In the Evening of My Thought

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A laudatory and passionate account of the Bab's life and martyrdom, with the following reflections: 'Do not such events, occuring in almost modern times, indicate something more than a popular attachment to an unformulated doctrine of theology? They indicate the supreme aspiration toward an idealism beyond human strength, the aim of which was a moral achievement of conscience, and the evocation of which seems to have been much dreaded by the de facto authorities. 'Christianity, too quickly distorted by its triumphs, sprang into being under identical conditions.... Babism is of yesterday. And, if different and even contradictory religions played an important role in the origin and development of civilization, how can we explain the monstrous union of the loftiest thought and the lowest and most shameful exhibition of human barbarity? Considered as a cosmic phenomenon, man should subject himself to his own faculty of analysis, were it only for the more or less dubious prospect of a better future to be realized under the name of civilization. 'But are we quite sure that civilized man is so different from the savage?...'