soul, to prune its institutions, and cement its
unity. A schism, a permanent cleavage in the vast body of its adherents,
they could never create.

They who betrayed its cause, its lukewarm and faint-hearted supporters,
withered away and dropped as dead leaves, powerless to cloud its radiance
or to imperil its structure. Its most implacable adversaries, they who
assailed it from without, were hurled from power, and, in the most
astonishing fashion, met their doom. Persia had been the first to repress
and oppose it. Its monarchs had miserably fallen, their dynasty had
collapsed, their name was execrated, the hierarchy that had been their
ally and had propped their declining state, had been utterly discredited.
Turkey, which had thrice banished its Founder and inflicted on Him cruel
and life-long imprisonment, had passed through one of the severest ordeals
and far-reaching revolutions that its history has recorded, had shrunk
from one of the most powerful empires to a tiny Asiatic republic, its
Sultanate obliterated, its dynasty overthrown, its Caliphate, the
mightiest institution of Islam, abolished.

Meanwhile the Faith that had been the object of such monstrous betrayals,
and the target for such woeful assaults, was going from strength to
strength, was forging ahead, undaunted and undivided by the injuries it
had received. In the midst of trials it had inspired its loyal followers
with a resolution that no obstacle, however formidable, could undermine.
It had lighted in their hearts a faith that no misfortune, however black,
could quench. It had infused into their hearts a hope that no force,
however determined, could shatter.

A World Religion

Ceasing to designate to itself a movement, a fellowship and the
like--designations that did grave injustice to its ever-unfolding
system--dissociating itself from such appellations as Babi sect, Asiatic
cult, and offshoot of _Sh_i'ih Islam, with which the ignorant and the
malicious were wont to describe it, refusing to be labeled as a mere
philosophy of life, or as an eclectic code of ethical conduct, or even as
a new religion, the Faith of Baha'u'llah is now visibly succeeding in
demonstrating its claim and title to be regarded as a World Religion,
destined to attain, in the fullness of time, the status of a
world-embracing Commonwealth, which would be at once the instrument and
the guardian of the Most Great Peace announced by its Author. Far from
wishing to add to