It should be noted, in this connection, that in the third Vahíd of this
Book there occurs a passage which, alike in its explicit reference to the
name of the Promised One, and in its anticipation of the Order which, in a
later age, was to be identified with His Revelation, deserves to rank as
one of the most significant statements recorded in any of the Báb’s
writings. “Well is it with him,” is His prophetic announcement, “who
fixeth his gaze upon the Order of Bahá’u’lláh, and rendereth thanks unto
his Lord. For He will assuredly be made manifest. God hath indeed
irrevocably ordained it in the Bayán.” It is with that self-same Order
that the Founder of the promised Revelation, twenty years
later—incorporating that same term in His Kitáb-i-Aqdas—identified the
System envisaged in that Book, affirming that “this most great Order” had
deranged the world’s equilibrium, and revolutionized mankind’s ordered
life. It is the features of that self-same Order which, at a later stage
in the evolution of the Faith, the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant and
the appointed Interpreter of His teachings, delineated through the
provisions of His Will and Testament. It is the structural basis of that
self-same Order which, in the Formative Age of that same Faith, the
stewards of that same Covenant, the elected representatives of the
world-wide Bahá’í community, are now laboriously and unitedly
establishing. It is the superstructure of that self-same Order, attaining
its full stature through the emergence of the Bahá’í World
Commonwealth—the Kingdom of God on earth—which the Golden Age of that same
Dispensation must, in the fullness of time, ultimately witness.
The Báb was still in Máh-Kú when He wrote the most detailed and
illuminating of His Tablets to Muḥammad _Sh_áh. Prefaced by a laudatory
reference to the unity of God, to His Apostles and to the twelve Imáms;
unequivocal in its assertion of the divinity of its Author and of the
supernatural powers with which His Revelation had been invested; precise
in the verses and traditions it cites in confirmation of so audacious a
claim; severe in its condemnation of some of the officials and
representatives of the _Sh_áh’s administration, particularly of the
“wicked and accursed” Ḥusayn _Kh_án; moving in its description of the
humiliation and hardships to which its writer had been subjected, this
historic document resembles, in many of its features, the Lawḥ-i-Sulṭán,
the Tablet addressed, under similar circumstances, from the
prison-fortress of Akká by Bahá’u’lláh to Náṣiri’d-Dín _Sh_áh, and
constituting His lengthiest epistle to any single sovereign.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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