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In the pestilential atmosphere of the Siyah- Chal, nine years after that historic Declaration, the Message proclaimed by the Bab had yielded its fruit, His promise had been redeemed, and the most glorious, the most momentous period of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i era had dawned. A momentary eclipse of the newly risen Sun of Truth, the world's greatest Luminary, had ensued, as a result of Baha'u'llah's precipitate banishment to Iraq by order of Nasiri'd- Din Shah, of His sudden withdrawal to the mountains of Kurdistan, and of the degradation and confusion that afflicted the remnant of the persecuted community of His fellow- disciples in Baghdad. A reversal in the fortunes of a fast declining community, following His return from His two- year retirement, had set in, bringing in its wake the recreation of that community, the reformation of its morals, the enhancement of its prestige, the enrichment of its doctrine, and culminating in the Declaration of His Mission in the garden of Najibiyyih to His immediate companions on the eve of His banishment to Constantinople. Another crisis-- the severest a struggling Faith was destined to experience in the course of its history-- precipitated by the rebellion of the Bab's nominee and the iniquities perpetrated by him and by the evil genius that had seduced him, had, in Adrianople, well nigh disrupted the newly consolidated forces of the Faith and all but destroyed in a baptism of fire the community of the Most Great Name which Baha'u'llah had called into being. Cleansed of the pollution of this "Most Great Idol," undeterred by the convulsion that had seized it, an indestructible Faith had, in the strength of the Covenant instituted by the Bab, now surmounted the most formidable obstacles it was ever to meet; and in this very hour it reached its meridian glory through the proclamation of the Mission of Baha'u'llah to the kings, the rulers and ecclesiastical leaders of the world in both the East and the West. Close on the heels of this unprecedented victory had followed the climax of His sufferings, a banishment to the penal colony of Akka, decreed by Sultan Abdu'l- 'Aziz. This had been hailed by vigilant enemies as the signal for the final extermination of a much feared and hated adversary, and it had heaped upon that Faith in this fortress- town, designated by Baha'u'llah as His "Most Great Prison," calamities from both within and without, such as it had never before experienced. The formulation of the laws and ordinances of a new- born Dispensation and the enunciation and reaffirmation of its fundamental principles-- the warp and woof of a future Administrative Order-- had, however, enabled a slowly maturing Revelation, in spite of this tide of tribulations, to advance a stage further and yield its fairest fruit.
(403:2)
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