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A faint resistance was here and there attempted by magistrates and burghers who could not forget in a moment the rights of self-government and the code of laws which had been enjoyed for centuries. At Hoorn, for instance, there was deep indignation among the citizens. An imprudent word or two from the authorities might have brought about a "blood-bath."

A faint resistance was here and there attempted by magistrates and burghers who could not forget in a moment the rights of self-government and the code of laws which had been enjoyed for centuries. At Hoorn, for instance, there was deep indignation among the citizens. An imprudent word or two from the authorities might have brought about a "blood-bath."

People stared at each other in the streets with open mouths as they heard how the Advocate had for years and years been the hireling of Spain, whose government had bribed him largely to bring about the Truce and kill the West India Company; how his pockets and his coffers were running over with Spanish ducats; how his plot to sell the whole country to the ancient tyrant, drive the Prince of Orange into exile, and bring every city of the Netherlands into a "blood-bath," had, just in time, been discovered.

He evidently received good information of what was going on in the British camp. To Mr. Waldmeier, who was more than any other in his confidence, he said, "With love and friendship they will overcome me; but if they come with other intentions I know they will not spare me, and I will make a great blood-bath, and afterwards die."

He had of his own accord rejected a certain proposed, notable alliance of the utmost importance to this Republic. He had received from foreign potentates various large sums of money and other presents. All "these proceedings tended to put the city of Utrecht into a blood-bath, and likewise to bring the whole country, and the person of his Excellency into the uttermost danger."

The quarter of the town where this took place is still named Sture, in memory of the dead, and on the spot where the great pyre was kindled stands St. Christopher's Church. Such was the famous, or rather the infamous, "blood-bath of Stockholm," which still remains as a frightful memory to the land. It did not end here.

For it was a hundred years ago that a Faith, which had already been oppressed by a staggering weight of untold tribulations; which had sustained shattering blows in Mázindarán, Nayríz, Ṭihrán and Zanján, and indeed throughout every province in the land of its birth; which had lost its greatest exponents through the tragic martyrdom of most of the Letters of the Living, and particularly of the valiant Mullá Ḥusayn and of the erudite Vahíd and which had been afflicted with the supreme calamity of losing its Divine Founder; was being subjected to still more painful ordealsordeals which robbed it of both the heroic Hujjat and of the far-famed Táhirih; which caused it to pass through a reign of terror, and to experience a blood-bath of unprecedented severity, which inflicted on it one of the greatest humiliations it has ever suffered through the attempted assassination of the sovereign himself, and which unloosed a veritable deluge of barbarous atrocities in Ṭihrán, Mázindarán, Nayríz and Shíráz before which paled the horrors of the siege of Zanján, and which swept no less a figure than Bahá’u’lláh Himselfthe last remaining pillar of a Faith that had been so rudely shaken, so ruthlessly denuded of its chief buttressesinto the subterranean dungeon of Ṭihrán, an imprisonment that was soon followed by His cruel banishment, in the depths of an exceptionally severe winter, from His native land to ‘Iráq.

Not even the dramatic execution of its Herald, nor the blood-bath which, in circumstances of fiendish cruelty followed quickly in its wake in the city of Ṭihrán, nor even the widely advertised travels of the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant in the West, succeeded in focusing the attention of the world and in inviting the notice of those in high places as has this latest manifestation of God’s inscrutable will, this marvelous demonstration of His invincible power, this latest move in His Own Major Plan, using both the mighty and lowly as pawns in His world-shaping game, for the fulfillment of His immediate purpose and the eventual establishment of His Kingdom on earth.

"Yes, all countries are baptized in blood; that is the sacrament of circumcision, and see what fertility follows this manuring with blood! You don't know that apple-trees bear most fruit after a blood-bath." "Yes I do; my father always used to bury offal from butchers' shops at the root of fruit-trees." Here he stopped and coloured, for he had made a slip with his tongue.

"Are we to have a Paris massacre, a Paris blood-bath here in the Netherland capital? God forbid! God forbid! Away with the conspirators! Down with the Papists!" It was easily represented to the inflamed imaginations of the populace that a Brussels Saint Bartholomew had been organized, and that Champagny, who stood there before them, was its originator and manager.