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Such in sum are the salient features of the concluding utterances of that historic Proclamation, the opening notes of which were sounded during the latter part of Baha'u'llah's banishment to Adrianople, and which closed during the early years of His incarceration in the prison- fortress of Akka. Kings and emperors, severally and collectively; the chief magistrates of the Republics of the American continent; ministers and ambassadors; the Sovereign Pontiff himself; the Vicar of the Prophet of Islam; the royal Trustee of the Kingdom of the Hidden Imam; the monarchs of Christendom, its patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, priests and monks; the recognized leaders of both the Sunni and Shi'ah sacerdotal orders; the high priests of the Zoroastrian religion; the philosophers, the ecclesiastical leaders, the wise men and the inhabitants of Constantinople-- that proud seat of both the Sultanate and the Caliphate; the entire company of the professed adherents of the Zoroastrian, the Jewish, the Christian and Muslim Faiths; the people of the Bayan; the wise men of the world, its men of letters, its poets, its mystics, its tradesmen, the elected representatives of its peoples; His own countrymen-- all have, at one time or another, in books, Epistles, and Tablets, been brought directly within the purview of the exhortations, the warnings, the appeals, the declarations and the prophecies which constitute the theme of His momentous summons to the leaders of mankind-- a summons which stands unparalleled in the annals of any previous religion, and to which the messages directed by the Prophet of Islam to some of the rulers among His contemporaries alone offer a faint resemblance. (212:1) "Never since the beginning of the world," Baha'u'llah Himself affirms, "hath the Message been so openly proclaimed." "Each one of them," He, specifically referring to the Tablets addressed by Him to the sovereigns of the earth-- Tablets acclaimed by Abdu'l- Baha as a "miracle"-- has written, "hath been designated by a special name. The first hath been named `The Rumbling,' the second `The Blow,' the third `The Inevitable,' the fourth `The Plain,' the fifth `The Catastrophe,' and the others `The Stunning Trumpet- Blast,' `The Near Event,' `The Great Terror,' `The Trumpet,' `The Bugle,' and the like, so that all the peoples of the earth may know, of a certainty, and may witness, with outward and inner eyes, that He Who is the Lord of Names hath prevailed, and will continue to prevail, under all conditions, over all men." The most important of these Tablets, together with the celebrated Suriy- i- Haykal (the Surih of the Temple), He, moreover, ordered to be written in the shape of a pentacle, symbolizing the temple of man, and which He identified, when addressing the followers of the Gospel in one of His Tablets, with the "Temple" mentioned by the Prophet Zechariah, and designated as "the resplendent dawning- place of the All- Merciful," and which "the hands of the power of Him Who is the Causer of Causes" had built.
(212:2)
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