The manuscript, "Life of Baha Ullah," continues: "In the last year at Bagdad (1867-68) before the exiling of our Lord to Constantinople, the sister of Mirza Mahdi of Kashan was honoured to be His wife." It appears that she was sent by a rich believer from Persia to be a maid-servant in Baha's household. The Persian Consul in Bagdad, Mirza Buzurk Khan Kasvini[346] desired to take her as his wife or concubine. Baha himself took her as a concubine. Because he was thwarted, the Consul showed special enmity to Baha and his followers. The only child of this wife, a girl, was born at Acca in 1873. The three wives survived Baha. After his death one of them suffered gross indignities at the hands of Abbas Effendi, being furiously attacked by him in his own house, so that she fled precipitately. This, at least, is the report of Khadim Ullah, the lifelong amanuensis of Baha Ullah.[347] It should be noted that all of Baha's wives[348] had children, and that the first wife had a living son (Abbas) when he took the second wife, so that the usual excuses cannot be pleaded in palliation. For it is common for Bahais in Persia to quote their law, in speaking to a Christian, as meaning that a man may take an additional wife if the first one is childless. Mr. Phelps pleads[349] in extenuation for Baha Ullah that "his second marriage occurred early in his life and under peculiar circumstances, the exact nature of which I do not know." Such an excuse might be accepted for a man like Mullah Mohammed Ali, the Babi leader of the Zenjan insurrection, for, as far as is known, he entered upon his polygamous life while he was a Mohammedan. Two of his wives[350] were shot by a cannon ball and were buried with him in a room of his house, while his third wife, with children, escaped and lived at Shiraz. But for Baha Ullah the excuse of Mr. Phelps is inadmissible, for he was no longer a Moslem when he took the second wife, and was thirty-three years old, and he was fifty when he took the third wife in Bagdad, having been born in 1817. At that time Baha had been for many years a leader in the Babi religion, had written the "Ikan," and announced his mission. Nor was this polygamous union a passing phase of his life, but one continued through thirty or forty years. It would have concerned us little to know the private life of Baha Ullah so long as the religion presented itself merely as aiming at a reformation of Islam, for it may readily be admitted that it is somewhat less of an evil to have two wives and one concubine than the four wives and unlimited concubines that the Koran allows, or the nine to thirteen wives that Mohammed took, and that if Bahaism should cut off the temporary concubines, which disgrace Islam, it would be doing a good thing--so far forth--but when the "Interpreter, the centre of the Covenant," Abdul Baha, comes and stands in Christian churches in London and New York and proclaims Bahaism as a new and