noblest of all became the founder of Bábíism.
Chapter XI, page 120—
The Báb was dead, but not Bábíism. He was not the first, and still less the last, of a long line of martyrs who have testified that even in a country gangrened with corruption and atrophied with indifferentism like Persia, the soul of a nation survives, inarticulate, perhaps, and in a way helpless, but still capable of sudden spasms of vitality.
Chapter XI, page 124—
Socially one of the most interesting features of Bábíism is the raising of woman to a much higher plane than she is usually admitted to in the East. The Báb himself had no more devoted a disciple than the beautiful and gifted lady, known as Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, the “Consolation of the Eyes,” who, having shared all the dangers of the first apostolic missions in the north, challenged and suffered death with virile fortitude, as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. No memory is more deeply venerated or kindles greater enthusiasm than hers, and the influence which she yielded in her lifetime still inures to her sex.
VII. By Albert Vail.
Quotation from Heroic Lives, page 305—
Prof. Jowett of Oxford, Master of Balliol, the translator of Plato, studied the movement and was so impressed thereby that he said: “The Bábite (Bahá’í) movement may not impossibly turn out to have the promise of the future." Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter quotes Prof. Edward Caird, Prof. Jowett’s successor as Master of Balliol, as saying, “He thought Bábíism (as the Bahá’í movement was then called) might prove the most important religious movement since the foundation of Christianity.“ Prof. Carpenter himself gives a sketch of the Bahá’í movement in his recent book on Comparative Religion and asks, “Has Persia, in the midst of her miseries, given birth to a religion that will go around the world?”
VIII. By Alfred W. Martin.
Excerpts from Comparative Religion and the Religion of the Future, pages 81-91—
Inasmuch as a fellowship of faiths is at once the dearest hope and ultimate goal of the Bahá’í movement, it behooves us to take cognizance of it and its mission .... Today this religious movement has a million and more adherents, including people from all parts of the globe and representing a remarkable variety of race, color, class and creed. It has been given literary expression in a veritable library of Asiatic, European, and American works to which additions are annually made as the movement grows and grapples with the great problems that grow out of its cardinal teachings. It has a long roll of martyrs for the cause for which it stands, twenty thousand in Persia alone, proving it to be a movement worth dying for as well as worth living by.
From its inception it has been identified with Bahá’u’lláh, who paid the price of prolonged exile, imprisonment, bodily suffering, and mental anguish for the faith he cherished — a man of imposing personality as revealed in his writings characterized by intense moral earnestness and profound spirituality, gifted with the selfsame power so conspicuous in the character of Jesus, the power to appreciate people ideally, that is, to see them at the level of their best and to make even the lowest types think well of themselves because of potentialities within them to which he pointed, but of which they were wholly unaware; a prophet whose greatest contribution was not any specific doctrine he proclaimed, but an informing spiritual power breathed into the world through the example of his life and thereby quickening souls into new spiritual activity.
