In a celebrated passage addressed to William I, King of Prussia and newly-acclaimed emperor of a unified Germany, He, in His Kitáb-i-Aqdas, bids the sovereign hearken to His Voice, the Voice of God Himself; warns him to take heed lest his pride debar him from recognizing “the Day-Spring of Divine Revelation,” and admonishes him to “remember the one (Napoleon III) whose power transcended” his power, and who “went down to dust in great loss.” Furthermore, in that same Book, apostrophizing the “banks of the Rhine,” He predicts that “the swords of retribution” would be drawn against them, and that “the lamentations of Berlin” would be raised, though at that time she was “in conspicuous glory.” In another notable passage of that same Book, addressed to Francis-Joseph, the Austrian Emperor and heir of the Holy Roman Empire, Bahá’u’lláh reproves the sovereign for having neglected to inquire about Him in the course of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; takes God to witness that He had found him “clinging unto the Branch and heedless of the Root”; grieves to observe his waywardness; and bids him open his eyes and gaze on “the Light that shineth above this luminous Horizon.” To ‘Alí Pá_sh_á, the Grand Vizir of the Sulṭán of Turkey He addressed, shortly after His arrival in Akká, a second Tablet, in which He reprimands him for his cruelty “that hath made hell to blaze and the Spirit to lament”; recounts his acts of oppression; condemns him as one of those who, from time immemorial, have denounced the Prophets as stirrers of mischief; prophesies his downfall; expatiates on His own sufferings and those of His fellow-exiles; extolls their fortitude and detachment; predicts that God’s “wrathful anger” will seize him and his government, that “sedition will be stirred up” in their midst, and that their “dominions will be disrupted”; and affirms that were he to awake, he would abandon all his possessions, and would “choose to abide in one of the dilapidated rooms of this Most Great Prison.” In the Lawḥ-i-Fu’ád, in the course of His reference to the premature death of the Sulṭán’s Foreign Minister, Fu’ád Pá_sh_á, He thus confirms His above-mentioned prediction: “Soon will We dismiss the one (‘Alí Pá_sh_á) who was like unto him and will lay hold on their Chief (Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz) who ruleth the land, and I, verily, am the Almighty, the All-Compelling.” No less outspoken and emphatic are the messages, some embodied in specific Tablets, others interspersed through His writings, which Bahá’u’lláh addressed to the world’s ecclesiastical leaders of all denominations—messages in which He discloses, clearly and unreservedly, the claims of His Revelation, summons them to heed His call, and denounces, in certain specific cases, their perversity, their extreme arrogance and tyranny.