. . . Taking precedence over all else in its gospel is the message of unity in religion .... It is the crowning glory of the Bahá’í movement that, while deprecating sectarianism in its preaching, it has faithfully practiced what it preached by refraining from becoming itself a sect. . . . Its representatives do not attempt to impose any beliefs upon others, whether by argument or bribery; rather do they seek to put beliefs that have illumined their own lives within the reach of those who feel they need illumination. No, not a sect, not a part of humanity cut off from all the rest, living for itself and aiming to convert all the rest into material for its own growth; no, not that, but a leaven, causing spiritual fermentation in all religions, quickening them with the spirit of catholicity and fraternalism.

. . . Who shall say but that just as the little company of the Mayflower, landing on Plymouth Rock, proved to be the small beginning of a mighty nation, the ideal germ of a democracy which, if true to its principles, shall yet overspread the habitable globe, so the little company of Bahá’ís exiled from their Persian home may yet prove to be the small beginning of a world-wide movement, the ideal germ of democracy in religion, the Universal Church of Mankind?

The political reprieve brought about by the Súfís did not result in the regeneration of thought. But the last century which marks the end of Persia has had its revival and twofold revival, literary and religious. The funeral ceremonies by which Persia celebrates every year for centuries—the fatal day of the 10th of Mohorrum, when the son of ‘Alí breathed his last at Karbilá—have developed a popular theatre and produce a sincere poetry, dramatic and human, which is worth all the rhetoric of the poets. During the same times an attempt at religious renovation was made, the religion of Bábíism. Demoralized for centuries by ten foreign conquests, by the yoke of a composite religion in which she believed just enough to persecute, by the enervating influence of a mystical philosophy which disabled men for action and divested life of all aim and objects, Persia has been making unexpected efforts for the last fifty-five years to re-make for herself a virile ideal. Bábíism has little of originality in its dogmas and mythology. Its mystic doctrine takes its rise from Súfísm and the old sects of the Aliides formed around the dogma of divine incarnation. But the morality it inculcates is a revolution. It has the ethics of the West. It suppresses lawful impurities which are a great barrier dividing Islám from Christendom. It denounces polygamy, the fruitful source of Oriental degeneration. It seeks to reconstitute the family and it elevates man and in elevating him exalts woman up to his level. Bábíism, which diffused itself in less than five years from one end of Persia to another, which was bathed in 1852 in the blood of its martyrs, has been silently progressing and propagating itself. If Persia is to be at all regenerate it will be through this new faith.