Was it not, he might well ponder, this same _Sh_áh Abbás the Great who had been arrogantly addressed by another mujtahid as “the founder of a borrowed empire,” implying that the kingdom of the “king of kings” really belonged to the expected Imám, and was held by the _Sh_áh solely in the capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same _Sh_áh who walked the entire distance of eight hundred miles from Iṣfáhán to Ma_sh_had, the “special glory of the _Sh_í’ih world,” to offer his prayers, in the only way that befitted the _sh_áhan_sh_áh, at the shrine of the Imám Riḍá, and who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts? Had not _Sh_áh Tahmásp, on receiving an epistle, penned by yet another mujtahid, sprung to his feet, placed it on his eyes, kissed it with rapture, and, because he had been addressed as “brother,” ordered it to be placed within his winding-sheet and buried with him? Might not that same mullá ponder the torrents of blood which, during the long years when he enjoyed impunity of conduct, flowed at his behest, the flamboyant anathemas he pronounced, and the great army of orphans and widows, of the disinherited, the dishonored, the destitute, and the homeless which, on the Day of Reckoning, were, with one accord, to cry out for vengeance, and invoke the malediction of God upon him? That infamous crew had indeed merited the degradation in which it had sunk. Persistently ignoring the sentence of doom which the finger of Bahá’u’lláh had traced upon the wall, it pursued, for well nigh a hundred years, its fatal course, until, at the appointed hour, its death knell was sounded by those spiritual, revolutionary forces which, synchronizing with the first dawnings of the World Order of His Faith, are upsetting the equilibrium, and throwing into such confusion, the ancient institutions of mankind. THE COLLAPSE OF THE CALIPHATE These same forces, operating in a collateral field, have effected a still more remarkable, and a more radical, revolution, culminating in the collapse and fall of the Muslim Caliphate, the most powerful institution of the whole Islamic world. This event of portentous significance has, moreover, been followed by a formal and definite separation of what was left of the Sunní faith in Turkey from the state, and by the complete secularization of the Republic that has arisen on the ruins of the Ottoman theocratic empire. This catastrophic fall, that stunned the Islamic world, and the avowed, the unqualified, and formal divorce between the spiritual and temporal powers, which distinguished the revolution in Turkey from that which occurred in Persia, I now proceed to consider.