The Faith of Bahá’u’lláh—that priceless gem of Divine Revelation enshrining the Spirit of God and incarnating His Purpose for mankind in this age—can neither aspire nor expect to escape unhurt amid the hurricane of human disasters that blows around it. By most men unnoticed, scorned and ridiculed by some, feared and challenged by others, this world redemptive Faith, for whose precious sake the world is undergoing such agonies, finds its virgin strength assailed, and its infant institutions hemmed in, by the dark forces which a godless civilization has unloosed over the face of the planet. In the Old World, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, it is being buffeted about, ostracized, arraigned and repressed. In certain countries its community life is being extinguished, in others a ban is severely imposed on its propagation, in still others its members are denied all intercourse with its World Center. Dangers, grave and unsuspected, confront its cradle and surround its very heart.
Not so, however, with the countries of the Western Hemisphere. The call of Bahá’u’lláh summons, at this challenging hour, the peoples of the New World, and its leaders to redress the balance of the old. “O Rulers of America,” He thus addresses the Chief Magistrates of that continent, “and the Presidents of the Republics therein.... Adorn the temple of your dominion with the ornament of Justice and of the fear of God, and its head with the crown of the remembrance of your Lord, the Maker of the heavens.” The Great Republic of the West, an object of special solicitude throughout the ministry of the Center of the Covenant, whose soil has been hallowed by His footsteps, and the foundation of whose edifice—the Mother Temple of the West—has been consecrated by His hand, has been singled out through the operation of His Will, and been invested by His Pen with an unique, an inescapable, a weighty and most sacred responsibility. The Mission entrusted to the community of the North American believers in the darkest days of the last war, is, after a period of incubation of well nigh twenty years, and through the instrumentality of the administrative agencies erected after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, efflorescing under our very eyes. Already, since the inception of the Seven Year Plan, this community can well claim to have attained, through its deeds, a stature that dwarfs its sister communities, and can glory in a parentage that embraces every Republic of Latin America. The first Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of the West, its beauteous and noble handiwork, is virtually completed. A nucleus for a future flourishing local community is already formed in every state and province in North America. The administrative structure, following the pattern of its prototype in the U.S.A. is, through the agency of that same Plan, raising its triumphant head in the Central and South American Republics. The Plan itself, propelled by the agencies released by those immortal Tablets which constitute its charter, bids fair, in the fifth year of its operation, to exceed the highest expectations of those who have so courageously launched it. Its consummation, coinciding with the termination of the first century of the Bahá’í Era, will mark the opening of yet another phase in a series of crusades which must carry, in the course of the succeeding century, the privileged recipients of those epoch-making Tablets beyond the Western Hemisphere to the uttermost ends of the earth, to implant the banner, and lay an unassailable basis for the administrative structure of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.
The quality and magnitude of the work already achieved by these stalwart champions of God’s New World Order are inexpressibly exhilarating and infinitely meritorious. The immensity of the task still to be performed staggers our fancy and inflames our imagination. The potentialities with which these tasks are endowed elude our shrewdest calculations. The promise they enshrine is too dazzling to contemplate. What else can we do but bow our heads in thanksgiving and reverence, steel our hearts in preparation for the strenuous days ahead, and intensify a hundredfold our resolution to carry on the task to which our hands are set at present.
May 25, 1941
FATE-LADEN WORLD ORDEAL
The fate-laden world ordeal is moving in steady, pre-ordained crescendo. The blaze of a seemingly uncontrollable fire is leaping, ravaging last remaining great Power on European continent. Shadows of God’s retributive act are fast gathering. As the arena of world convulsing contest broadens; as wounds it inflicts deepen; as issues it raises aggravate and multiply, so will the operation of the spiritual forces, destined to cast the burden of a travailing age, be accelerated. As the old world sinks beneath the weight of a crumbling old order, so must new world exponents of Bahá’u’lláh’s nascent, integrating World Order climb loftier summits of their sublime calling. I urgently, insistently plead that all American believers, particularly the National Teaching and Inter-America Committees, above all the National elected representatives, arm their souls, labor more resolutely, cooperate more closely, scatter more widely, sacrifice more abundantly, to insure, during remaining years of Seven Year Plan, the brilliant discharge of the one remaining obligation of their dual task, whose consummation must signalize the termination and seal the triumph of First Bahá’í Century.
Cablegram July 4, 1941