ecclesiastical powers of _Sh_i'ah Persia, gathering momentum, at
a later stage, through the avowed and persistent opposition of the Caliph
of Islam and the Sunni hierarchy in Turkey, and destined to culminate in
the fierce antagonism of the sacerdotal orders associated with other and
still more powerful religious systems, had launched their initial assault.
The nucleus of the divinely ordained, world-embracing Community--a
Community whose infant strength had already plucked asunder the fetters of
_Sh_i'ah orthodoxy, and which was, with every expansion in the range of
its fellowship, to seek and obtain a wider and still more significant
recognition of its claims to be the world religion of the future, had been
formed and was slowly crystallizing. And, lastly, the seed, endowed by the
Hand of Omnipotence with such vast potentialities, though rudely trampled
under foot and seemingly perished from the face of the earth, had, through
this very process, been vouchsafed the opportunity to germinate and
remanifest itself, in the shape of a still more compelling Revelation--a
Revelation destined to blossom forth, in a later period into the
flourishing institutions of a world-wide administrative System, and to
ripen, in the Golden Age as yet unborn, into mighty agencies functioning
in consonance with the principles of a world-unifying, world-redeeming
Order.

Chapter V: The Attempt on the Life of the Shah and Its Consequences

The Faith that had stirred a whole nation to its depth, for whose sake
thousands of precious and heroic souls had been immolated and on whose
altar He Who had been its Author had sacrificed His life, was now being
subjected to the strain and stress of yet another crisis of extreme
violence and far-reaching consequences. It was one of those periodic
crises which, occurring throughout a whole century, succeeded in
momentarily eclipsing the splendor of the Faith and in almost disrupting
the structure of its organic institutions. Invariably sudden, often
unexpected, seemingly fatal to both its spirit and its life, these
inevitable manifestations of the mysterious evolution of a world Religion,
intensely alive, challenging in its claims, revolutionizing in its tenets,
struggling against overwhelming odds, have either been externally
precipitated by the malice of its avowed antagonists or internally
provoked by the unwisdom of its friends, the apostasy of its supporters,
or the defection of some of the m