To the mounting tide of trials which laid low the Báb, to the long-drawn-out calamities which rained on Bahá’u’lláh, to the warnings sounded by both the Herald and the Author of the Bahá’í Revelation, must be added the sufferings which, for no less than seventy years, were endured by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as well as His pleas, and entreaties, uttered in the evening of His life, in connection with the dangers that increasingly threatened the whole of mankind.
- Born in the very year that witnessed the inception of the Bábí Revelation;
- baptized with the initial fires of persecution that raged around that nascent Cause;
- an eyewitness, when a boy of eight, of the violent upheavals that rocked the Faith which His Father had espoused;
- sharing with Him, the ignominy, the perils, and rigors consequent upon the successive banishments from His native-land to countries far beyond its confines;
- arrested and forced to support, in a dark cell, the indignity of imprisonment soon after His arrival in Akká;
- the object of repeated investigations and the target of continual assaults and insults under the despotic rule of Sultán ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd, and later under the ruthless military dictatorship of the suspicious and merciless Jamál Páshá—
He, too, the Center and Pivot of Bahá’u’lláh’s peerless Covenant and the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, was made to taste, at the hands of potentates, ecclesiastics, governments and peoples, the cup of woe which the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, as well as so many of their followers, had drained.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Promised Day Is Come’)