…the revolutionary changes in the great world which that
ministry [‘Abdu’l-Baha’s] has witnessed… —most of them flowing directly from
the warnings which were uttered by the Báb, in the first chapter of His
Qayyúmu’l-Asmá, on the very night of the Declaration of His Mission in Shíráz,
and which were later reinforced by the pregnant passages addressed by
Bahá’u’lláh to the kings of the earth and the world’s religious leaders, in
both the Súriy-i-Mulúk and the Kitáb-i-Aqdas.
- The conversion of the Portuguese monarchy and the Chinese empire into republics;
- the collapse of the Russian, the German and Austrian empires, and the ignominious fate which befell their rulers;
- the assassination of Násiri’d-Dín Sháh, the fall of Sultán ‘Abdu’l-Hamíd—
- these may be said to have marked further stages in the operation of that catastrophic process the inception of which was signalized in the lifetime of Bahá’u’lláh
- by the murder of Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz,
- by the dramatic downfall of Napoleon III, and the extinction of the Third Empire, and
- by the self-imposed imprisonment and virtual termination of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope himself.
- Later, after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, the same process was to be accelerated
- by the demise of the Qájár dynasty in Persia,
- by the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy,
- by the collapse of both the Sultanate and the Caliphate in Turkey,
- by a swift decline in the fortunes of Shí’ah Islám and of the Christian Missions in the East, and
- by the cruel fate that is now overtaking so many of the crowned heads of Europe.
