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What greater reward can crown the labors of that community, now launched on the second stage of its world mission, than that the consummation of the second Seven Year Plan should coincide with the celebrations commemorating the centenary of the "Year Nine," the year which alike marked the termination of the Babi Dispensation, and signalized the birth of Baha'u'llah's prophetic Mission? It was at a time when the Faith for which the Bab had suffered and died was hovering on the brink of extinction, when Baha'u'llah lay wrapped in the gloom of the Siyah-Chal of Tihran, His feet in stocks, His neck freighted with chains, and surrounded by vile and wretched criminals, that the auspicious year 1269 A. H., acclaimed by the Bab as the "Year Nine," dawned upon the world, ushering in the most glorious and momentous stage in the Heroic Age of the greatest religious Dispensation in the spiritual history of mankind. To that year He had referred as the year in which "the realities of the created things" will "be made manifest," the year in which mankind "will attain unto all good," in which the "Bayan," as yet "in the stage of seed," will manifest "its ultimate perfection, in which the "embryo of the Faith will attain the station of the most comely of forms" and in which "a new creation" will be beheld. It was in that same year that the "third woe," as anticipated by St. John the Divine, quickly succeeded the second. To that same year Shaykh-Ahmad-i-Ahsa'i, who had heralded the Faith of the Bab, had alluded as the year "after Hin" (68), when, according to his written testimony, the "mystery" of the Cause of God would be "manifested," and the "secret" of His Message "divulged." It was in that same year that, according to Baha'u'llah Him self, "the requisite number of pure, of wholly consecrated, and sanctified souls" had been "most secretly consummated."
(99:1)
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