Those who lament that this is an age of dominant materialism may well ponder the results of the Bab’s mission in the heroic sacrifice of His faithful followers, many thousands of whom were tortured and slain with incredible brutality. Because these events took place in a Muslim land, and in a land peculiarly remote from European and American experience, little attention was paid to the Bábí movement in the West.

The motive animating the faith of the Bab’s followers was that His being and mission fulfilled the spirit of their own religious prophecy.

With Bahá’u’lláh, whose advent the Báb had foretold, the new Movement left behind its particular Muslim aspect and assumed a world-wide purpose and meaning. Bahá’u’lláh arose after the death of the Báb, took upon Himself full responsibility for leading a Movement proscribed by the government, and became the target for all the bitterness engendered by failure to extinguish the new light of faith . Bahá’u’lláh was imprisoned in Ṭihrán with murderers and criminals, bastinadoed, condemned to death, exiled to Baghdád, then to Constantinople and Adrianople, and finally confined for life in the desolate barracks of ‘Akká, a Turkish penal colony, facing Mount Carmel in the Holy Land.

On April 21, 1863, in a garden outside Baghdád, Bahá’u’lláh made known to a few followers that He was the One proclaimed and promised by the Bab. This announcement was made in His famous Epistles in Adrianople previous to the journey to ‘Akká, in 1868.

By this event the Bábí Movement was fulfilled in the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh (i. e., Glory of God), and the streams of Christian and Jewish prophecy united with the inner reality of the Muslim religion.

Bahá’u’lláh gave the glad-tidings to East and West that the Day of God had dawned, that the power of the Holy Spirit encompassed humanity in its time of greatest need, that a new and universal cycle had been established—the age of brotherhood, of peace, of the knowledge of God. This message was inscribed in Tablets or Epistles, written during His forty years of exile and imprisonment, to kings and rulers, to representatives of the several religions, to His own followers in response to questions they had addressed to Him, and in a great number of books containing the essence of universal religion, science and philosophy. In the annals of the world, no spiritual revelation has been so complete, nor made under such conditions of personal oppression and hardship.

The effect of Bahá’u’lláh Himself upon His followers, even upon His enemies, was unique and indescribable. About Him emanated a majesty that glorified every suffering, an awe that penetrated to the rudest soul, a consecrated love that portrayed man in his ultimate perfection.

Voluntarily sharing these fateful ordeals from very childhood was the son of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (i. e., Servant of Bahá) , whose confinement at ‘Akká, lasting forty years, was terminated at last in 1908 by the overthrow of the old regime by the Young Turks.

Bahá’u’lláh ascended (i. e., passed from this world) in 1892, leaving a Testament naming ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as the Head of His Cause, the Interpreter of His Teachings, and the Promulgator of His Faith. The providential spirit guiding and protecting the Bahá’í Cause from its beginning, centered thereafter in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.