ld have silenced those who either among their contemporaries or in a
later age have repudiated their authority and, by their action,
precipitated the schisms that persist until the present day? Where, we may
confidently ask, in the recorded sayings of Jesus Christ, whether in the
matter of succession or in the provision of a set of specific laws and
clearly defined administrative ordinances, as distinguished from purely
spiritual principles, can we find anything approaching the detailed
injunctions, laws and warnings that abound in the authenticated utterances
of both Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha? Can any passage of the Qur'an, which
in respect to its legal code, its administrative and devotional ordinances
marks already a notable advance over previous and more corrupted
Revelations, be construed as placing upon an unassailable basis the
undoubted authority with which Muhammad had, verbally and on several
occasions, invested His successor? Can the Author of the Babi Dispensation
however much He may have succeeded through the provisions of the Persian
Bayan in averting a schism as permanent and catastrophic as those that
afflicted Christianity and Islam--can He be said to have produced
instruments for the safeguarding of His Faith as definite and efficacious
as those which must for all time preserve the unity of the organized
followers of the Faith of Baha'u'llah?

Alone of all the Revelations gone before it this Faith has, through the
explicit directions, the repeated warnings, the authenticated safeguards
incorporated and elaborated in its teachings, succeeded in raising a
structure which the bewildered followers of bankrupt and broken creeds
might well approach and critically examine, and seek, ere it is too late,
the invulnerable security of its world-embracing shelter.

No wonder that He Who through the operation of His Will has inaugurated so
vast and unique an Order and Who is the Center of so mighty a Covenant
should have written these words: "So firm and mighty is this Covenant that
from the beginning of time until the present day no religious Dispensation
hath produced its like." "Whatsoever is latent in the innermost of this
holy cycle," He wrote during the darkest and most dangerous days of His
ministry, "shall gradually appear and be made manifest, for now is but the
beginning of its growth and the dayspring of the revelation of its signs."
"Fear not," are His reassuring words foreshadowing the rise of the
A