafted over all regions.'... At still another, We
address the people of the &Qur'an saying: `Fear the All-Merciful, and cavil
not at Him through Whom all religions were founded.'... Know thou,
moreover, that We have addressed to the Magians Our Tablets, and
adorned them with Our Law.... We have revealed in them the essence of
all the hints and allusions contained in their Books. The Lord, verily, is
the Almighty, the All-Knowing."
Addressing the Jewish people &Baha'u'llah has written: "The Most
Great Law is come, and the Ancient Beauty ruleth upon the throne of
David. Thus hath My Pen spoken that which the histories of bygone ages
have related. At this time, however, David crieth aloud and saith: `O my
loving Lord! Do Thou number me with such as have stood steadfast in
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Thy Cause, O Thou through Whom the faces have been illumined, and
the footsteps have slipped!'" And again: "The Breath hath been wafted,
and the Breeze hath blown, and from Zion hath appeared that which was
hidden, and from Jerusalem is heard the Voice of God, the One, the
Incomparable, the Omniscient." Furthermore, in His "Epistle to the
Son of the Wolf" &Baha'u'llah has revealed: "Lend an ear unto the song of
David. He saith: `Who will bring me into the Strong City?' The Strong
City is &Akka, which hath been named the Most Great Prison, and which
possesseth a fortress and mighty ramparts. O &Shaykh! Peruse that which
Isaiah hath spoken in His Book. He saith: `Get thee up into the high
mountain, O Zion, that bringest good tidings; lift up thy voice with
strength, O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings. Lift it up, be not
afraid; say unto the cities of Judah: "Behold your God! Behold the Lord
God will come with strong hand, and His arm shall rule for Him."' This
Day all the signs have appeared. A Great City hath descended from
heaven, and Zion trembleth and exulteth with joy at the Revelation of
God, for it hath heard the Voice of God on every side."
To the priestly caste, holding sacerdotal supremacy over the followers
of the Faith of Zoroaster, that same Voice, identifying itself with the
voice of the promised &Shah-Bahram, has declared: "O high priests! Ears
have been given you that they may hearken unto the mystery of Him Who
is the Self-Dependent, and eyes that they may behold Him. Wherefore
flee ye? The Incomparable Friend is manifest. He speaketh that wherein
lieth salvation. Were ye, O high priests, to discover the perfume of the rose
garden of understanding, ye would seek none other but Him, and would
recognize, in His new vesture, the All-Wise and Peerless One, and would
turn your eyes from the world and all who seek it, and would arise to help
Him." "Whatsoever hath been announced in the Books," &Baha'u'llah,
replying to a Zoroastrian who had inquired regarding the promised
&Shah-Bahram, has written, "hath been revealed and made clear. From
every direction the signs have been manifested. The Omnipotent One is
calling, in this Day, and announcing the appearance of the Supreme
Heaven." "This is not the day," He, in another Tablet declares,
"whereon the high priests can command and exercise their authority. In
your Book it is stated that the high priests will, on that Day, lead men far
astray, and will prevent them from drawing nigh unto Him. He indeed is
a high priest who hath seen the light and hastened unto the way leading
to the Beloved." "Say, O high priests!" He, again addresses them, "The
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Hand of Omnipotence is stretched forth from behind the clouds; behold ye
it with new eyes. The tokens of His majesty and greatness are unveiled;
gaze ye on them with pure eyes.... Say, O high priests! Ye are held in
reverence because of My Name, and yet ye flee Me! Ye are the high priests
of the Temple. Had ye been the high priests of the Omnipotent One, ye
would have been united with Him, and would have recognized Him....
Say, O high priests! No man's acts shall be acceptable, in this Day,
unless he forsaketh mankind and all that men possess, and setteth his face
towards the Omnipotent One."
It is not, however, with either of these two Faiths that we are primarily
concerned. It is to &Islam and, to a lesser extent, to Christianity that my
theme is directly related. &Islam, from which the Faith of &Baha'u'llah has
sprung, even as did Christianity from Judaism, is the religion within
whose pale that Faith first rose and developed, from whose ranks the
great mass of &Baha'i adherents have been recruited, and by whose
leaders they have been, and indeed are still being, persecuted. Christianity,
on the other hand, is the religion to which the vast majority of
&Baha'is of non-Islamic extraction belong, within whose spiritual domain
the Administrative Order of the Faith of God is rapidly advancing,
and by whose ecclesiastical exponents that Order is being increasingly
assailed. Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and even Zoroastrianism
which, in the main, are still unaware of the potentialities of the
Cause of God, and whose response to its Message is as yet negligible, the
&Muhammadan and Christian Faiths may be regarded as the two religious
systems which are sustaining, at this formative stage in its evolution,
the full impact of so tremendous a Revelation.
Let us, then, consider what the Founders of the &Baha'i Faith have
addressed to, or written about, the recognized leaders of &Islam and
Christianity. We have already considered the passages with reference to
the kings of &Islam, whether as Caliphs reigning in Constantinople, or as
&Shahs of Persia who ruled the kingdom as temporary trustees for the
expected &Imam. We have also noted the Tablet which &Baha'u'llah
specifically revealed for the Roman Pontiff, and the more general
message in the &Suriy-i-Muluk directed to the kings of Christendom. No
less challenging and ominous is the Voice that has warned and called to
account the &Muhammadan divines and the Christian clergy.
"Leaders of religion," is &Baha'u'llah's clear and universal censure
pronounced in the &Kitab-i-Iqan, "in every age, have hindered their
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people from attaining the shores of eternal salvation, inasmuch as they
held the reins of authority in their mighty grasp. Some for the lust of
leadership, others through want of knowledge and understanding, have
been the cause of the deprivation of the people. By their sanction and
authority, every Prophet of God hath drunk from the chalice of sacrifice,
and winged His flight unto the heights of glory. What unspeakable
cruelties they that have occupied the seats of authority and learning have
inflicted upon the true Monarchs of the world, those Gems of Divine
virtue! Content with a transitory dominion, they have deprived themselves
of an everlasting sovereignty." And again, in that same Book:
"Among these `veils of glory' are the divines and doctors living in the days
of the Manifestation of God, who, because of their want of discernment
and their love and eagerness for leadership, have failed to submit to the
Cause of God, nay, have even refused to incline their ears unto the
Divine Melody. `They have thrust their fingers into their ears.' And the
people also, utterly ignoring God and taking them for their masters, have
placed themselves unreservedly under the authority of these pompous and
hypocritical leaders, for they have no sight, no hearing, no heart, of their
own to distinguish truth from falsehood. Notwithstanding the divinely
inspired admonitions of all the Prophets, the Saints, and Chosen Ones of
God, enjoining the people to see with their own eyes and hear with their
own ears, they have disdainfully rejected their counsels and have blindly
followed, and will continue to follow, the leaders of their Faith. Should a
poor and obscure person, destitute of the attire of the men of learning,
address them saying: `Follow ye, O people, the Messengers of God,' they
would, greatly surprised at such a statement, reply: `What! Meanest
thou that all these divines, all these exponents of learning, with all their
authority, their pomp, and pageantry, have erred, and failed to distinguish
truth from falsehood? Dost thou, and people like thyself, pretend to
have comprehended that which they have not understood?' If numbers
and excellence of apparel be regarded as the criterions of learning and
truth, the peoples of a bygone age, whom those of today have never
surpassed in numbers, magnificence and power, should certainly be
accounted a superior and worthier people." Furthermore, "Not one
Prophet of God was made manifest Who did not fall a victim to the
relentless hate, to the denunciation, denial and execration of the clerics of
His day! Woe unto them for the iniquities their hands have formerly
wrought! Woe unto them for that which they are now doing! What veils of
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glory more grievous than these embodiments of error! By the righteousness
of God! To pierce such veils is the mightiest of all acts, and to rend them
asunder the most meritorious of all deeds!" "On their tongue," He
moreover has written, "the mention of God hath become an empty name;
in their midst His holy Word a dead letter. Such is the sway of their
desires, that the lamp of conscience and reason hath been quenched in
their hearts.... No two are found to agree on one and the same law, for
they seek no God but their own desire, and tread no path but the path of
error. In leadership they have recognized the ultimate object of their
endeavor, and account pride and haughtiness as the highest attainments
of their hearts' desire. They have placed their sordid machinations above
the Divine decree, have renounced resignation unto the will of God,
busied themselves with selfish calculation, and walked in the way of the
hypocrite. With all their power and strength they strive to secure themselves
in their petty pursuits, fearful lest the least discredit undermine
their authority or blemish the display of their magnificence."
"The source and origin of tyranny," &Baha'u'llah in another Tablet has
affirmed, "have been the divines. Through the sentences pronounced by
these haughty and wayward souls the rulers of the earth have wrought
that which ye have heard.... The reins of the heedless masses have been,
and are, in the hands of the exponents of idle fancies and vain imaginings.
These decree what they please. God, verily, is clear of them, and
We, too, are clear of them, as are such as have testified unto that which
the Pen of the Most High hath spoken in this glorious Station."
"The leaders of men," He has likewise asserted, "have, from time
immemorial, prevented the people from turning unto the Most Great
Ocean. The Friend of God [Abraham] was cast into fire through the
sentence pronounced by the divines of the age, and lies and calumnies
were imputed to Him Who discoursed with God [Moses]. Reflect upon
the One Who was the Spirit of God [Jesus]. Though He showed forth the
utmost compassion and tenderness, yet they rose up against that Essence
of Being and Lord of the seen and unseen, in such a manner that He
could find no refuge wherein to rest. Each day He wandered unto a new
place, and sought a new shelter. Consider the Seal of the Prophets
[&Muhammad]--may the souls of all else except Him be His sacrifice!
How grievous the things which befell that Lord of all being at the hands of
the priests of idolatry, and of the Jewish doctors, after He had uttered the
blessed words proclaiming the unity of God! By My life! My pen
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groaneth, and all created things cry out by reason of the things that have
touched Him, at the hands of such as have broken the Covenant of God
and His Testament, and denied His Testimony, and gainsaid His signs."
"The foolish divines," another Tablet declares, "have laid aside the
Book of God, and are occupied with that which they themselves have
fashioned. The Ocean of Knowledge is revealed, and the shrill of the Pen
of the Most High is raised, and yet they, even as earthworms, are afflicted
with the clay of their fancies and imaginings. They are exalted by reason
of their relationship to the one true God, and yet they have turned aside
from Him! Because of Him have they become famous, and yet they are
shut off as by a veil from Him!"
"The pagan priests," in yet another Tablet is written, "and the Jewish
and Christian divines, have committed the very things which the divines
of the age, in this Dispensation, have committed, and are still committing.
Nay, these have displayed a more grievous cruelty and a fiercer
malice. Every atom beareth witness unto that which I say."
To these leaders who "esteem themselves the best of all creatures and
have been regarded as the vilest by Him Who is the Truth," who "occupy
the seats of knowledge and learning, and who have named ignorance
knowledge, and called oppression justice," and who, "worship no God
but their own desire, who bear allegiance to naught but gold, who are
wrapt in the densest veils of learning, and who, enmeshed by its obscurities,
are lost in the wilds of error"--to these &Baha'u'llah has chosen
to address these words: "O concourse of divines! Ye shall not henceforward
behold yourselves possessed of any power, inasmuch as We have
seized it from you, and destined it for such as have believed in God, the
One, the All-Powerful, the Almighty, the Unconstrained."
In the &Kitab-i-Aqdas we read the following: "Say: O leaders of
religion! Weigh not the Book of God with such standards and sciences as are
current amongst you, for the Book itself is the unerring Balance established
amongst men. In this most perfect Balance whatsoever the peoples
and kindreds of the earth possess must be weighed, while the measure of
its weight should be tested according to its own standard, did ye but know
it. The eye of My loving-kindness weepeth sore over you, inasmuch as ye
have failed to recognize the One upon Whom ye have been calling in the
daytime and in the night season, at even and at morn.... O ye leaders of
religion! Who is the man amongst you that can rival Me in vision or
insight? Where is he to be found that dareth to claim to be My equal in
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utterance or wisdom? No, by My Lord, the All-Merciful! All on the earth
shall pass away; and this is the face of your Lord, the Almighty, the
Well-Beloved.... Say: This, verily, is the heaven in which the Mother
Book is treasured, could ye but comprehend it. He it is Who hath caused
the Rock to shout, and the Burning Bush to lift up its voice, upon the
Mount rising above the Holy Land, and proclaim: `The Kingdom is
God's, the sovereign Lord of all, the All-Powerful, the Loving!' We have
not entered any school, nor read any of your dissertations. Incline your
ears to the words of this unlettered One, wherewith He summoneth you
unto God, the Ever-Abiding. Better is this for you than all the treasures
of the earth, could ye but comprehend it."
"O concourse of divines!" He moreover has written, "When My verses
were sent down, and My clear tokens were revealed, We found you
behind the veils. This, verily, is a strange thing.... We have rent the
veils asunder. Beware lest ye shut out the people by yet another veil. Pluck
asunder the chains of vain imaginings, in the name of the Lord of all
men, and be not of the deceitful. Should ye turn unto God, and embrace
His Cause, spread not disorder within it, and measure not the Book of
God with your selfish desires. This, verily, is the counsel of God aforetime
and hereafter.... Had ye believed in God, when He revealed Himself,
the people would not have turned aside from Him, nor would the things
ye witness today have befallen Us. Fear God, and be not of the heedless.
...This is the Cause that hath caused all your superstitions and idols to
tremble.... O concourse of divines! Beware lest ye be the cause of strife in
the land, even as ye were the cause of the repudiation of the Faith in its
early days. Gather the people around this Word that hath made the
pebbles to cry out: `The Kingdom is God's, the Dawning-Place of all
signs!'... Tear the veils asunder in such wise that the inmates of the
Kingdom will hear them being rent. This is the command of God, in days
gone by, and for those to come. Blessed the man that observeth that
whereunto he was bidden, and woe betide the negligent."
And again: "How long will ye, O concourse of divines, level the spears
of hatred at the face of &Baha? Rein in your pens. Lo, the Most Sublime
Pen speaketh betwixt earth and heaven. Fear God, and follow not your
desires which have altered the face of creation. Purify your ears that they
may hearken unto the Voice of God. By God! It is even as fire that
consumeth the veils, and as water that washeth the souls of all who are in
the universe."
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"Say: O concourse of divines!" He furthermore addresses them, "Can
any one of you race with the Divine Youth in the arena of wisdom and
utterance, or soar with Him into the heaven of inner meaning and
explanation? Nay, by My Lord, the God of mercy! All have swooned
away in this Day from the Word of thy Lord. They are even as dead and
lifeless, except him whom thy Lord, the Almighty, the Unconstrained,
hath willed to exempt. Such a one is indeed of those endued with
knowledge in the sight of Him Who is the All-Knowing. The inmates of
Paradise, and the dwellers of the sacred Folds, bless him at eventide and
at dawn. Can the one possessed of wooden legs resist him whose feet God
hath made of steel? Nay, by Him Who illumineth the whole of creation!"
"When We observed carefully," He significantly remarks, "We discovered
that Our enemies are, for the most part, the divines." "Among the
people are those who said: `He hath repudiated the divines.' Say: `Yea, by
My Lord! I, in very truth, was the One Who abolished the idols!'" "We,
verily, have sounded the Trumpet, which is Our Most Sublime Pen, and
lo, the divines and the learned, and the doctors and the rulers, swooned
away except such as God preserved, as a token of His grace, and He,
verily, is the All-Bounteous, the Ancient of Days."
"O concourse of divines! Fling away idle fancies and imaginings, and
turn, then, towards the Horizon of Certitude. I swear by God! All that ye
possess will profit you not, neither all the treasures of the earth, nor the
leadership ye have usurped. Fear God, and be not of the lost ones." "Say:
O concourse of divines! Lay aside all your veils and coverings. Give ear
unto that whereunto calleth you the Most Sublime Pen, in this wondrous
Day.... The world is laden with dust, by reason of your vain imaginings,
and the hearts of such as enjoy near access to God are troubled
because of your cruelty. Fear God, and be of them that judge equitably."
"O ye the dawning-places of knowledge!" He thus exhorts them,
"Beware that ye suffer not yourselves to become changed, for as ye
change, most men will, likewise, change. This, verily, is an injustice
unto yourselves and unto others.... Ye are even as a spring. If it be
changed, so will the streams that branch out from it be changed. Fear
God, and be numbered with the godly. In like manner, if the heart of
man be corrupted, his limbs will also be corrupted. And similarly, if the
root of a tree be corrupted, its branches, and its offshoots, and its leaves,
and its fruits, will be corrupted."
"Say: O concourse of divines!" He thus appeals to them, "Be fair, I
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adjure you by God, and nullify not the Truth with the things ye possess.
Peruse that which We have sent down with truth. It will, verily, aid you,
and will draw you nigh unto God, the Mighty, the Great. Consider and
call to mind how when &Muhammad, the Apostle of God, appeared, the
people denied Him. They ascribed unto Him what caused the Spirit
[Jesus] to lament in His Most Sublime Station, and the Faithful Spirit to
cry out. Consider, moreover, the things which befell the Apostles and
Messengers of God before Him, by reason of what the hands of the unjust
have wrought. We make mention of you for the sake of God, and remind
you of His signs, and announce unto you the things ordained for such as
are nigh unto Him in the most sublime Paradise and the all-highest
Heaven, and I, verily, am the Announcer, the Omniscient. He hath
come for your salvation, and hath borne tribulations that ye may ascend,
by the ladder of utterance, unto the summit of understanding....
Peruse, with fairness and justice, that which hath been sent down. It
will, verily, exalt you through the truth, and will cause you to behold the
things from which ye have been withheld, and will enable you to quaff
His sparkling Wine."
Words Addressed to Muslim Ecclesiastics
Let us now consider more particularly the specific references, and the
words directly addressed, to Muslim ecclesiastics by the &Bab and
&Baha'u'llah. The &Bab, as attested by the &Kitab-i-Iqan, has "specifically
revealed an Epistle unto the divines of every city, wherein He hath fully
set forth the character of the denial and repudiation of each of them."
Whilst in &Isfahan, that time-honored stronghold of Muslim ecclesiasticism,
He, through the medium of its governor, &Manuchihr &Khan,
invited in writing the divines of that city to engage in a contest with Him,
in order, as He expressed it, to "establish the truth and dissipate
falsehood." Not one of the multitude of divines who thronged that great
seat of learning had the courage to take up that challenge. &Baha'u'llah,
on His part, while in Adrianople, and as witnessed by His own Tablet to
the &Shah of Persia, signified His wish to be "brought face to face with the
divines of the age, and produce proofs and testimonies in the presence of
His Majesty, the &Shah." This offer was denounced as a "great presumption
and amazing audacity" by the divines of &Tihran, who, in their fear,
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advised their sovereign to instantly punish the bearer of that Tablet.
Previously, while &Baha'u'llah was in &Baghdad, He expressed His willingness
that, provided the divines of Najaf and &Karbila--the twin holiest
cities next to Mecca and Medina, in the eyes of the &Shi'ihs--assembled
and agreed regarding any miracle they wished to be performed, and
signed and sealed a statement affirming that on performance of this
miracle they would acknowledge the truth of His Mission, He would
unhesitatingly produce it. To this challenge they, as recorded by
&Abdu'l-Baha in His "Some Answered Questions," could offer no better
reply than this: "This man is an enchanter; perhaps he will perform an
enchantment, and then we shall have nothing more to say." "For twelve
years," &Baha'u'llah Himself has testified, "We tarried in &Baghdad.
Much as We desired that a large gathering of divines and fair-minded
men be convened, so that truth might be distinguished from falsehood,
and be fully demonstrated, no action was taken." And again: "And
likewise, while in &Iraq, We wished to come together with the divines of
Persia. No sooner did they hear of this, than they fled and said: `He
indeed is a manifest sorcerer!' This is the word that proceeded aforetime
out of the mouths of such as were like them. These [divines] objected to
what they said, and yet, they themselves repeat, in this day, what was
said before them, and understand not. By My life! They are even as ashes
in the sight of thy Lord. If He be willing, tempestuous gales will blow over
them, and make them as dust. Thy Lord, verily, doth what He pleaseth."
These false, these cruel and cowardly &Shi'ih clericals, who, as
&Baha'u'llah declared, had they not intervened, Persia would have been
subdued by the power of God in hardly more than two years, have been
thus addressed in the &Qayyum-i-Asma: "O concourse of divines! Fear
God from this day onwards in the views ye advance, for He Who is Our
Remembrance in your midst, and Who cometh from Us, is, in very truth,
the Judge and Witness. Turn away from that which ye lay hold of, and
which the Book of God, the True One, hath not sanctioned, for on the
Day of Resurrection ye shall, upon the Bridge, be, in very truth, held
answerable for the position ye occupied."
In that same Book the &Bab thus addresses the &Shi'ihs, as well as the
entire body of the followers of the Prophet: "O concourse of &Shi'ihs! Fear
ye God, and Our Cause, which concerneth Him Who is the Most Great
Remembrance of God. For great is its fire, as decreed in the Mother-Book."
"O people of the &Qur'an! Ye are as nothing unless ye submit unto
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the Remembrance of God and unto this Book. If ye follow the Cause of
God, We will forgive you your sins, and if ye turn aside from Our
command, We will, in truth, condemn your souls in Our Book, unto the
Most Great Fire. We, verily, do not deal unjustly with men, even to the
extent of a speck on a date stone."
And finally, in that same Commentary, this startling prophecy is
recorded: "Erelong We will, in very truth, torment such as waged war
against &Husayn [&Imam &Husayn], in the Land of the Euphrates, with the
most afflictive torment, and the most dire and exemplary punishment."
"Erelong," He also, referring to that same people, in that same Book,
has written, "will God wreak His vengeance upon them, at the time of
Our Return, and He hath, in very truth, prepared for them, in the world
to come, a severe torment."
As to &Baha'u'llah, the passages I cite in these pages constitute but a
fraction of the references to the Muslim divines with which His writings
abound. "The Lote-Tree beyond Which there is no passing," He exclaims,
"crieth out, by reason of the cruelty of the divines. It shouteth
aloud, and bewaileth itself." "From the inception of this sect [&Shi'ih],"
He, in His "Epistle to the Son of the Wolf," has written, "until the
present day, how great hath been the number of the divines that have
appeared, none of whom became cognizant of the nature of this Revelation.
What could have been the cause of this waywardness? Were We to
mention it, their limbs would cleave asunder. It is necessary for them to
meditate, nay to meditate for a thousand thousand years, that haply they
may attain unto a sprinkling from the ocean of knowledge, and discover
the things whereof they are oblivious in this day. I was walking in the
Land of &Ta [&Tihran]--the dayspring of the signs of thy Lord--when lo, I
heard the lamentation of the pulpits and the voice of their supplication
unto God, blessed and glorified be He! They cried out and said: `O God of
the world and Lord of the nations! Thou beholdest our state and the
things which have befallen us, by reason of the cruelty of Thy servants.
Thou hast created us and revealed us for Thy glorification and praise.
Thou dost now hear what the wayward proclaim upon us in Thy days. By
Thy might! Our souls are melted, and our limbs are trembling. Alas,
alas! Would that we had never been created and revealed by Thee!' The
hearts of them that enjoy near access to God are consumed by these words,
and from them the cries of such as are devoted to Him are raised."
"These thick clouds," He, in that same Epistle, has stated, "are the
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exponents of idle fancies and vain imaginings, who are none other than
the divines of Persia." "By `divines' in the passage cited above," He, in
that same connection, explains, "is meant those men who outwardly
attire themselves with the raiment of knowledge, but who inwardly are
deprived therefrom. In this connection We quote, from the Tablet addressed
to His Majesty the &Shah, certain passages from the `Hidden
Words' which were revealed by the &Abha Pen under the name of the `Book
of &Fatimih,' the blessings of God be upon her! `O ye that are foolish, yet
have a name to be wise! Wherefore do ye wear the guise of the shepherd,
when inwardly ye have become wolves, intent upon My flock? Ye are even
as the star, which riseth ere the dawn, and which, though it seem radiant
and luminous, leadeth the wayfarers of My city astray into the paths of
perdition.' And likewise He saith: `O ye seemingly fair yet inwardly foul!
Ye are like clear but bitter water, which to outward seeming is but crystal
pure but of which, when tested by the Divine Assayer, not a drop is
accepted. Yea, the sunbeam falleth alike upon the dust and the mirror,
yet differ they in reflection even as doth the star from the earth: nay,
immeasurable is the difference!'"
"We have invited all men," &Baha'u'llah, in another Tablet, has
stated, "to turn towards God, and have acquainted them with the
Straight Path. They [divines] rose up against Us with such cruelty as
hath sapped the strength of &Islam, and yet most of the people are
heedless!" "The children of Him Who is the Friend of God [Abraham],"
He moreover has written, "and heirs of the One Who discoursed with
God [Moses], who were accounted the most abject of men, have split the
veils asunder, and rent the coverings, and seized the Sealed Wine from
the hands of the bounty of Him Who is the Self-Subsisting, and drunk
their fill, whilst the detestable &Shi'ih divines have remained, until the
present time, hesitant and perverse." And again: "The divines of Persia
committed that which no people amongst the peoples of the world have
committed."
"If this Cause be of God," He thus addresses the Minister of the &Shah
in Constantinople, "no man can prevail against it; and if it be not of
God, the divines amongst you, and they that follow their corrupt desires,
and such as have rebelled against Him, will surely suffice to overpower
it."
"Of all the peoples of the world," He, in another Tablet, observes,
"they that have suffered the greatest loss have been, and are still, the
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people of Persia. I swear by the Daystar of Utterance which shineth upon
the world in its meridian glory! The lamentations of the pulpits, in that
country, are being raised continually. In the early days such lamentations
were heard in the Land of &Ta [&Tihran], for pulpits, erected for the
purpose of remembering the True One--exalted be His glory--have now,
in Persia, become places wherefrom blasphemies are uttered against Him
Who is the Desire of the worlds."
"In this day," is His caustic denunciation, "the world is redolent with
the fragrances of the robe of the Revelation of the Ancient King ... and
yet, they [divines] have gathered together, and established themselves
upon their seats, and have spoken that which would put an animal to
shame, how much more man himself! Were they to become aware of one
of their acts, and perceive the mischief it hath wrought, they would, with
their own hands, dispatch themselves to their final abode."
"O concourse of divines!" &Baha'u'llah thus commands them, "...Lay
aside that which ye possess, and hold your peace, and give ear, then, unto
that which the Tongue of Grandeur and Majesty speaketh. How many
the veiled handmaidens who turned unto Me, and believed, and how
numerous the wearers of the turban who were debarred from Me, and
followed in the footsteps of bygone generations!"
"I swear by the Daystar that shineth above the Horizon of Utterance!"
He asserts, "A paring from the nail of one of the believing handmaidens
is, in this day, more esteemed, in the sight of God, than the divines of
Persia, who, after thirteen hundred years' waiting, have perpetrated
what the Jews have not perpetrated during the Revelation of Him Who is
the Spirit [Jesus]." "Though they rejoice," is His warning, "at the
adversities that have touched Us, the day will come whereon they shall
wail and weep."
"O heedless one!" He thus addresses, in the &Lawh-i-Burhan, a notorious
Persian mujtahid, whose hands were stained with the blood of
&Baha'i martyrs, "rely not on thy glory and thy power. Thou art even as the
last trace of sunlight upon the mountaintop. Soon will it fade away, as
decreed by God, the All-Possessing, the Most High. Thy glory, and the
glory of such as are like thee, have been taken away, and this, verily, is
what hath been ordained by the One with Whom is the Mother Tablet.
...Because of you the Apostle [&Muhammad] lamented, and the Chaste
One [&Fatimih] cried out, and the countries were laid waste, and darkness
fell upon all regions. O concourse of divines! Because of you the people
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were abased, and the banner of &Islam was hauled down, and its mighty
throne subverted. Every time a man of discernment hath sought to hold
fast unto that which would exalt &Islam, you raised a clamor, and thereby
was he deterred from achieving his purpose, while the land remained
fallen in clear ruin."
"Say: O concourse of Persian divines!" &Baha'u'llah again prophesies,
"In My name ye have seized the reins of men, and occupy the seats of
honor, by reason of your relation to Me. When I revealed Myself,
however, ye turned aside, and committed what hath caused the tears of
such as have recognized Me to flow. Erelong will all that ye possess
perish, and your glory be turned into the most wretched abasement, and
ye shall behold the punishment for what ye have wrought, as decreed by
God, the Ordainer, the All-Wise."
In the &Suriy-i-Muluk, addressing the entire company of the ecclesiastical
leaders of &Sunni &Islam in Constantinople, the capital of the Empire
and seat of the Caliphate, He has written: "O ye divines of the City! We
came to you with the truth, whilst ye were heedless of it. Methinks ye are
as dead, wrapt in the coverings of your own selves. Ye sought not Our
presence, when so to do would have been better for you than all your
doings.... Know ye, that had your leaders, to whom ye owe allegiance,
and on whom ye pride yourselves, and whom ye mention by day and by
night, and from whose traces ye seek guidance--had they lived in these
days, they would have circled around Me, and would not have separated
themselves from Me, whether at eventide or at morn. Ye, however, did
not turn your faces towards My face, for even less than a moment, and
waxed proud, and were careless of this Wronged One, Who hath been so
afflicted by men that they dealt with Him as they pleased. Ye failed to
inquire about My condition, nor did ye inform yourselves of the things
which befell Me. Thereby have ye withheld from yourselves the winds of
holiness, and the breezes of bounty, that blow from this luminous and
perspicuous Spot. Methinks ye have clung to outward things, and
forgotten the inner things, and say that which ye do not. Ye are lovers of
names, and appear to have given yourselves up to them. For this reason
make ye mention of the names of your leaders. And should anyone like
them, or superior unto them, come unto you, ye would flee him. Through
their names ye have exalted yourselves, and have secured your positions,
and live and prosper. And were your leaders to reappear, ye would not
renounce your leadership, nor would ye turn in their direction, nor set
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your faces towards them. We found you, as We found most men,
worshiping names which they mention during the days of their life, and
with which they occupy themselves. No sooner do the Bearers of these
names appear, however, than they repudiate them, and turn upon their
heels.... Know ye that God will not, in this day, accept your thoughts,
nor your remembrance of Him, nor your turning towards Him, nor your
devotions, nor your vigilance, unless ye be made new in the estimation of
this Servant, could be but perceive it."
The voice of &Abdu'l-Baha, the Center of the Covenant of God, has,
likewise, been raised, announcing the dire misfortunes which were to
overtake, soon after His passing, the ecclesiastical hierarchies of both
&Sunni and &Shi'ih &Islam. "This glory," He has written, "shall be turned
into the most abject abasement, and this pomp and might converted into
the most complete subjugation. Their palaces will be transformed into
prisons, and the course of their ascendant star terminate in the depths of
the pit. Laughter and merriment will vanish, nay more, the voice of their
weeping will be raised." "Even as the snow," He moreover has written,
"they will melt away in the July sun."
The dissolution of the institution of the Caliphate, the complete
secularization of the state which had enshrined the most august institution
of &Islam, and the virtual collapse of the &Shi'ih hierarchy in Persia,
were the visible and immediate consequences of the treatment meted
out to the Cause of God by the clergy of the two largest communions of
the Muslim world.
The Falling Fortunes of &Shi'ih &Islam
Let us first consider the visitations that have marked the falling
fortunes of &Shi'ih &Islam. The iniquities summarized in the beginning of
these pages, and for which the &Shi'ih ecclesiastical order in Persia is to
be held primarily answerable; iniquities which, in the words of
&Baha'u'llah, had caused "the Apostle [&Muhammad] to lament, and the
Chaste One [&Fatimih] to cry out," and "all created things to groan, and
the limbs of the holy ones to quake"; iniquities which had riddled the
breast of the &Bab with bullets, and bowed down &Baha'u'llah, and turned
His hair white, and caused Him to groan aloud in anguish, and made
&Muhammad to weep over Him, and Jesus to beat Himself upon the
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head, and the &Bab to bewail His plight--such iniquities indeed could
not, and were not to, remain unpunished. God, the Fiercest of Avengers,
was lying in wait, pledged "not to forgive any man's injustice." The
scourge of His chastisement, swift, sudden and terrible, was, at long last,
let loose upon the perpetrators of these iniquities.
A revolution, formidable in its proportions, far-reaching in its
repercussions, amazing in the absence of bloodshed and even of violence
which marked its progress, challenged that ecclesiastical ascendency
which, for centuries, had been of the essence of &Islam in that country,
and virtually overthrew a hierarchy with which the machinery of the
state and the life of the people had been inextricably interwoven. Such a
revolution did not signalize the disestablishment of a state-church. It
indeed was tantamount to the disruption of what may be called a
church-state--a state that had been hopefully awaiting, even up till the
moment of its expiry, the gladsome advent of the Hidden &Imam, who
would not only seize the reins of authority from the &shah, the chief
magistrate who was merely representing him, but would also assume
dominion over the whole earth.
The spirit which that clerical order had so assiduously striven, during
a whole century, to crush; the Faith which it had, with such ferocious
brutality, attempted to extirpate; were now, in their turn, through the
forces they had engendered in the world, deranging the equilibrium,
and sapping the strength, of that same order whose ramifications had
extended to every sphere, duty, and act of life in that country. The rock
wall of &Islam, seemingly impregnable, was now shaken to its foundations,
and was tottering to its ruin, before the very eyes of the persecuted
followers of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah. A sacerdotal hierarchy that had
held in thrall for so long the Faith of God, and seemed, at one time, to
have mortally struck it down, now found itself the prey of a superior civil
authority whose settled policy was to fasten, steadily and relentlessly, its
coils around it.
The vast system of that hierarchy, with all its elements and
appurtenances--its &shaykhu'l-Islams (high priests), its mujtahids (doctors
of the law), its &mullas (priests), its &fuqahas (jurists), its &imams
(prayer-leaders), its &mu'adhdhins (criers), its &vu'azz (preachers), its
&qadis (judges), its &mutavallis (custodians), its madrasihs (seminaries),
its &mudarrisins (professors), its &tullabs (pupils), its &qurra's (intoners),
its &mu'abbirins (soothsayers), its &muhaddithins (narrators), its
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&musakhkhirins (spirit-subduers), its &dhakirins (rememberers), its
&ummal-i-dhakat (almsgivers), its &muqaddasins (saints), its &munzavis
(recluses), its &sufis, its dervishes, and what not--was paralyzed and
utterly discredited. Its mujtahids, those firebrands, who wielded powers
of life and death, and who for generations had been accorded honors
almost regal in character, were reduced to a deplorably insignificant
number. The beturbaned prelates of the Islamic church who, in the
words of &Baha'u'llah, "decked their heads with green and white, and
committed what made the Faithful Spirit to groan," were ruthlessly
swept away, except for a handful who, in order to safeguard themselves
against the fury of an impious populace, are now compelled to submit to
the humiliation of producing, whenever the occasion demands it, the
license granted them by the civil authorities to wear this vanishing
emblem of a vanished authority. The rest of this turbaned class, whether
siyyids, &mullas, or &hajis, were forced not only to exchange their venerable
headdress for the &kulah-i-farangi (European hat), which not long
ago they themselves had anathematized, but also to discard their flowing
robes and don the tight-fitting garments of European style, the introduction
of which into their country they had, a generation ago, so violently
disapproved.
"The dark blue and white domes"--an allusion by &Abdu'l-Baha to the
rotund and massive headgears of the priests of Persia--had indeed been
"inverted." Those whose heads had borne them, the arrogant, fanatical,
perfidious, and retrograde clericals, "in the grasp of whose authority," as
testified by &Baha'u'llah, "were held the reins of the people," whose "words
are the pride of the world," and whose "deeds are the shame of the
nations," recognizing the wretchedness of their state, betook themselves,
crestfallen and destitute of hope, to their homes, there to drag out
a miserable existence. Impotent and sullen, they are watching the
operations of a process which, having reversed their policy and ruined
their handiwork, is irresistibly moving towards a climax.
The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of &Islam has
already died out. Their fanatical outcries, their clamorous invocations,
their noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their &fatvas (sentences), pronounced
with such shamelessness, and at times embracing the denunciation
of kings, are a dead letter. The spectacular sight of congregational
prayers, in which thousands of worshipers, lined row upon row,
participated, has vanished. The pulpits from whence they discharged
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the thunder of their anathemas against the powerful and the innocent
alike, are deserted and silent. Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung
endowments--the landed property of the expected &Imam--which in
&Isfahan alone at one time embraced the whole of the city, have been
wrested out of their hands, and brought under the control of a lay
administration. Their madrasihs (seminaries), with their medieval
learning, are deserted and dilapidated. The innumerable tomes of
theological commentaries, super-commentaries, glosses, and notes,
unreadable, unprofitable, the product of misdirected ingenuity and toil,
and pronounced by one of the most enlightened Islamic thinkers in
modern times as works obscuring sound knowledge, breeding maggots,
and fit for fire, are now buried away, overspread with cobwebs, and
forgotten. Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement controversies,
their interminable discussions, are outmoded and abandoned. Their
masjids (mosques) and &imam-zadihs (tombs of saints), which were
privileged to extend the bast (right of sanctuary) to many a criminal, and
which had degenerated into a monstrous scandal, whose walls rang with
the intonations of a hypocritical and profligate clergy, whose ornaments
vied with the treasures of the palaces of kings, are either forsaken or
fallen in ruin. Their takyihs, the haunts of the lazy, the passive, and
contemplative pietists, are either being sold or closed down. Their
&ta'ziyihs (religious plays), acted with barbaric zeal, and accentuated by
sudden spasms of unbridled religious excitement, are forbidden. Even
their &rawdih-khanis (lamentations), with their long-drawn-out, plaintive
howls, which arose from so many houses, have been curtailed and
discouraged. The sacred pilgrimages to Najaf and &Karbila, the holiest
shrines of the &Shi'ih world, are reduced in number and made increasingly
difficult, preventing thereby many a greedy &mulla from indulging
in his time-honored habit of charging double for making those pilgrimages
as a substitute for the religious-minded. The disuse of the veil
which the &mullas fought tooth and nail to prevent; the equality of sexes
which their law forbade; the erection of civil tribunals which superseded
their ecclesiastical courts; the abolition of the &sighih (concubinage)
which, when contracted for short periods, is hardly distinguishable from
quasi-prostitution, and which made of the turbulent and fanatical
&Mashhad, the national center of pilgrimage, one of the most immoral
cities in Asia; and finally, the efforts which are being made to disparage
the Arabic tongue, the sacred language of &Islam and of the &Qur'an, and
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to divorce it from Persian--all these have successively lent their share to
the acceleration of that impelling process which has subordinated to the
civil authority the position and interests of Muslim clericals to a degree
undreamt of by any &mulla.
Well might the once lofty-turbaned, long-bearded, grave-looking &aqa
(&mulla), who had so insolently concerned himself with every department
of human activity, as he sits, hatless, clean shaven, in the seclusion
of his home, and perhaps listening to the strains of western music,
blared upon the ethers of his native land, pause to reflect for a while on
the vanished splendors of his defunct empire. Well might he muse upon
the havoc which the rising tide of nationalism and skepticism has
wrought in the adamantine traditions of his country. Well might he
recollect the halcyon days when, seated on a donkey, and parading
through the &bazars and &maydans of his native town, an eager but
deluded multitude would rush to kiss with fervor not only his hands, but
also the tail of the animal on which he rode. Well might he remember
the blind zeal with which they acclaimed his acts, and the prodigies and
miracles they ascribed to their performance.
He might indeed look back further, and call to mind the reign of those
pious &Safavi monarchs, who delighted to call themselves "dogs of the
threshold of the Immaculate &Imams," how one of those kings was
induced to go on foot before the mujtahid as he rode through the
&maydan-i-Shah, the main square of &Isfahan, as a mark of royal subservience
to the favorite minister of the Hidden &Imam, a minister who, as
distinct from the &Shah's title, styled himself "the servant of the Lord of
Saintship (&Imam &Ali)."
Was it not, he might well ponder, this same &Shah &Abbas the Great
who had been arrogantly addressed by another mujtahid as "the founder
of a borrowed empire," implying that the kingdom of the "king of kings"
really belonged to the expected &Imam, and was held by the &Shah solely
in the capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same &Shah who
walked the entire distance of eight hundred miles from &Isfahan to
&Mashhad, the "special glory of the &Shi'ih world," to offer his prayers, in
the only way that befitted the &shahanshah, at the shrine of the &Imam
&Rida, and who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts?
Had not &Shah &Tahmasp, on receiving an epistle, penned by yet another
mujtahid, sprung to his feet, placed it on his eyes, kissed it with rapture,
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and, because he had been addressed as "brother," ordered it to be placed
within his winding-sheet and buried with him?
Might not that same &mulla ponder the torrents of blood which,
during the long years when he enjoyed impunity of conduct, flowed at
his behest, the flamboyant anathemas he pronounced, and the great
army of orphans and widows, of the disinherited, the dishonored, the
destitute, and the homeless which, on the Day of Reckoning, were, with
one accord, to cry out for vengeance, and invoke the malediction of God
upon him?
That infamous crew had indeed merited the degradation in which it
had sunk. Persistently ignoring the sentence of doom which the finger of
&Baha'u'llah had traced upon the wall, it pursued, for well nigh a
hundred years, its fatal course, until, at the appointed hour, its death
knell was sounded by those spiritual, revolutionary forces which, synchronizing
with the first dawnings of the World Order of His Faith, are
upsetting the equilibrium, and throwing into such confusion, the ancient
institutions of mankind.
The Collapse of the Caliphate
These same forces, operating in a collateral field, have effected a still
more remarkable, and a more radical, revolution, culminating in the
collapse and fall of the Muslim Caliphate, the most powerful institution
of the whole Islamic world. This event of portentous significance has,
moreover, been followed by a formal and definite separation of what was
left of the &Sunni faith in Turkey from the state, and by the complete
secularization of the Republic that has arisen on the ruins of the
Ottoman theocratic empire. This catastrophic fall, that stunned the
Islamic world, and the avowed, the unqualified, and formal divorce
between the spiritual and temporal powers, which distinguished the
revolution in Turkey from that which occurred in Persia, I now proceed
to consider.
&Sunni &Islam has sustained, not through the action of a foreign and
invading Power, but at the hands of a dictator, avowedly professing the
Faith of &Muhammad, a blow more grievous than that which fell, almost
simultaneously, upon its sister-sect in Persia. This retributive act, directed
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against the archenemy of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah, recalls a
similar disaster precipitated through the action of a Roman emperor,
during the latter part of the first century of the Christian era--a disaster
that razed to its foundations the Temple of Solomon, destroyed the Holy
of Holies, laid waste the city of David, uprooted the Jewish hierarchy in
Jerusalem, massacred thousands of the Jewish people--the persecutors
of the religion of Jesus Christ--dispersed the remainder over the surface
of the earth, and reared a pagan colony on Zion.
The Caliph, the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of &Islam, exercised a
spiritual sovereignty, and was invested with a sacred character, which
the &Shah of Persia neither claimed nor possessed. Nor should it be
forgotten that the sphere of his spiritual jurisdiction extended to countries
far beyond the confines of his own empire, and embraced the
overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world. He was,
moreover, in his capacity as the Prophet's representative on earth,
regarded as the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the
defender and propagator of &Islam, and the commander of its followers in
any holy war they might be called upon to wage.
So potent, so august, so sacred a personage was at first by virtue of the
abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of that temporal authority
which the exponents of the &Sunni school have regarded as a necessary
concomitant to his high office. The sword, emblem of temporal
sovereignty, was thus wrested out of the hands of the commander who,
for a brief period, was permitted to occupy such an anomalous and
precarious position. It was soon, however, trumpeted to the &Sunni
world, which had not previously been in the least consulted, that the
Caliphate itself had been extinguished, and that the country which had
accepted it as an appanage to its Sultanate, for more than four hundred
years, had now permanently disowned it. The Turks who had been the
militant leaders of the &Muhammadan world, since the Arab decline,
and who had carried the standard of &Islam as far as the gates of Vienna,
the seat of government of Europe's premier Power, had resigned their
leadership. The ex-caliph, shorn of his royal pomp, stripped of the
symbols of his vicarship, and deserted by friend and foe alike, was forced
to flee from Constantinople, the proud seat of a dual sovereignty, to the
land of the infidels, resigning himself to that same life of exile to which a
number of his fellow-sovereigns had been and were still condemned.
Nor has the &Sunni world, despite determined efforts, succeeded in
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designating anyone in his stead who, though deprived of the sword of a
commander, would still act as the custodian of the cloak and standard of
the Apostle of God--the twin holy symbols of the Caliphate. Conferences
were held, discussions ensued, a Congress of the Caliphate was
convened in the Egyptian capital, the City of the Fatimites, only to
result in the widely advertised and public confession of its failure: "They
have agreed to disagree!"
Strange, incredibly strange, must appear the position of this most
powerful branch of the Islamic Faith, with no outward and visible head
to voice its sentiments and convictions, its unity irretrievably shattered,
its radiance obscured, its law undermined, its institutions thrown into
hopeless confusion. This institution that had challenged the inalienable,
divinely appointed rights of the &Imams of the Faith of &Muhammad,
had, after the revolution of thirteen centuries, vanished like a
smoke, an institution which had dealt such merciless blows to a Faith
Whose Herald was Himself a descendant of the &Imams, the lawful
successors of the Apostle of God.
To what else could this remarkable prophecy, enshrined in the
&Lawh-i-Burhan, allude if not to the downfall of this crowned overlord of
&Sunni Muslims? "O concourse of Muslim Divines! Because of you the
people were abased, and the banner of &Islam was hauled down, and its
mighty throne subverted." What of the indubitably clear and amazing
prophecy recorded in the &Qayyum-i-Asma'? "Erelong We will, in very
truth, torment such as waged war against &Husayn [&Imam &Husayn], in
the Land of the Euphrates, with the most afflictive torment, and the
direst and most exemplary punishment." What other interpretation can
this &Muhammadan tradition be given? "In the latter days a grievous
calamity shall befall My people at the hands of their ruler, a calamity
such as no man ever heard to surpass it."
This was not all, however. The disappearance of the Caliph, the
spiritual head of above two hundred million &Muhammadans, brought
in its wake, in the land that had dealt &Islam such a heavy blow, the
annulment of the &shari'ah canonical Law, the disendowment of &Sunni
institutions, the promulgation of a civil Code, the suppression of religious
orders, the abrogation of ceremonials and traditions inculcated by
the religion of &Muhammad. The &Shaykhu'l-Islam and his satellites,
including &muftis, &qadis, &hujahs, &shaykhs, &sufis, &hajis, &mawlavis,
dervishes, and others, vanished at a stroke more determined, more open,
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and drastic than the one dealt the &Shi'ihs by the &Shah and his government.
The mosques of the capital, the pride and glory of the Islamic
world, were deserted, and the fairest and most famous of them all, the
peerless St. Sophia, "the Second Firmament," "the Vehicle of the
Cherubim," converted by the blatant creators of a secular regime into a
museum. The Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet of God, was
banished from the land, its alphabet was superseded by Latin characters,
and the &Qur'an itself translated into Turkish for the few who still cared to
read it. The constitution of the new Turkey not only proclaimed
formally the disestablishment and disendowment of &Islam, with all its
attendant and, in the view of some, atheistic enactments, but also
heralded various measures that aimed at its further humiliation and
weakening. Even the city of Constantinople, "the Dome of &Islam,"
apostrophized in such condemnatory terms by &Baha'u'llah, which, after
the fall of Byzantium, had been hailed by the great Constantine as "the
New Rome," and exalted to the rank of the metropolis of both the
Roman Empire and of Christendom, and subsequently revered as the
seat of the Caliphs, was relegated to the position of a provincial city and
stripped of all its pomp and glory, its soaring and slender minarets
standing sentinel at the grave of so much vanished splendor and power.
"O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas!" &Baha'u'llah has
thus apostrophized the Imperial City, in terms that call to mind the
prophetic words addressed by Jesus Christ to Jerusalem, "The throne of
tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the flame of hatred
hath been kindled within thy bosom, in such wise that the Concourse on
high, and they who circle around the Exalted Throne, have wailed and
lamented. We behold in thee the foolish ruling over the wise, and
darkness vaunting itself against the light. Thou art indeed filled with
manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious? By
Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy daughters,
and thy widows, and all the kindreds that dwell within thee shall lament.
Thus informeth thee the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."
Such was the fate that overtook both &Shi'ih and &Sunni &Islam, in the
two countries where they had planted their banners and reared their
most powerful and far-famed institutions. Such was their fate in these
two countries, in one of which &Baha'u'llah died an exile, and in the
other the &Bab suffered a martyr's death. Such was the fate of the
self-styled Vicar of the Prophet of God, and of the favorite ministers of
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the still awaited &Imam. "The people of the &Qur'an," &Baha'u'llah testifies,
"have risen against Us, and tormented Us with such a torment that the
Holy Spirit lamented, and the thunder roared out, and the clouds wept
over Us.... &Muhammad, the Apostle of God, bewaileth, in the
all-highest Paradise, their acts." "A day shall be witnessed by My
people," their own traditions condemn them, "whereon there will have
remained of &Islam naught but a name, and of the &Qur'an naught but a
mere appearance. The doctors of that age shall be the most evil the world
hath ever seen. Mischief hath proceeded from them, and on them it will
recoil." And again: "Most of His enemies will be the divines. His bidding
they will not obey, but will protest saying: `This is contrary to that which
hath been handed down unto us by the &Imams of the Faith.'" And still
again: "At that hour His malediction shall descend upon you, and your
curse shall afflict you, and your religion shall remain an empty word on
your tongues. And when these signs appear amongst you, anticipate the
day when the red-hot wind will have swept over you, or the day when ye
will have been disfigured, or when stones will have rained upon you."
A Warning Unto All Nations
This horde of degraded priests, stigmatized by &Baha'u'llah as "doctors
of doubt," as the "abject manifestations of the Prince of Darkness," as
"wolves" and "pharaohs," as "focal centers of hellish fire," as "voracious
beasts preying upon the carrion of the souls of men," and, as testified by
their own traditions, as both the sources and victims of mischief, have
joined the various swarms of &shah-zadihs, of emirs, and princelings of
fallen dynasties--a witness and a warning unto all nations of what must,
sooner or later, befall those wielders of earthly dominion, be it royal or
ecclesiastic, who might dare to challenge or persecute the appointed
Channels and Embodiments of Divine authority and power.
&Islam, at once the progenitor and persecutor of the Faith of
&Baha'u'llah, is, if we read aright the signs of the times, only beginning to
sustain the impact of this invincible and triumphant Faith. We need
only recall the nineteen hundred years of abject misery and dispersion
which they, who only for the short space of three years persecuted the
Son of God, have had to endure, and are still enduring. We may well
ask ourselves, with mingled feelings of dread and awe, how severe must
+P100
be the tribulations of those who, during no less than fifty years, have, "at
every moment tormented with a fresh torment" Him Who is the Father,
and who have, in addition, made His Herald--Himself a Manifestation
of God--to quaff, in such tragic circumstances, the cup of martyrdom.
I have, in the pages immediately preceding, quoted certain passages
addressed collectively to the members of the ecclesiastical order, both
Islamic and Christian, and have then recorded a number of specific
addresses and references to Muslim divines, both &Shi'ih and &Sunni,
after which I proceeded to describe the calamities that afflicted these
&Muhammadan hierarchies, their heads, their members, their properties,
their ceremonials, and institutions. Let us now consider the
addresses specifically made to the members of the Christian clerical
order who, for the most part, have ignored the Faith of &Baha'u'llah,
whilst a few among them have, as its Administrative Order gained in
stature and spread its ramifications over Christian countries, arisen to
check its progress, to belittle its influence, and obscure its purpose.
His Messages to Christian Leaders
A glance at the writings of the Author of the &Baha'i Revelation will
reveal the important and significant fact that He Who addressed collectively
an immortal message to all the kings of the earth, Who revealed a
Tablet to each of the outstanding crowned heads of Europe and Asia,
Who issued His call to the sacerdotal leaders of &Islam, both &Sunni and
&Shi'ih, Who did not exclude from His purview the Jews and the
Zoroastrians, has, apart from His numerous and repeated exhortations
and warnings to the entire Christian world, directed particular messages,
some general, others precise and challenging, to the heads, as
well as to the rank and file, of the ecclesiastical orders of Christendom
--its pope, its kings, its patriarchs, its archbishops, its bishops,
its priests, and its monks. We have already, in connection with the
messages of &Baha'u'llah to the crowned heads of the world, considered
certain features of the Tablet to the Roman Pontiff, as well as the words
written to the kings of Christendom. Let us now turn our attention to
those passages in which the aristocracy of the church and its ordained
servants are singled out for exhortation and admonition by the Pen of
&Baha'u'llah:
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"Say: O concourse of patriarchs! He Whom ye were promised in the
Tablets is come. Fear God, and follow not the vain imaginings of the
superstitious. Lay aside the things ye possess, and take fast hold of the
Tablet of God by His sovereign power. Better is this for you than all your
possessions. Unto this testifieth every understanding heart, and every
man of insight. Pride ye yourselves on My Name, and yet shut yourselves
out as by a veil from Me? This indeed is a strange thing!"
"Say: O concourse of archbishops! He Who is the Lord of all men hath
appeared. In the plain of guidance He calleth mankind, whilst ye are
numbered with the dead! Great is the blessedness of him who is stirred by
the Breeze of God, and hath arisen from amongst the dead in this
perspicuous Name."
"Say: O concourse of bishops! Trembling hath seized all the kindreds of
the earth, and He Who is the Everlasting Father calleth aloud between
earth and heaven. Blessed the ear that hath heard, and the eye that hath
seen, and the heart that hath turned unto Him Who is the Point of
Adoration of all who are in the heavens and all who are on earth." "O
concourse of bishops! Ye are the stars of the heaven of My knowledge. My
mercy desireth not that ye should fall upon the earth. My justice,
however, declareth: `This is that which the Son [Jesus] hath decreed.' And
whatsoever hath proceeded out of His blameless, His truthspeaking,
trustworthy mouth, can never be altered. The bells, verily, peal out My
Name, and lament over Me, but My spirit rejoiceth with evident gladness.
The body of the Loved One yearneth for the cross, and His head is
eager for the spear, in the path of the All-Merciful. The ascendancy of the
oppressor can in no wise deter Him from His purpose." And again: "The
stars of the heaven of knowledge have fallen, they that adduce the proofs
they possess in order to demonstrate the truth of My Cause, and who
make mention of God in My Name. When I came unto them, in My
majesty, however, they turned aside from Me. They, verily, are of the
fallen. This is what the Spirit [Jesus] prophesied when He came with the
truth, and the Jewish doctors caviled at Him, until they committed what
made the Holy Spirit to lament, and the eyes of such as enjoy near access
to God to weep."
"Say: O concourse of priests! Leave the bells, and come forth, then,
from your churches. It behooveth you, in this day, to proclaim aloud the
Most Great Name among the nations. Prefer ye to be silent, whilst every
stone and every tree shouteth aloud: `The Lord is come in His great
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glory!'?... He that summoneth men in My name is, verily, of Me, and
he will show forth that which is beyond the power of all that are on earth.
...Let the Breeze of God awaken you. Verily, it hath wafted over the
world. Well is it with him that hath discovered the fragrance thereof and
been accounted among the well-assured." And again: "O concourse of
priests! The Day of Reckoning hath appeared, the Day whereon He Who
was in heaven hath come. He, verily, is the One Whom ye were promised
in the Books of God, the Holy, the Almighty, the All-Praised. How long
will ye wander in the wilderness of heedlessness and superstition? Turn
with your hearts in the direction of your Lord, the Forgiving, the Generous."
"Say: O concourse of monks! Seclude not yourselves in churches and
cloisters. Come forth by My leave, and occupy yourselves with that which
will profit your souls and the souls of men. Thus biddeth you the King of
the Day of Reckoning. Seclude yourselves in the stronghold of My love.
This, verily, is a befitting seclusion, were ye of them that perceive it. He
that shutteth himself up in a house is indeed as one dead. It behooveth
man to show forth that which will profit all created things, and he that
bringeth forth no fruit is fit for fire. Thus counseleth you your Lord, and
He, verily, is the Almighty, the All-Bounteous. Enter ye into wedlock,
that after you someone may fill your place. We have forbidden you
perfidious acts, and not that which will demonstrate fidelity. Have ye
clung to the standards fixed by your own selves, and cast the standards of
God behind your backs? Fear God, and be not of the foolish. But for
man, who would make mention of Me on My earth, and how could My
attributes and My name have been revealed? Ponder ye, and be not of
them that are veiled and fast asleep. He that wedded not [Jesus] found no
place wherein to dwell or lay His head, by reason of that which the hands
of the treacherous had wrought. His sanctity consisteth not in that which
ye believe or fancy, but rather in the things We possess. Ask, that ye may
apprehend His station which hath been exalted above the imaginings of
all that dwell on earth. Blessed are they who perceive it." And again: "O
concourse of monks! If ye choose to follow Me, I will make you heirs of My
Kingdom; and if ye transgress against Me, I will, in My long-suffering,
endure it patiently, and I, verily, am the Ever-Forgiving, the All-Merciful.
...Bethlehem is astir with the Breeze of God. We hear her
voice saying: `O Most Generous Lord! Where is Thy great glory established?
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The sweet savors of Thy presence have quickened me, after I had
melted in my separation from Thee. Praised be Thou in that Thou hast
raised the veils, and come with power in evident glory.' We called unto
her from behind the Tabernacle of Majesty and Grandeur: `O Bethlehem!
This Light hath risen in the orient, and traveled towards the occident,
until it reached thee in the evening of its life. Tell Me then: Do the sons
recognize the Father, and acknowledge Him, or do they deny Him, even
as the people aforetime denied Him [Jesus]?' Whereupon she cried out
saying: `Thou art, in truth, the All-Knowing, the Best-Informed." And
again: "Consider, likewise, how numerous at this time are the monks who
have secluded themselves in their churches, in My name, and who, when
the appointed time came, and We unveiled to them Our beauty, failed to
recognize Me, notwithstanding that they call upon Me at dawn and at
eventide." "Read ye the Evangel," He again addresses them, "and yet
refuse to acknowledge the All-Glorious Lord? This indeed beseemeth you
not, O concourse of learned men!... The fragrances of the All-Merciful
have wafted over all creation. Happy the man that hath forsaken his
desires, and taken fast hold of guidance."
These "fallen stars" of the firmament of Christendom, these "thick
clouds" that have obscured the radiance of the true Faith of God, these
princes of the Church that have failed to acknowledge the sovereignty of
the "King of kings," these deluded ministers of the Son who have
shunned and ignored the promised Kingdom which the "Everlasting
Father" has brought down from heaven, and is now establishing upon
earth--these are experiencing, in this "Day of Reckoning," a crisis, not
indeed as critical as that which the Islamic sacerdotal order, the inveterate
enemies of the Faith, has had to face, but one which is no less
widespread and significant. "Power hath been seized" indeed, and is
being increasingly seized, from these ecclesiastics that speak in the
name, and yet are so far away from the spirit, of the Faith they profess.
We have only to look around us, as we survey the fortunes of
Christian ecclesiastical orders, to appreciate the steady deterioration of
their influence, the decline of their power, the damage to their prestige,
the flouting of their authority, the dwindling of their congregations, the
relaxation of their discipline, the restriction of their press, the timidity of
their leaders, the confusion in their ranks, the progressive confiscation
of their properties, the surrender of some of their most powerful strongholds,
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and the extinction of other ancient and cherished institutions.
Indeed, ever since the Divine summons was issued, and the invitation
extended, and the warning sounded, and the condemnation pronounced,
this process, that may be said to have been initiated with the
collapse of the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff, soon after the
Tablet to the Pope had been revealed, has been operating with increasing
momentum, menacing the very basis on which the entire order is
resting. Aided by the forces which the Communist movement has
unloosed, reinforced by the political consequences of the last war,
accelerated by the excessive, the blind, the intolerant, and militant
nationalism which is now convulsing the nations, and stimulated by the
rising tide of materialism, irreligion, and paganism, this process is not
only tending to subvert ecclesiastical institutions, but appears to be
leading to the rapid dechristianization of the masses in many Christian
countries.
I shall content myself with the enumeration of certain outstanding
manifestations of this force which is increasingly invading the domain,
and assailing the firmest ramparts, of one of the leading religious systems
of mankind. The virtual extinction of the temporal power of the most
preeminent ruler in Christendom immediately after the creation of the
Kingdom of Italy; the wave of anticlericalism that swept over France
after the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, and which culminated in
the complete separation of the Catholic Church from the state, in the
laicization of the Third Republic, in the secularization of education,
and in the suppression and dispersal of religious orders; the swift and
sudden rise of that "religious irreligion," that bold, conscious, and
organized assault launched in Soviet Russia against the Greek Orthodox
Church, that precipitated the disestablishment of the state religion, that
massacred a vast number of its members originally numbering above a
hundred million souls, that pulled down, closed, or converted into
museums, theatres and warehouses, thousands upon thousands of
churches, monasteries, synagogues and mosques, that stripped the
church of its six and a half million acres of property, and sought,
through its League of Militant Atheists and the promulgation of a
"five-year plan of godlessness," to loosen from its foundations the
religious life of the masses; the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy that dissolved, by one stroke, the most powerful
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unit which owed its allegiance to, and supported through its resources
the administration of, the Church of Rome; the divorce of the Spanish
state from that same Church, and the overthrow of the monarchy, the
champion of Catholic Christendom; the nationalistic philosophy, the
parent of an unbridled and obsolete nationalism, which, having dethroned
&Islam, has indirectly assaulted the front line of the Christian
church in non-Christian lands, and is dealing such heavy blows to
Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian Missions in Persia, Turkey, and
the Far East; the revolutionary movement that brought in its wake the
persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico; and finally the gospel of
modern paganism, unconcealed, aggressive, and unrelenting, which,
in the years preceding the present turmoil, and increasingly since its
outbreak, has swept over the continent of Europe, invading the citadels,
and sowing confusion in the hearts of the supporters, of the Catholic,
the Greek Orthodox, and the Lutheran churches, in Austria, Poland,
the Baltic and Scandinavian states, and more recently in Western
Europe, the home and center of the most powerful hierarchies of
Christendom.
Christian Nations against Christian Nations
What a sorry spectacle of impotence and disruption does this fratricidal
war, which Christian nations are waging against Christian nations--
Anglicans pitted against Lutherans, Catholics against Greek
Orthodox, Catholics against Catholics, and Protestants against
Protestants--in support of a so-called Christian civilization, offer to the
eyes of those who are already perceiving the bankruptcy of the institutions
that claim to speak in the name, and to be the custodians, of the
Faith of Jesus Christ! The powerlessness and despair of the Holy See to
halt this internecine strife, in which the children of the Prince of
Peace--blessed and supported by the benedictions and harangues of the
prelates of a hopelessly divided church--are engaged, proclaim the
degree of subservience into which the once all-powerful institutions of
the Christian Faith have sunk, and are a striking reminder of the parallel
state of decadence into which the hierarchies of its sister religion have
fallen.
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How tragically has Christendom ignored, and how far it has strayed
from, that high mission which He Who is the true Prince of Peace has,
in these, the concluding passages of His Tablet to Pope Pius IX, called
upon the entire body of Christians to fulfill--passages which establish,
for all time, the distinction between the Mission of &Baha'u'llah in this
age and that of Jesus Christ: "Say: O concourse of Christians! We have,
on a previous occasion, revealed Ourself unto you, and ye recognized Me
not. This is yet another occasion vouchsafed unto you. This is the Day of
God; turn ye unto Him.... The Beloved One loveth not that ye be
consumed with the fire of your desires. Were ye to be shut out as by a veil
from Him, this would be for no other reason than your own waywardness
and ignorance. Ye make mention of Me, and know Me not. Ye call upon
Me, and are heedless of My Revelation.... O people of the Gospel! They
who were not in the Kingdom have now entered it, whilst We behold you,
in this day, tarrying at the gate. Rend the veils asunder by the power of
your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Bounteous, and enter, then, in My
name My Kingdom. Thus biddeth you He Who desireth for you everlasting
life.... We behold you, O children of the Kingdom, in darkness.
This, verily, beseemeth you not. Are ye, in the face of the Light, fearful
because of your deeds? Direct yourselves towards Him.... Verily, He
[Jesus] said: `Come ye after Me, and I will make you to become fishers of
men.' In this day, however, We say: `Come ye after Me, that We may
make you to become the quickeners of mankind.'" "Say," He moreover
has written, "We, verily, have come for your sakes, and have borne the
misfortunes of the world for your salvation. Flee ye the One Who hath
sacrificed His life that ye may be quickened? Fear God, O followers of the
Spirit [Jesus], and walk not in the footsteps of every divine that hath gone
far astray.... Open the doors of your hearts. He Who is the Spirit [Jesus]
verily, standeth before them. Wherefore keep ye afar from Him Who hath
purposed to draw you nigh unto a Resplendent Spot? Say: We, in truth,
have opened unto you the gates of the Kingdom. Will ye bar the doors of
your houses in My face? This indeed is naught but a grievous error."
Such is the pass to which the Christian clergy have come--a clergy
that have interposed themselves between their flock and the Christ
returned in the glory of the Father. As the Faith of this Promised One
penetrates farther and farther into the heart of Christendom, as its
recruits from the garrisons which its spirit is assailing multiply, and
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provoke a concerted and determined action in defense of the strongholds
of Christian orthodoxy, and as the forces of nationalism, paganism,
secularism and racialism move jointly towards a climax, might we not
expect that the decline in the power, the authority, and the prestige of
these ecclesiastics will be accentuated, and further demonstrate the
truth, and more fully unfold the implications, of &Baha'u'llah's pronouncement
predicting the eclipse of the luminaries of the Church of
Jesus Christ.
Devastating indeed has been the havoc wrought in the fortunes of the
&Shi'ih hierarchy in Persia, and pitiable the lot reserved for its remnant
now groaning under the yoke of a civil authority it had for centuries
scorned and dominated. Cataclysmic indeed has been the collapse of
the most preeminent institution of &Sunni &Islam, and irretrievable the
downfall of its hierarchy in a country that had championed the cause of
the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of God. Steady and relentless is the
process which has brought such destruction, shame, division, and
weakness to the defenders of the strongholds of Christian ecclesiasticism,
and black indeed are the clouds that darken its horizon. Through
the actions of Muslim and Christian divines--"idols," whom &Baha'u'llah
has stigmatized as constituting the majority of His enemies--
who failed, as commanded by Him, to lay aside their pens and fling
away their fancies, and who, as He Himself testified, had they believed
in Him would have brought about the conversion of the masses, &Islam
and Christianity have, it would be no exaggeration to say, entered the
most critical phase of their history.
Let none, however, mistake my purpose, or misrepresent this cardinal
truth which is of the essence of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah. The divine
origin of all the Prophets of God--including Jesus Christ and the
Apostle of God, the two greatest Manifestations preceding the Revelation
of the &Bab--is unreservedly and unshakably upheld by each and
every follower of the &Baha'i religion. The fundamental unity of these
Messengers of God is clearly recognized, the continuity of their Revelations
is affirmed, the God-given authority and correlative character of
their Books is admitted, the singleness of their aims and purposes is
proclaimed, the uniqueness of their influence emphasized, the ultimate
reconciliation of their teachings and followers taught and anticipated.
"They all," according to &Baha'u'llah's testimony, "abide in the same
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tabernacle, soar in the same heaven, are seated upon the same throne,
utter the same speech, and proclaim the same Faith."
The Continuity of Revelation
The Faith standing identified with the name of &Baha'u'llah disclaims
any intention to belittle any of the Prophets gone before Him, to whittle
down any of their teachings, to obscure, however slightly, the radiance
of their Revelations, to oust them from the hearts of their followers, to
abrogate the fundamentals of their doctrines, to discard any of their
revealed Books, or to suppress the legitimate aspirations of their adherents.
Repudiating the claim of any religion to be the final revelation of
God to man, disclaiming finality for His own Revelation, &Baha'u'llah
inculcates the basic principle of the relativity of religious truth, the
continuity of Divine Revelation, the progressiveness of religious experience.
His aim is to widen the basis of all revealed religions and to
unravel the mysteries of their scriptures. He insists on the unqualified
recognition of the unity of their purpose, restates the eternal verities they
enshrine, coordinates their functions, distinguishes the essential and
the authentic from the nonessential and spurious in their teachings,
separates the God-given truths from the priest-prompted superstitions,
and on this as a basis proclaims the possibility, and even prophecies the
inevitability, of their unification, and the consummation of their highest
hopes.
As to &Muhammad, the Apostle of God, let none among His followers
who read these pages, think for a moment that either &Islam, or its
Prophet, or His Book, or His appointed Successors, or any of His
authentic teachings, have been, or are to be in any way, or to however
slight a degree, disparaged. The lineage of the &Bab, the descendant of
the &Imam &Husayn; the divers and striking evidences, in &Nabil's Narrative,
of the attitude of the Herald of our Faith towards the Founder, the
&Imams, and the Book of &Islam; the glowing tributes paid by &Baha'u'llah
in the &Kitab-i-Iqan to &Muhammad and His lawful Successors, and
particularly to the "peerless and incomparable" &Imam &Husayn; the
arguments adduced, forcibly, fearlessly, and publicly by &Abdu'l-Baha,
in churches and synagogues, to demonstrate the validity of the Message
of the Arabian Prophet; and last but not least the written testimonial of
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the Queen of Rumania, who, born in the Anglican faith and notwithstanding
the close alliance of her government with the Greek Orthodox
Church, the state religion of her adopted country, has, largely as a result
of the perusal of these public discourses of &Abdu'l-Baha, been prompted
to proclaim her recognition of the prophetic function of &Muhammad--
all proclaim, in no uncertain terms, the true attitude of the
&Baha'i Faith towards its parent religion.
"God," is her royal tribute, "is All, everything. He is the power
behind all beginnings.... His is the Voice within us that shows us good
and evil. But mostly we ignore or misunderstand this voice. Therefore,
did He choose His Elect to come down amongst us upon earth to make
clear His Word, His real meaning. Therefore, the Prophets; therefore,
Christ, &Muhammad, &Baha'u'llah, for man needs from time to time a
voice upon earth to bring God to him, to sharpen the realization of the
existence of the true God. Those voices sent to us had to become flesh,
so that with our earthly ears we should be able to hear and understand."
What greater proof, it may be pertinently asked, can the divines of
either Persia or Turkey require wherewith to demonstrate the recognition
by the followers of &Baha'u'llah of the exalted position occupied by
the Prophet &Muhammad among the entire company of the Messengers
of God? What greater service do these divines expect us to render the
Cause of &Islam? What greater evidence of our competence can they
demand than that we should kindle, in quarters so far beyond their
reach, the spark of an ardent and sincere conversion to the truth voiced
by the Apostle of God, and obtain from the pen of royalty this public,
and indeed historic, confession of His God-given Mission?
As to the position of Christianity, let it be stated without any
hesitation or equivocation that its divine origin is unconditionally
acknowledged, that the Sonship and Divinity of Jesus Christ are fearlessly
asserted, that the divine inspiration of the Gospel is fully recognized,
that the reality of the mystery of the Immaculacy of the Virgin Mary is
confessed, and the primacy of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, is
upheld and defended. The Founder of the Christian Faith is designated
by &Baha'u'llah as the "Spirit of God," is proclaimed as the One Who
"appeared out of the breath of the Holy Ghost," and is even extolled as
the "Essence of the Spirit." His mother is described as "that veiled and
immortal, that most beauteous, countenance," and the station of her
Son eulogized as a "station which hath been exalted above the imaginings
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of all that dwell on earth," whilst Peter is recognized as one whom
God has caused "the mysteries of wisdom and of utterance to flow out of
his mouth." "Know thou," &Baha'u'llah has moreover testified, "that
when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation
wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing Himself, however, a fresh
capacity was infused into all created things. Its evidences, as witnessed in
all the peoples of the earth, are now manifest before thee. The deepest
wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any
mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the
influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but manifestations of
the quickening power released by His transcendent, His all-pervasive and
resplendent Spirit. We testify that when He came into the world, He shed
the splendor of His glory upon all created things. Through Him the leper
recovered from the leprosy of perversity and ignorance. Through Him the
unchaste and wayward were healed. Through His power, born of Almighty
God, the eyes of the blind were opened and the soul of the sinner
sanctified.... He it is Who purified the world. Blessed is the man who,
with a face beaming with light, hath turned towards Him."
Indeed, the essential prerequisites of admittance into the &Baha'i fold
of Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and the followers of other
ancient faiths, as well as of agnostics and even atheists, is the wholehearted
and unqualified acceptance by them all of the divine origin of
both &Islam and Christianity, of the Prophetic functions of both
&Muhammad and Jesus Christ, of the legitimacy of the institution of the
Imamate, and of the primacy of St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles.
Such are the central, the solid, the incontrovertible principles that
constitute the bedrock of &Baha'i belief, which the Faith of &Baha'u'llah is
proud to acknowledge, which its teachers proclaim, which its apologists
defend, which its literature disseminates, which its summer schools
expound, and which the rank and file of its followers attest by both word
and deed.
Nor should it be thought for a moment that the followers of
&Baha'u'llah either seek to degrade or even belittle the rank of the world's
religious leaders, whether Christian, Muslim, or of any other denomination,
should their conduct conform to their professions, and be
worthy of the position they occupy. "Those divines," &Baha'u'llah has
affirmed, "...who are truly adorned with the ornament of knowledge
and of a goodly character are, verily, as a head to the body of the world,
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and as eyes to the nations. The guidance of men hath, at all times, been
and is dependent upon these blessed souls." And again: "The divine
whose conduct is upright, and the sage who is just, are as the spirit unto
the body of the world. Well is it with that divine whose head is attired
with the crown of justice, and whose temple is adorned with the ornament
of equity." And yet again: "The divine who hath seized and quaffed the
most holy Wine, in the name of the sovereign Ordainer, is as an eye unto
the world. Well is it with them who obey him, and call him to remembrance."
"Great is the blessedness of that divine," He, in another
connection, has written, "that hath not allowed knowledge to become a
veil between him and the One Who is the Object of all knowledge, and
who, when the Self-Subsisting appeared, hath turned with a beaming
face towards Him. He, in truth, is numbered with the learned. The
inmates of Paradise seek the blessing of his breath, and his lamp sheddeth
its radiance over all who are in heaven and on earth. He, verily, is
numbered with the inheritors of the Prophets. He that beholdeth him
hath, verily, beheld the True One, and he that turneth towards him hath,
verily, turned towards God, the Almighty, the All-Wise." "Respect ye the
divines amongst you," is His exhortation, "They whose acts conform to
the knowledge they possess, who observe the statutes of God, and decree
the things God hath decreed in the Book. Know ye that they are the lamps
of guidance betwixt earth and heaven. They that have no consideration
for the position and merit of the divines amongst them have, verily,
altered the bounty of God vouchsafed unto them."
Dear friends! I have, in the preceding pages, attempted to represent
this world-afflicting ordeal that has laid its grip upon mankind as
primarily a judgment of God pronounced against the peoples of the
earth, who, for a century, have refused to recognize the One Whose
advent had been promised to all religions, and in Whose Faith all
nations can alone, and must eventually, seek their true salvation. I have
quoted certain passages from the writings of &Baha'u'llah and the &Bab that
reveal the character, and foreshadow the occurrence of this divinely
inflicted visitation. I have enumerated the woeful trials with which the
Faith, its Herald, its Founder, and its Exemplar, have been afflicted,
and exposed the tragic failure of the generality of mankind and its leaders
to protest against these tribulations, and to acknowledge the claims
advanced by those Who bore them. I have, moreover, indicated that a
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direct, an awful, an inescapable responsibility rested on the sovereigns
of the earth and the world's religious leaders who, in the days of the &Bab
and &Baha'u'llah, held within their grasp the reins of absolute political
and religious authority. I have also endeavored to show how, as a result
of the direct and active antagonism of some of them to the Faith, and the
neglect by others of their unquestioned duty to investigate its truth and
its claims, to vindicate its innocence, and avenge its injuries, both kings
and ecclesiastics have been, and are still being, subjected to the dire
punishments which their sins of omission and commission have provoked.
I have, owing to the chief responsibility which they incurred, as a
result of the undisputed ascendancy they held over their subjects and
followers, quoted extensively from the messages, the exhortations and
warnings addressed to them by the Founders of our Faith, and expatiated
on the consequences that have flowed from these momentous
and epoch-making utterances.
This great retributive calamity, for which the world's supreme leaders,
both secular and religious, are to be regarded as primarily answerable,
as testified by &Baha'u'llah, should not, if we would correctly
appraise it, be regarded solely as a punishment meted out by God to a
world that has, for a hundred years, persisted in its refusal to embrace the
truth of the redemptive Message proffered to it by the supreme Messenger
of God in this day. It should be viewed also, though to a lesser
degree, in the light of a divine retribution for the perversity of the human
race in general, in casting itself adrift from those elementary principles
which must, at all times, govern, and can alone safeguard, the life and
progress of mankind. Humanity has, alas, with increasing insistence,
preferred, instead of acknowledging and adoring the Spirit of God as
embodied in His religion in this day, to worship those false idols,
untruths and half-truths, which are obscuring its religions, corrupting
its spiritual life, convulsing its political institutions, corroding its social
fabric, and shattering its economic structure.
Not only have the peoples of the earth ignored, and some of them
even assailed, a Faith which is at once the essence, the promise, the
reconciler, and the unifier of all religions, but they have drifted away
from their own religions, and set up on their subverted altars other gods
wholly alien not only to the spirit but to the traditional forms of their
ancient faiths.
"The face of the world," &Baha'u'llah laments, "hath altered. The way
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of God and the religion of God have ceased to be of any worth in the eyes
of men." "The vitality of men's belief in God," He also has written, "is
dying out in every land.... The corrosion of ungodliness is eating into
the vitals of human society." "Religion," He affirms, "is verily the chief
instrument for the establishment of order in the world, and of tranquility
amongst its peoples.... The greater the decline of religion, the more
grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end
to chaos and confusion." And again: "Religion is a radiant light and an
impregnable stronghold for the protection and welfare of the peoples of the
world." "As the body of man," He, in another connection, has written,
"needeth a garment to clothe it, so the body of mankind must needs be
adorned with the mantle of justice and wisdom. Its robe is the Revelation
vouchsafed unto it by God."
The Three False Gods
This vital force is dying out, this mighty agency has been scorned, this
radiant light obscured, this impregnable stronghold abandoned, this
beauteous robe discarded. God Himself has indeed been dethroned
from the hearts of men, and an idolatrous world passionately and
clamorously hails and worships the false gods which its own idle fancies
have fatuously created, and its misguided hands so impiously exalted.
The chief idols in the desecrated temple of mankind are none other than
the triple gods of Nationalism, Racialism and Communism, at whose
altars governments and peoples, whether democratic or totalitarian, at
peace or at war, of the East or of the West, Christian or Islamic, are, in
various forms and in different degrees, now worshiping. Their high
priests are the politicians and the worldly-wise, the so-called sages of the
age; their sacrifice, the flesh and blood of the slaughtered multitudes;
their incantations outworn shibboleths and insidious and irreverent
formulas; their incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends from the
lacerated hearts of the bereaved, the maimed, and the homeless.
The theories and policies, so unsound, so pernicious, which deify the
state and exalt the nation above mankind, which seek to subordinate the
sister races of the world to one single race, which discriminate between
the black and the white, and which tolerate the dominance of one
privileged class over all others--these are the dark, the false, and
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crooked doctrines for which any man or people who believes in them, or
acts upon them, must, sooner or later, incur the wrath and chastisement
of God.
"Movements," is the warning sounded by &Abdu'l-Baha, "newly born
and worldwide in their range, will exert their utmost effort for the
advancement of their designs. The Movement of the Left will acquire
great importance. Its influence will spread."
Contrasting with, and irreconcilably opposed to, these war-engendering,
world-convulsing doctrines are the healing, the saving,
the pregnant truths proclaimed by &Baha'u'llah, the Divine Organizer
and Savior of the whole human race--truths which should be regarded
as the animating force and the hallmark of His Revelation: "The world is
but one country, and mankind its citizens." "Let not a man glory in that
he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind."
And again: "Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch."
"Bend your minds and wills to the education of the peoples and kindreds
of the earth, that haply ... all mankind may become the upholders of one
order, and the inhabitants of one city.... Ye dwell in one world, and
have been created through the operation of one Will." "Beware lest the
desires of the flesh and of a corrupt inclination provoke divisions among
you. Be ye as the fingers of one hand, the members of one body." And yet
again: "All the saplings of the world have appeared from one Tree, and all
the drops from one Ocean, and all beings owe their existence to one
Being." And furthermore: "That one indeed is a man who today dedicateth
himself to the service of the entire human race."
The Weakened Pillars of Religion
Not only must irreligion and its monstrous offspring, the triple curse
that oppresses the soul of mankind in this day, be held responsible for
the ills which are so tragically besetting it, but other evils and vices,
which are, for the most part, the direct consequences of the "weakening
of the pillars of religion," must also be regarded as contributory factors to
the manifold guilt of which individuals and nations stand convicted.
The signs of moral downfall, consequent to the dethronement of religion
and the enthronement of these usurping idols, are too numerous
and too patent for even a superficial observer of the state of present-day
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society to fail to notice. The spread of lawlessness, of drunkenness, of
gambling, and of crime; the inordinate love of pleasure, of riches, and
other earthly vanities; the laxity in morals, revealing itself in the
irresponsible attitude towards marriage, in the weakening of parental control,
in the rising tide of divorce, in the deterioration in the standard of
literature and of the press, and in the advocacy of theories that are the
very negation of purity, of morality and chastity--these evidences of
moral decadence, invading both the East and the West, permeating
every stratum of society, and instilling their poison in its members of
both sexes, young and old alike, blacken still further the scroll upon
which are inscribed the manifold transgressions of an unrepentant
humanity.
Small wonder that &Baha'u'llah, the Divine Physician, should have
declared: "In this day the tastes of men have changed, and their power of
perception hath altered. The contrary winds of the world, and its colors,
have provoked a cold, and deprived men's nostrils of the sweet savors of
Revelation."
Brimful and bitter indeed is the cup of humanity that has failed to
respond to the summons of God as voiced by His Supreme Messenger,
that has dimmed the lamp of its faith in its Creator, that has transferred,
in so great a measure, the allegiance owed Him to the gods of its own
invention, and polluted itself with the evils and vices which such a
transference must necessarily engender.
Dear friends! It is in this light that we, the followers of &Baha'u'llah,
should regard this visitation of God which, in the concluding years of
the first century of the &Baha'i era, afflicts the generality, and has thrown
into such a bewildering confusion the affairs, of mankind. It is because
of this dual guilt, the things it has done and the things it has left undone,
its misdeeds as well as its dismal and signal failure to accomplish its clear
and unmistakable duty towards God, His Messenger, and His Faith,
that this grievous ordeal, whatever its immediate political and economic
causes, has laid its adamantine grip upon it.
God, however, as has been pointed out in the very beginning of these
pages, does not only punish the wrongdoings of His children. He
chastises because He is just, and He chastens because He loves. Having
chastened them, He cannot, in His great mercy, leave them to their
fate. Indeed, by the very act of chastening them He prepares them for
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the mission for which He has created them. "My calamity is My
providence," He, by the mouth of &Baha'u'llah, has assured them,
"outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy."
The flames which His Divine justice have kindled cleanse an unregenerate
humanity, and fuse its discordant, its warring elements as no
other agency can cleanse or fuse them. It is not only a retributory and
destructive fire, but a disciplinary and creative process, whose aim is the
salvation, through unification, of the entire planet. Mysteriously,
slowly, and resistlessly God accomplishes His design, though the sight
that meets our eyes in this day be the spectacle of a world hopelessly
entangled in its own meshes, utterly careless of the Voice which, for a
century, has been calling it to God, and miserably subservient to the
siren voices which are attempting to lure it into the vast abyss.
God's Purpose
God's purpose is none other than to usher in, in ways He alone can
bring about, and the full significance of which He alone can fathom, the
Great, the Golden Age of a long-divided, a long-afflicted humanity. Its
present state, indeed even its immediate future, is dark, distressingly
dark. Its distant future, however, is radiant, gloriously radiant--so
radiant that no eye can visualize it.
"The winds of despair," writes &Baha'u'llah, as He surveys the immediate
destinies of mankind, "are, alas, blowing from every direction,
and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing.
The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned,
inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective."
"Such shall be its plight," He, in another connection, has declared,
"that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly." "These fruitless
strifes," He, on the other hand, contemplating the future of mankind,
has emphatically prophesied, in the course of His memorable interview
with the Persian orientalist, Edward G. Browne, "these ruinous wars
shall pass away, and the `Most Great Peace' shall come.... These strifes
and this bloodshed and discord must cease, and all men be as one kindred
and one family." "Soon," He predicts, "will the present-day order be
rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead." "After a time," He also
has written, "all the governments on earth will change. Oppression will
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envelop the world. And following a universal convulsion, the sun of
justice will rise from the horizon of the unseen realm." "The whole earth,"
He, moreover, has stated, "is now in a state of pregnancy. The day is
approaching when it will have yielded its noblest fruits, when from it will
have sprung forth the loftiest trees, the most enchanting blossoms, the
most heavenly blessings." "All nations and kindreds," &Abdu'l-Baha
likewise has written, "...will become a single nation. Religious and
sectarian antagonism, the hostility of races and peoples, and differences
among nations, will be eliminated. All men will adhere to one religion,
will have one common faith, will be blended into one race, and become a
single people. All will dwell in one common fatherland, which is the
planet itself."
What we witness at the present time, during "this gravest crisis in the
history of civilization," recalling such times in which "religions have
perished and are born," is the adolescent stage in the slow and painful
evolution of humanity, preparatory to the attainment of the stage of
manhood, the stage of maturity, the promise of which is embedded in
the teachings, and enshrined in the prophecies, of &Baha'u'llah. The
tumult of this age of transition is characteristic of the impetuosity and
irrational instincts of youth, its follies, its prodigality, its pride, its
self-assurance, its rebelliousness, and contempt of discipline.
The Great Age to Come
The ages of its infancy and childhood are past, never again to return,
while the Great Age, the consummation of all ages, which must signalize
the coming of age of the entire human race, is yet to come. The
convulsions of this transitional and most turbulent period in the annals
of humanity are the essential prerequisites, and herald the inevitable
approach, of that Age of Ages, "the time of the end," in which the folly
and tumult of strife that has, since the dawn of history, blackened the
annals of mankind, will have been finally transmuted into the wisdom
and the tranquility of an undisturbed, a universal, and lasting peace, in
which the discord and separation of the children of men will have given
way to the worldwide reconciliation, and the complete unification of the
divers elements that constitute human society.
This will indeed be the fitting climax of that process of integration
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which, starting with the family, the smallest unit in the scale of human
organization, must, after having called successively into being the tribe,
the city-state, and the nation, continue to operate until it culminates in
the unification of the whole world, the final object and the crowning
glory of human evolution on this planet. It is this stage which humanity,
willingly or unwillingly, is resistlessly approaching. It is for this stage
that this vast, this fiery ordeal which humanity is experiencing is
mysteriously paving the way. It is with this stage that the fortunes and the
purpose of the Faith of &Baha'u'llah are indissolubly linked. It is the
creative energies which His Revelation has released in the "year sixty,"
and later reinforced by the successive effusions of celestial power vouchsafed
in the "year nine" and the "year eighty" to all mankind, that have
instilled into humanity the capacity to attain this final stage in its organic
and collective evolution. It is with the Golden Age of His Dispensation
that the consummation of this process will be forever associated. It is the
structure of His New World Order, now stirring in the womb of the
administrative institutions He Himself has created, that will serve both
as a pattern and a nucleus of that world commonwealth which is the
sure, the inevitable destiny of the peoples and nations of the earth.
Just as the organic evolution of mankind has been slow and gradual,
and involved successively the unification of the family, the tribe, the
city-state, and the nation, so has the light vouchsafed by the Revelation
of God, at various stages in the evolution of religion, and reflected in the
successive Dispensations of the past, been slow and progressive. Indeed
the measure of Divine Revelation, in every age, has been adapted to,
and commensurate with, the degree of social progress achieved in that
age by a constantly evolving humanity.
"It hath been decreed by Us," explains &Baha'u'llah, "that the Word of
God, and all the potentialities thereof, shall be manifested unto men in
strict conformity with such conditions as have been foreordained by Him
Who is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.... Should the Word be allowed
to release suddenly all the energies latent within it, no man could sustain
the weight of so mighty a Revelation." "All created things," &Abdu'l-Baha,
elucidating this truth, has affirmed, "have their degree or
stage of maturity. The period of maturity in the life of a tree is the time of
its fruit-bearing.... The animal attains a stage of full growth and
completeness, and in the human kingdom man reaches his maturity
when the light of his intelligence attains its greatest power and development.
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...Similarly there are periods and stages in the collective life of
humanity. At one time it was passing through its stage of childhood, at
another its period of youth, but now it has entered its long-predicted
phase of maturity, the evidences of which are everywhere apparent....
That which was applicable to human needs during the early history of the
race can neither meet nor satisfy the demands of this day, this period of
newness and consummation. Humanity has emerged from its former
state of limitation and preliminary training. Man must now become
imbued with new virtues and powers, new moral standards, new
capacities. New bounties, perfect bestowals, are awaiting and already
descending upon him. The gifts and blessings of the period of youth,
although timely and sufficient during the adolescence of mankind, are
now incapable of meeting the requirements of its maturity." "In every
Dispensation," He moreover has written, "the light of Divine Guidance
has been focused upon one central theme.... In this wondrous Revelation,
this glorious century, the foundation of the Faith of God, and the
distinguishing feature of His Law, is the consciousness of the oneness of
mankind."
Religion and Social Evolution
The Revelation associated with the Faith of Jesus Christ focused
attention primarily on the redemption of the individual and the molding
of his conduct, and stressed, as its central theme, the necessity of
inculcating a high standard of morality and discipline into man, as the
fundamental unit in human society. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find
any reference to the unity of nations or the unification of mankind as a
whole. When Jesus spoke to those around Him, He addressed them
primarily as individuals rather than as component parts of one universal,
indivisible entity. The whole surface of the earth was as yet unexplored,
and the organization of all its peoples and nations as one unit
could, consequently, not be envisaged, how much less proclaimed or
established. What other interpretation can be given to these words,
addressed specifically by &Baha'u'llah to the followers of the Gospel, in
which the fundamental distinction between the Mission of Jesus Christ,
concerning primarily the individual, and His own Message, directed
more particularly to mankind as a whole, has been definitely established:
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"Verily, He [Jesus] said: `Come ye after Me, and I will make you
to become fishers of men.' In this day, however, We say: `Come ye after
Me, that We may make you to become the quickeners of mankind.'"
The Faith of &Islam, the succeeding link in the chain of Divine
Revelation, introduced, as &Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, the conception
of the nation as a unit and a vital stage in the organization of human
society, and embodied it in its teaching. This indeed is what is meant by
this brief yet highly significant and illuminating pronouncement of
&Baha'u'llah: "Of old [Islamic Dispensation] it hath been revealed: `Love
of one's country is an element of the Faith of God.'" This principle was
established and stressed by the Apostle of God, inasmuch as the evolution
of human society required it at that time. Nor could any stage above
and beyond it have been envisaged, as world conditions preliminary to
the establishment of a superior form of organization were as yet unobtainable.
The conception of nationality, the attainment to the state of
nationhood, may, therefore, be said to be the distinguishing characteristics
of the &Muhammadan Dispensation, in the course of which the
nations and races of the world, and particularly in Europe and America,
were unified and achieved political independence.
&Abdu'l-Baha Himself elucidates this truth in one of His Tablets: "In
cycles gone by, though harmony was established, yet, owing to the
absence of means, the unity of all mankind could not have been achieved.
Continents remained widely divided, nay even among the peoples of one
and the same continent association and interchange of thought were
well-nigh impossible. Consequently intercourse, understanding and
unity amongst all the peoples and kindreds of the earth were unattainable.
In this day, however, means of communication have multiplied,
and the five continents of the earth have virtually merged into one.... In
like manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or
governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly interdependent.
For none is self-sufficiency any longer possible, inasmuch as
political ties unite all peoples and nations, and the bonds of trade and
industry, of agriculture and education, are being strengthened every day.
Hence the unity of all mankind can in this day be achieved. Verily this is
none other but one of the wonders of this wondrous age, this glorious
century. Of this past ages have been deprived, for this century--the
century of light--has been endowed with unique and unprecedented
glory, power and illumination. Hence the miraculous unfolding of a
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fresh marvel every day. Eventually it will be seen how bright its candles
will burn in the assemblage of man."
"Behold," He further explains, "how its light is now dawning upon the
world's darkened horizon. The first candle is unity in the political realm,
the early glimmerings of which can now be discerned. The second candle
is unity of thought in world undertakings, the consummation of which
will erelong be witnessed. The third candle is unity in freedom which will
surely come to pass. The fourth candle is unity in religion which is the
cornerstone of the foundation itself, and which, by the power of God, will
be revealed in all its splendor. The fifth candle is the unity of nations--a
unity which, in this century, will be securely established, causing all the
peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common
fatherland. The sixth candle is unity of races, making of all that dwell on
earth peoples and kindreds of one race. The seventh candle is unity of
language, i.e., the choice of a universal tongue in which all peoples will
be instructed and converse. Each and every one of these will inevitably
come to pass, inasmuch as the power of the Kingdom of God will aid and
assist in their realization."
"One of the great events," &Abdu'l-Baha has, in His "Some Answered
Questions," affirmed, "which is to occur in the Day of the manifestation
of that Incomparable Branch [&Baha'u'llah] is the hoisting of the Standard
of God among all nations. By this is meant that all nations and kindreds
will be gathered together under the shadow of this Divine Banner, which
is no other than the Lordly Branch itself, and will become a single nation.
Religious and sectarian antagonism, the hostility of races and peoples,
and differences among nations, will be eliminated. All men will adhere
to one religion, will have one common faith, will be blended into one
race, and become a single people. All will dwell in one common fatherland,
which is the planet itself."
This is the stage which the world is now approaching, the stage of
world unity, which, as &Abdu'l-Baha assures us, will, in this century, be
securely established. "The Tongue of Grandeur," &Baha'u'llah Himself
affirms, "hath ... in the Day of His Manifestation proclaimed: `It is not
his to boast who loveth his country, but it is his who loveth the world.'"
"Through the power," He adds, "released by these exalted words He hath
lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men's hearts,
and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God's
Holy Book."
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The Wider, Inclusive Loyalty
A word of warning should, however, be uttered in this connection.
The love of one's country, instilled and stressed by the teaching of &Islam,
as "an element of the Faith of God," has not, through this declaration,
this clarion-call of &Baha'u'llah, been either condemned or disparaged. It
should not, indeed it cannot, be construed as a repudiation, or regarded
in the light of a censure, pronounced against a sane and intelligent
patriotism, nor does it seek to undermine the allegiance and loyalty of
any individual to his country, nor does it conflict with the legitimate
aspirations, rights, and duties of any individual state or nation. All it
does imply and proclaim is the insufficiency of patriotism, in view of the
fundamental changes effected in the economic life of society and the
interdependence of the nations, and as the consequence of the contraction
of the world, through the revolution in the means of transportation
and communication--conditions that did not and could not exist either
in the days of Jesus Christ or of &Muhammad. It calls for a wider loyalty,
which should not, and indeed does not, conflict with lesser loyalties. It
instills a love which, in view of its scope, must include and not exclude
the love of one's own country. It lays, through this loyalty which it
inspires, and this love which it infuses, the only foundation on which
the concept of world citizenship can thrive, and the structure of world
unification can rest. It does insist, however, on the subordination of
national considerations and particularistic interests to the imperative
and paramount claims of humanity as a whole, inasmuch as in a world
of interdependent nations and peoples the advantage of the part is best to
be reached by the advantage of the whole.
The world is, in truth, moving on towards its destiny. The
interdependence of the peoples and nations of the earth, whatever the leaders
of the divisive forces of the world may say or do, is already an accomplished
fact. Its unity in the economic sphere is now understood and
recognized. The welfare of the part means the welfare of the whole, and
the distress of the part brings distress to the whole. The Revelation of
&Baha'u'llah has, in His own words, "lent a fresh impulse and set a new
direction" to this vast process now operating in the world. The fires lit by
this great ordeal are the consequences of men's failure to recognize it.
They are, moreover, hastening its consummation. Adversity, prolonged,
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worldwide, afflictive, allied to chaos and universal destruction,
must needs convulse the nations, stir the conscience of the world,
disillusion the masses, precipitate a radical change in the very conception
of society, and coalesce ultimately the disjointed, the bleeding
limbs of mankind into one body, single, organically united, and indivisible.
World Commonwealth
To the general character, the implications and features of this world
commonwealth, destined to emerge, sooner or later, out of the carnage,
agony, and havoc of this great world convulsion, I have already referred
in my previous communications. Suffice it to say that this consummation
will, by its very nature, be a gradual process, and must, as
&Baha'u'llah has Himself anticipated, lead at first to the establishment of
that Lesser Peace which the nations of the earth, as yet unconscious of
His Revelation and yet unwittingly enforcing the general principles
which He has enunciated, will themselves establish. This momentous
and historic step, involving the reconstruction of mankind, as the result
of the universal recognition of its oneness and wholeness, will bring in
its wake the spiritualization of the masses, consequent to the recognition
of the character, and the acknowledgment of the claims, of the Faith of
&Baha'u'llah--the essential condition to that ultimate fusion of all races,
creeds, classes, and nations which must signalize the emergence of His
New World Order.
Then will the coming of age of the entire human race be proclaimed
and celebrated by all the peoples and nations of the earth. Then will the
banner of the Most Great Peace be hoisted. Then will the worldwide
sovereignty of &Baha'u'llah--the Establisher of the Kingdom of the
Father foretold by the Son, and anticipated by the Prophets of God
before Him and after Him--be recognized, acclaimed, and firmly
established. Then will a world civilization be born, flourish, and perpetuate
itself, a civilization with a fullness of life such as the world has
never seen nor can as yet conceive. Then will the Everlasting Covenant
be fulfilled in its completeness. Then will the promise enshrined in
all the Books of God be redeemed, and all the prophecies uttered by the
Prophets of old come to pass, and the vision of seers and poets be
realized. Then will the planet, galvanized through the universal belief
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of its dwellers in one God, and their allegiance to one common Revelation,
mirror, within the limitations imposed upon it, the effulgent
glories of the sovereignty of &Baha'u'llah, shining in the plenitude of its
splendor in the &Abha Paradise, and be made the footstool of His Throne
on high, and acclaimed as the earthly heaven, capable of fulfilling that
ineffable destiny fixed for it, from time immemorial, by the love and
wisdom of its Creator.
Not ours, puny mortals that we are, to attempt, at so critical a stage in
the long and checkered history of mankind, to arrive at a precise and
satisfactory understanding of the steps which must successively lead a
bleeding humanity, wretchedly oblivious of its God, and careless of
&Baha'u'llah, from its calvary to its ultimate resurrection. Not ours, the
living witnesses of the all-subduing potency of His Faith, to question,
for a moment, and however dark the misery that enshrouds the world,
the ability of &Baha'u'llah to forge, with the hammer of His Will, and
through the fire of tribulation, upon the anvil of this travailing age, and
in the particular shape His mind has envisioned, these scattered and
mutually destructive fragments into which a perverse world has fallen,
into one single unit, solid and indivisible, able to execute His design for
the children of men.
Ours rather the duty, however confused the scene, however dismal
the present outlook, however circumscribed the resources we dispose of,
to labor serenely, confidently, and unremittingly to lend our share of
assistance, in whichever way circumstances may enable us, to the
operation of the forces which, as marshaled and directed by &Baha'u'llah,
are leading humanity out of the valley of misery and shame to the loftiest
summits of power and glory.
Shoghi
To the beloved of God and the handmaids of the Merciful throughout
the West.
Haifa, Palestine
March 28, 1941