lest ye remain afar from
Him Who is His Remembrance [the Bab], after the Truth hath come unto you
with a Book and signs from God, as spoken through the wondrous tongue of
Him Who is His Remembrance. Seek ye grace from God, for God hath ordained
for you, after ye have believed in Him, a Garden the vastness of which is
as the vastness of the whole of Paradise."

So much for the epoch-making counsels and warnings collectively addressed
by the Bab and Baha'u'llah to the sovereigns of the earth, and more
particularly directed to the kings of Christendom. I would be failing to
do justice to my theme were I to ignore, or even to dismiss briefly, those
audacious, fate-laden apostrophes to individual monarchs who, whether as
kings or emperors, have either viewed with cold indifference the
tribulations, or rejected with contempt the warnings, of the twin Founders
of our Faith. I can neither quote as fully as I should from the two
thousand and more verses that have streamed from the pen of Baha'u'llah
and, to a lesser extent, from that of the Bab, addressed to individual
monarchs in Europe and Asia, nor is it my purpose to expatiate upon the
circumstances that have provoked, or the consequences that have flowed
from, those astounding utterances. The historian of the future, viewing
more widely and in fuller perspective the momentous happenings of the
Apostolic and Formative Ages of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, will no doubt be
able to evaluate accurately and to describe in a circumstantial manner the
causes, the implications and the effects of these Divine Messages which,
in their scope and effectiveness, have certainly no parallel in the
religious annals of mankind.

To the French Emperor, Napoleon III, Baha'u'llah addressed these words: "O
King of Paris! Tell the priest to ring the bells no longer. By God, the
True One! The Most Mighty Bell hath appeared in the form of Him Who is the
Most Great Name, and the fingers of the will of thy Lord, the Most
Exalted, the Most High, toll it out in the heaven of Immortality, in His
Name, the All-Glorious. Thus have the mighty verses of thy Lord been again
sent down unto thee, that thou mayest arise to remember God, the Creator
of earth and heaven, in these days when all the tribes of the earth have
mourned, and the foundations of the cities have trembled, and the dust of
irreligion hath enwrapped all men, except such as thy Lord, the
All-Knowing, the All-Wise, was pleased to spare.... Give e