out as one stung by the sting of the
adder.... By the righteousness of God! Every morning I arose from My bed I
discovered the hosts of countless afflictions massed behind My door, and
every night when I lay down, lo! My heart was torn with agony at what it
had suffered from the fiendish cruelty of its foes. With every piece of
bread the Ancient Beauty breaketh is coupled the assault of a fresh
affliction, and with every drop He drinketh is mixed the bitterness of the
most woeful of trials. He is preceded in every step He taketh by an army
of unforeseen calamities, while in His rear follow legions of agonizing
sorrows."

Was it not He Who, at the early age of twenty-seven, spontaneously arose
to champion, in the capacity of a mere follower, the nascent Cause of the
Bab? Was He not the One Who by assuming the actual leadership of a
proscribed and harrassed sect exposed Himself, and His kindred, and His
possessions, and His rank, and His reputation to the grave perils, the
bloody assaults, the general spoliation and furious defamations of both
government and people? Was it not He--the Bearer of a Revelation, Whose day
"every Prophet hath announced," for which "the soul of every Divine
Messenger hath thirsted," and in which "God hath proved the hearts of the
entire company of His Messengers and Prophets"--was not the Bearer of such
a Revelation, at the instigation of _Sh_i'ih ecclesiastics and by order of
the _Sh_ah himself forced, for no less than four months, to breathe, in
utter darkness, whilst in the company of the vilest criminals and
freighted down with galling chains, the pestilential air of the
vermin-infested subterranean dungeon of Tihran--a place which, as He
Himself subsequently declared, was mysteriously converted into the very
scene of the annunciation made to Him by God of His Prophethood?

"We were consigned," He wrote in His "Epistle to the Son of the Wolf,"
"for four months to a place foul beyond comparison. As to the dungeon in
which this Wronged One and others similarly wronged were confined, a dark
and narrow pit were preferable.... The dungeon was wrapped in thick
darkness, and Our fellow prisoners numbered nearly a hundred and fifty
souls: thieves, assassins, and highwaymen. Though crowded, it had no other
outlet than the passage by which We entered. No pen can depict that place,
nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell. Most of these men had neither
clothes nor bedding to lie on. God alone know