“Consider the past. How many, both high and low, have, at all times, yearningly awaited the advent of the Manifestations of God… And whensoever the portals of grace did open… they all denied Him, and turned away from His face — the face of God Himself.”
Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad — each was rejected by the people of His own time, and above all by the clergy, whose literal readings of prophecy became the very veil that hid its fulfillment.
“Leaders of religion, in every age, have hindered their people from attaining the shores of eternal salvation… By their sanction and authority, every Prophet of God hath drunk from the chalice of sacrifice, and winged His flight unto the heights of glory.”
The mechanism is always literalism. The divines awaited a Messiah descending visibly from the sky; a sun physically darkened; stars physically falling. Bahá'u'lláh reads these as symbols — “sun” and “moon” as the luminaries of religious authority, “clouds” as the things that obscure recognition — and observes of one generation what applies to all: they “clung to the literal interpretation of the words” and so “became deprived of the streaming grace” of the next Revelation.
“Consider, how great is the change today! Behold, how many are the Sovereigns who bow the knee before His name!”
That is the vindication move: each Faith begins hunted and ends revered. The Bábís being shot and burned in the streets of Persia in the 1850s stood, He argued, at the start of the same arc.
Honest counterpoint, acknowledged in the Íqán itself: rejection is common to true and false claimants alike, so the pattern alone proves nothing — Bahá'u'lláh's reply is that God deliberately allows the test “that light may be distinguished from darkness.” The pattern is an invitation to look closer; the case itself rests on the texts and the life behind them.