vistas of a justice, a unity, a peace, a culture, such as
no age has ever seen. The former has spent its force, demonstrated its
falsity and barrenness, lost irretrievably its opportunity, and is
hurrying to its doom. The latter, virile and unconquerable, is plucking
asunder its chains, and is vindicating its title to be the one refuge
within which a sore-tried humanity, purged from its dross, can attain its
destiny.

"Soon," Baha'u'llah Himself has prophesied, "will the present-day order be
rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead." And again: "By Myself!
The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that
is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead." "The day is
approaching when God will have raised up a people who will call to
remembrance Our days, who will tell the tale of Our trials, who will
demand the restitution of Our rights, from them who, without a tittle of
evidence, have treated Us with manifest injustice."

Dear friends! For the trials which have afflicted the Faith of Baha'u'llah
a responsibility appalling and inescapable rests upon those into whose
hands the reins of civil and ecclesiastical authority were delivered. The
kings of the earth and the world's religious leaders alike must primarily
bear the brunt of such an awful responsibility. "Everyone well knoweth,"
Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, "that all the kings have turned aside from
Him, and all the religions have opposed Him." "From time immemorial," He
declares, "they who have been outwardly invested with authority have
debarred men from setting their faces towards God. They have disliked that
men should gather together around the Most Great Ocean, inasmuch as they
have regarded, and still regard, such a gathering as the cause of, and the
motive for, the disruption of their sovereignty." "The kings," He moreover
has written, "have recognized that it was not in their interest to
acknowledge Me, as have likewise the ministers and the divines,
notwithstanding that My purpose hath been most explicitly revealed in the
Divine Books and Tablets, and the True One hath loudly proclaimed that
this Most Great Revelation hath appeared for the betterment of the world
and the exaltation of the nations." "Gracious God!" writes the Bab in the
Dala'il-i-Sab'ih (Seven Proofs) with reference to the "seven powerful
sovereigns ruling the world" in His day, "None of them hath been informed
of His [the Bab's] Manifestation, and if i