with the scourges of the commands of your Lord, the Powerful, the Wise.” A very brief summary will be sufficient to show this spiritual sequence and historical progression of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is the apex and consummation.
The earliest dawning rays of the effulgent Sun of Truth, the Word of God which shone forth from the heaven of the divine will upon the horizon of the human world in this luminous cycle were reflected in the pure mirrors of sanctity Shaykh Aḥmad of Aḥsá’í and Hájí Siyyid Kázim of Rasht. As stars of morning precede the coming of the mighty luminary of day, these brilliant souls arose successively in Persia toward the close of the eighteenth century, piercing the sombre shadows of night and proclaiming the splendor of the approaching Manifestation. This mission completed, the lamps of their physical existence were extinguished in 1826 and 1844 respectively.
On May 23, 1844, His Holiness Mírzá ‘Alí Muḥammad the Báb suddenly enkindled the world by declaring in Shiráz, Persia that the Day of God was at hand. For six years as herald and forerunner this winsome messenger of the kingdom sounded His heavenly call, until in 1850 the flaming tongue and pen of His eloquence were stilled in the throes of a glorious martyrdom.
Then the heaven of religion overspread with the brilliant radiance of His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh, Glory of God, the Manifest Word and Sun of Reality which poured its bounty upon the world of mankind forty years, extending to the time of its occultation in 1892. Throughout these years this Glorious Being was subjected to continuous exile, imprisonment and oppression by earthly rulers until after infinite hardships and suffering He ascended from these abject conditions and surroundings of religious and political tyranny to His abode in the supreme world.
But the equation of divine purpose was not yet complete. The coming of Bahá’u’lláh, had fulfilled the prophetic promises of the sacred books of the Jews, Christians, Muḥammadans, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and others. Like mighty rivers restricted to their own watersheds these separate systems of religious belief and worship, incapable of mingling in their courses, had found their destined union and confluence in the infinite ocean of Bahá’u’lláh’s utterance. Furthermore, the supreme and ultimate product of divine revelation, the apotheosis of prophecy and the universal outcome in which all the heavenly religions would consummate was that quintessence of the cycles, that “Mystery of God,” a perfected “Servant” in whom the divine and human wills had found complete blending. This sanctified personage was to appear in the great Day of God, that Day of universal splendor when “the glory of the Lord should be revealed and all flesh should see it together.”
In the latter half of the nineteenth century the nations and peoples of the world had become so closely associated and wrought together in their physical existence, so interwoven and interdependent in the necessities and requirements of life that the problems and politics of one government now affected and influenced the conditions of them all. The world had become one vast human family wherein interests were intimately related, responsibilities mutual and problems universal. Therefore the Word of God revealed by Bahá’u’lláh was universal in its provision and remedy for the conditions of mankind; conditions which although they were direct outcomes of human will and making, had been eternally foreseen by the Omniscient eye and spoken by the tongues of Prophets as recorded in all the holy books. Great numbers of brilliant souls throughout the East had accepted and followed this manifest standard of unity and reconciliation. In religious heredity, training and belief they had been diverse, hostile and irreconcilable but under the benign, penetrating influence of the Holy Spirit of the Word made flesh in Bahá’u’lláh they attained
