ed, Whose warnings were brushed aside, Whose
followers were mowed down, Whose aims and purposes were maligned, Whose
summons to the rulers of the earth were ignored, Whose Herald drained the
cup of martyrdom, over the head of Whose Author swept a sea of unheard-of
tribulations, and Whose Exemplar sank beneath the weight of lifelong
sorrows and dire misfortunes. A world that has lost its bearings, in which
the bright flame of religion is fast dying out, in which the forces of a
blatant nationalism and racialism have usurped the rights and prerogatives
of God Himself, in which a flagrant secularism--the direct offspring of
irreligion--has raised its triumphant head and is protruding its ugly
features, in which the "majesty of kingship" has been disgraced, and they
who wore its emblems have, for the most part, been hurled from their
thrones, in which the once all-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies of
Islam, and to a lesser extent those of Christianity, have been
discredited, and in which the virus of prejudice and corruption is eating
into the vitals of an already gravely disordered society. A Faith Whose
institutions--the pattern and crowning glory of the age which is to
come--have been ignored and in some instances trampled upon and uprooted,
Whose unfolding system has been derided and partly suppressed and
crippled, Whose rising Order--the sole refuge of a civilization in the
embrace of doom--has been spurned and challenged, Whose Mother-Temple has
been seized and misappropriated, and Whose "House"--the "cynosure of an
adoring world"--has, through a gross miscarriage of justice, as witnessed
by the world's highest tribunal, been delivered into the hands of, and
violated by, its implacable enemies.

We are indeed living in an age which, if we would correctly appraise it,
should be regarded as one which is witnessing a dual phenomenon. The first
signalizes the death pangs of an order, effete and godless, that has
stubbornly refused, despite the signs and portents of a century-old
Revelation, to attune its processes to the precepts and ideals which that
Heaven-sent Faith proffered it. The second proclaims the birth pangs of an
Order, divine and redemptive, that will inevitably supplant the former,
and within Whose administrative structure an embryonic civilization,
incomparable and world-embracing, is imperceptibly maturing. The one is
being rolled up, and is crashing in oppression, bloodshed, and ruin. The
other opens up