ne of its members; in the boldness of His challenge to the time-honored
conventions, rites and laws which had been woven into the fabric of the
religion He Himself had been born into; in the role which an officially
recognized and firmly entrenched religious hierarchy played as chief
instigator of the outrages which He was made to suffer; in the indignities
heaped upon Him; in the suddenness of His arrest; in the interrogation to
which He was subjected; in the derision poured, and the scourging
inflicted, upon Him; in the public affront He sustained; and, finally, in
His ignominious suspension before the gaze of a hostile multitude--in all
these we cannot fail to discern a remarkable similarity to the
distinguishing features of the career of Jesus Christ.

It should be remembered, however, that apart from the miracle associated
with the Bab's execution, He, unlike the Founder of the Christian
religion, is not only to be regarded as the independent Author of a
divinely revealed Dispensation, but must also be recognized as the Herald
of a new Era and the Inaugurator of a great universal prophetic cycle. Nor
should the important fact be overlooked that, whereas the chief
adversaries of Jesus Christ, in His lifetime, were the Jewish rabbis and
their associates, the forces arrayed against the Bab represented the
combined civil and ecclesiastical powers of Persia, which, from the moment
of His declaration to the hour of His death, persisted, unitedly and by
every means at their disposal, in conspiring against the upholders and in
vilifying the tenets of His Revelation.

The Bab, acclaimed by Baha'u'llah as the "Essence of Essences," the "Sea
of Seas," the "Point round Whom the realities of the Prophets and
Messengers revolve," "from Whom God hath caused to proceed the knowledge
of all that was and shall be," Whose "rank excelleth that of all the
Prophets," and Whose "Revelation transcendeth the comprehension and
understanding of all their chosen ones," had delivered His Message and
discharged His mission. He Who was, in the words of 'Abdu'l-Baha, the
"Morn of Truth" and "Harbinger of the Most Great Light," Whose advent at
once signalized the termination of the "Prophetic Cycle" and the inception
of the "Cycle of Fulfillment," had simultaneously through His Revelation
banished the shades of night that had descended upon His country, and
proclaimed the impending rise of that Incomparable Orb Whose radiance was
to envelop the wh