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 _Sh_i'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
pa_sh_a 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.
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 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 Pa_sh_a--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 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 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."