…the fate that has overtaken those kings, ministers and
ecclesiastics, in the East as well as in the West, who have, at various stages
of Bahá’u’lláh’s ministry, either deliberately persecuted His Cause, or have
neglected to heed the warnings He had uttered, or have failed in their manifest
duty to respond to His summons or to accord Him and His message the treatment
they deserved, particular attention…
William I, the pride-intoxicated newly-acclaimed conqueror
of Napoleon III, admonished in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and bidden to ponder the fate
that had overtaken “one whose power transcended” his own, warned in that same
Book, that the “lamentations of Berlin” would be raised and that the banks of
the Rhine would be “covered with gore,” sustained two attempts on his life, and
was succeeded by a son who died of a mortal disease, three months after his
accession to the throne, bequeathing the throne to the arrogant, the headstrong
and short-sighted William II. The pride of the new monarch precipitated his
downfall. Revolution, swiftly and suddenly, broke out in his capital, communism
reared its head in a number of cities; the princes of the German states
abdicated, and he himself, fleeing ignominiously to Holland, was compelled to
relinquish his right to the throne. The constitution of Weimar sealed the fate
of the empire, whose birth had been so loudly proclaimed by his grandfather,
and the terms of an oppressively severe treaty provoked “the lamentations”
which, half a century before, had been ominously prophesied.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’)
