The Summons of the Lord of Hosts
Introduction
His messages addressed to individual potentates—Pope Pius IX, Napoleon III, Czar Alexander II, Queen Victoria, and Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh.
It was this composite work which, shortly after its completion,
Bahá’u’lláh instructed be written in the form of a pentacle, symbolizing the human temple. To it He added, as a conclusion, what
Shoghi Effendi has described as “
words which reveal the importance He attached to those Messages, and indicate their direct association with the prophecies of the Old Testament”:
Thus have We built the Temple with the hands of power and might, could ye but know it. This is the Temple promised unto you in the Book. Draw ye nigh unto it. This is that which profiteth you, could ye but comprehend it. Be fair, O peoples of the earth! Which is preferable, this, or a temple which is built of clay? Set your faces towards it. Thus have ye been commanded by God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.
During the last years of His ministry Bahá’u’lláh Himself arranged for the publication for the first time of definitive versions of some of His principal works, and the Súriy-i-Haykal was awarded a prominent position among them.
Of the various writings that make up the Súriy-i-Haykal, one requires particular mention. The Lawḥ-i-Sulṭán, the Tablet to Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, Bahá’u’lláh’s lengthiest epistle to any single sovereign, was revealed in the weeks immediately preceding His final banishment
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