The Jews who gainsaid God’s Cause aroused violent commotion, regarded the Beauty of the Promised One [Jesus] as a fire no longer bright, stirred up fierce opposition and launched a campaign of attacks and aggression against Him, but in the end their opposition proved of no avail.
- 'Abdu'l-Baha (Compilation by the World Center: 'Fire and Light')
Then all the idolatrous nations as well as the Jews rose up in their might to kill the Divine fire that had been lit in the lamp of Jerusalem. “Fain would they put out God’s light with their mouths: but God hath willed to perfect His light, albeit the infidels abhor it.” Under the fiercest tortures, they did every one of these holy souls to death; with butchers’ cleavers, they chopped the pure and undefiled bodies of some of them to pieces and burned them in furnaces, and they stretched some of the followers on the rack and then buried them alive. In spite of this agonizing requital, the Christians continued to teach the Cause of God, and they never drew a sword from its scabbard or even so much as grazed a cheek. Then in the end the Faith of Christ encompassed the whole earth, so that in Europe and America no traces of other religions were left, and today in Asia and Africa and Oceania, large masses of people are living within the sanctuary of the Four Gospels.
- ‘Abdu'l-Baha ('Secret of Divine Civilization')
