, the Tablet of the
Branch and related documents frustrated their private hopes to turn the
Cause to their personal advantage, these persons began a persistent
campaign to undermine His position, first in the Holy Land and then in
Persia, where the bulk of the Baha'i community was concentrated. When
these schemes failed, they next sought to manipulate the fears of the
Ottoman government and the avarice of its representatives in Palestine.
This hope too collapsed when the "Young Turk Revolution" overthrew the
regime in Constantinople, hanging some thirty-one of its leading
officials, including several who had been implicated in the plans of the
Covenant-breakers.

In the West, during the early years of the Master's ministry,
representatives sent by Him had already successfully countered the
machinations of Ibrahim _Kh_ayru'llah--ironically, the individual who had
introduced many of the American believers to the Cause--who had aimed at
securing a position of leadership through association with the
Covenant-breakers in the Holy Family. Such experiences had doubtless
prepared the Western believers for the Master's formal proclamation of His
station and for the firmness with which He enjoined on believers avoidance
of any involvement with such agents of division: "Certain weak,
capricious, malicious and ignorant souls ... have striven to efface the
Divine Covenant and Testament, and render the clear water muddy so that in
it they might fish.(32) It would be only gradually, however, as the new
communities struggled to overcome differences of opinion and resist the
perennial human temptation to factionalism, that the implications of this
great organizing law of the new Dispensation would emerge.

While laying out in both public addresses and private discussions the
vision of a world of unity and peace that the Revelation of God for our
day will bring into being, the Master warned emphatically of the dangers
that lay on the immediate horizon--both for the Faith and for the world.
For both, 'Abdu'l-Baha foresaw, in the words of Shoghi Effendi, a "winter
of unprecedented severity".

For the Cause of God, that winter would entail heartbreaking betrayals of
the Covenant. In North America, the inconstancy of a small number of
individuals, frustrated in their aspirations for personal leadership,
remained an ongoing source of difficulty for the community, undermining
the faith of some and causing others simply to drift away from
pa