in the plain of Salsabil. A holiday was declared
by the governor for the people, all the shops were closed by his order,
the city was illuminated at night, and festivities proclaimed the
consummation of one of the most barbarous acts perpetrated in modern
times.

Nor were the Jews and the Parsis who had been newly converted to the
Faith, and were living, the former in Hamadan, and the latter in Yazd,
immune to the assaults of enemies whose fury was exasperated by the
evidences of the penetration of the light of the Faith in quarters they
had fondly imagined to be beyond its reach. Even in the city of I_sh_qabad
the newly established _Sh_i'ah community, envious of the rising prestige
of the followers of Baha'u'llah who were living in their midst, instigated
two ruffians to assault the seventy-year old Haji
Muhammad-Riday-i-Isfahani, whom, in broad day and in the midst of the
bazaar, they stabbed in no less than thirty-two places, exposing his
liver, lacerating his stomach and tearing open his breast. A military
court dispatched by the Czar to I_sh_qabad established, after prolonged
investigation, the guilt of the _Sh_i'ahs, sentencing two to death and
banishing six others--a sentence which neither Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, nor the
'ulamas of Tihran, of Ma_sh_had and of Tabriz, who were appealed to, could
mitigate, but which the representatives of the aggrieved community,
through their magnanimous intercession which greatly surprised the Russian
authorities, succeeded in having commuted to a lighter punishment.

Such are some typical examples of the treatment meted out by the
adversaries of the Faith to the newly resurgent community of its followers
during the period of Baha'u'llah's banishment to Akka--a treatment which it
may be truly said testified alternately to "the callousness of the brute
and the ingenuity of the fiend."

The "inquisition and appalling tortures," following the attempt on the
life of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, had already, in the words of no less eminent
an observer than Lord Curzon of Kedleston, imparted to the Faith "a
vitality which no other impulse could have secured." This recrudescence of
persecution, this fresh outpouring of the blood of martyrs, served to
further enliven the roots which that holy Sapling had already struck in
its native soil. Careless of the policy of fire and blood which aimed at
their annihilation, undismayed by the tragic blows rained upon a Leader so
far removed from their midst,