with
bewildering rapidity as a result of the premeditated attacks and the
systematic machinations of the court, the clergy, the government and the
people, they were but the prelude to a harrowing and extensive captivity
which that edict had formally initiated. Extending over a period of more
than forty years, and carrying Him successively to 'Iraq, Sulaymaniyyih,
Constantinople, Adrianople and finally to the penal colony of Akka, this
long banishment was at last ended by His death, at the age of over three
score years and ten, terminating a captivity which, in its range, its
duration and the diversity and severity of its afflictions, is unexampled
in the history of previous Dispensations.

No need to expatiate on the particular episodes which cast a lurid light
on the moving annals of those years. No need to dwell on the character and
actions of the peoples, rulers and divines who have participated in, and
contributed to heighten the poignancy of the scenes of this, the greatest
drama in the world's spiritual history.

FEATURES OF THIS MOVING DRAMA

To enumerate a few of the outstanding features of this moving drama will
suffice to evoke in the reader of these pages, already familiar with the
history of the Faith, the memory of those vicissitudes which it has
experienced, and which the world has until now viewed with such frigid
indifference. The forced and sudden retirement of Baha'u'llah to the
mountains of Sulaymaniyyih, and the distressing consequences that flowed
from His two years' complete withdrawal; the incessant intrigues indulged
in by the exponents of _Sh_i'ih Islam in Najaf and Karbila, working in
close and constant association with their confederates in Persia; the
intensification of the repressive measures decreed by Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz
which brought to a head the defection of certain prominent members of the
exiled community; the enforcement of yet another banishment by order of
that same Sultan, this time to that far off and most desolate of cities,
causing such despair as to lead two of the exiles to attempt suicide; the
unrelaxing surveillance to which they were subjected upon their arrival in
Akka, by hostile officials, and the insufferable imprisonment for two
years in the barracks of that town; the interrogatory to which the Turkish
pa_sh_a subsequently subjected his Prisoner at the headquarters of the
government; His confinement for no less than eight years in a humble
dwelling surro