Look at the treatise that their second chief wrote, regarding their first chief and his associates—in which he described, with his own pen, in minute detail, their shameful purposes and actions relative to the Centre of the divine Covenant—aims and acts that no perverse and godless tyrant would consider permissible treatment for anyone. Their second chief tells how, to a despotic and oppressive government, they brought false and malicious accusations against ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; how they undertook to uproot the holy Tree; how they forged Tablets, in Bahá’u’lláh’s name, that denounced the Centre of His Covenant; how they altered and corrupted the holy Texts to such a degree that he said his confidence in the reliability of the holy Tablets was virtually shattered.(153) These and their other shameless activities are all set forth; and strangest of all is this, that he, their second chief—the very one who wrote the confession so full of the abominable acts of their first chief and his associates—now cleaves to the first one like flesh to bone. They are setting the axe to the root of the Cause of God; nor are they in the least ashamed, nor put to the blush, before the Lord God and His watchful and perceptive servants. There even exists a paper in the hand of _Sh_u’á’, son of their first chief, in which he tells of a person who was commissioned and was ready and waiting to martyr the Centre of the Covenant. If I my tale could tell, No bounds my pen would know; My work would swell, My book will grow, For tons of scroll Would bear my woe. For over a period of thirty years, always increasing their efforts, they inflicted extreme anguish on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; and they did not, in all this span, ever take one step nor draw a single breath to help the Faith. They spent their entire time in attempts to wean to beloved of God away from obedience to the Centre of the Covenant, and to undermine their convictions, making them waver in their faith, and turning them cold; and because of what they did, thousands of souls were veiled from the holy Cause, and prevented from embracing it. Such then is a glimpse of their aims and actions, which made them to be cut off from the Holy Tree, and excluded them from glory and joy everlasting. They lost out, both here and hereafter, and ‘this verily is utter perdition’.(154)