Cablegram April 27, 1940.
CONTINUOUS CONSECRATION
To these words, written on my behalf, and in answer to your particular questions relating to the administrative issues that confront you in these days, I wish to add my own tribute to the magnificent manner in which you face the problems, both spiritual and administrative, which the expansion of the Faith is continually raising, and to the way in which you resolve them, explain their nature, and derive fresh strength from your experience of any one of them. The text of the annual reports demonstrates this fact and establishes for all time the high standard according to which the administrative machinery of the Faith is functioning, developing and consolidating itself under your able and energetic direction. As the administrative processes expand, as their operation steadily improves, as their necessity is more fully and strikingly demonstrated, and their beneficent influence correspondingly grows more apparent and evident, so will the blessings, the strength and guidance bestowed by Him Who animates and directs these processes be more abundantly vouchsafed to those who have been called upon to utilize them, in this age, for the execution of God’s Purpose and for the ultimate redemption of a sore-stricken travailing humanity. Many will be the setbacks, the shocks and the disturbances, which the commotions of a convulsive age must produce; yet no force, however violent and world-wide in its range and catastrophic in its immediate consequences, can either halt these processes or deflect their appointed course. How great, then, the privilege, and how staggering the responsibility, of those who are destined to guard over them and to bring them eventually to full fruition. Nothing short of utter, of continuous consecration to His Will and Purpose can enable them to fulfil their high destiny.
May 15, 1940
EMERGENCE OF SPIRITUAL WORLD ORDER
The stupendous struggle now convulsing the major part of the European continent is progressively revealing the ominous features, and increasingly assuming the proportions, of the titanic upheaval foreshadowed seventy years ago by the prophetic Pen of Bahá’u’lláh. The disruptive forces associated with humanity’s world-shaking ordeal are closely interrelated with the constructive potentialities inherent in the American believers’ Divinely-ordained Plan. Both are directly hastening the emergence of the spiritual World Order stirring in the womb of a travailing age. I entreat the American Bahá’í Community, whatever the immediate or distant repercussions of the present turmoil on their own continent, however violent its impact upon the World Center of their Faith, to pledge themselves anew, before the Throne of Bahá’u’lláh, to discharge, with unswerving aim, unfailing courage, invincible vigor, exemplary fidelity and ever-deepening consecration, the dual responsibility solemnly undertaken under the Seven Year Plan. I implore them to accelerate their efforts, increase their vigilance, deepen their unity, multiply their heroic feats, maintain their distant outposts in the teaching field of Latin America and expedite the termination of the last stage in the ornamentation of the Temple. I am praying continually with redoubled fervor.