After a revolution of well nigh one hundred years what is it that the eye
encounters as one surveys the international scene and looks back upon the
early beginnings of Baha'i history? A world convulsed by the agonies of
contending systems, races and nations, entangled in the mesh of its
accumulated falsities, receding farther and farther from Him Who is the
sole Author of its destinies, and sinking deeper and deeper into a
suicidal carnage which its neglect and persecution of Him Who is its
Redeemer have precipitated. A Faith, still proscribed, yet bursting
through its chrysalis, emerging from the obscurity of a century-old
repression, face to face with the awful evidences of God's wrathful anger,
and destined to arise above the ruins of a smitten civilization. A world
spiritually destitute, morally bankrupt, politically disrupted, socially
convulsed, economically paralyzed, writhing, bleeding and breaking up
beneath the avenging rod of God. A Faith Whose call remained unanswered,
Whose claims were rejected, Whose warnings were brushed aside, Whose
followers were mowed down, Whose aims and purposes were maligned, Whose
summons to the rulers of the earth were ignored, Whose Herald drained the
cup of martyrdom, over the head of Whose Author swept a sea of unheard-of
tribulations, and Whose Exemplar sank beneath the weight of lifelong
sorrows and dire misfortunes. A world that has lost its bearings, in which
the bright flame of religion is fast dying out, in which the forces of a
blatant nationalism and racialism have usurped the rights and prerogatives
of God Himself, in which a flagrant secularism--the direct offspring of
irreligion--has raised its triumphant head and is protruding its ugly
features, in which the "majesty of kingship" has been disgraced, and they
who wore its emblems have, for the most part, been hurled from their
thrones, in which the once all-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies of
Islam, and to a lesser extent those of Christianity, have been
discredited, and in which the virus of prejudice and corruption is eating
into the vitals of an already gravely disordered society. A Faith Whose
institutions--the pattern and crowning glory of the age which is to
come--have been ignored and in some instances trampled upon and uprooted,
Whose unfolding system has been derided and partly suppressed and
crippled, Whose rising Order--the sole refuge of a civilization in the
embrace of doom--has been spurned and challenged, Whose Mother-Temple has
been seized and misappropriated, and Whose "House"--the "cynosure of an
adoring world"--has, through a gross miscarriage of justice, as witnessed
by the world's highest tribunal, been delivered into the hands of, and
violated by, its implacable enemies.
We are indeed living in an age which, if we would correctly appraise it,
should be regarded as one which is witnessing a dual phenomenon. The first
signalizes the death pangs of an order, effete and godless, that has
stubbornly refused, despite the signs and portents of a century-old
Revelation, to attune its processes to the precepts and ideals which that
Heaven-sent Faith proffered it. The second proclaims the birth pangs of an
Order, divine and redemptive, that will inevitably supplant the former,
and within Whose administrative structure an embryonic civilization,
incomparable and world-embracing, is imperceptibly maturing. The one is
being rolled up, and is crashing in oppression, bloodshed, and ruin. The
other opens up vistas of a justice, a unity, a peace, a culture, such as
no age has ever seen. The former has spent its force, demonstrated its
falsity and barrenness, lost irretrievably its opportunity, and is
hurrying to its doom. The latter, virile and unconquerable, is plucking
asunder its chains, and is vindicating its title to be the one refuge
within which a sore-tried humanity, purged from its dross, can attain its
destiny.
"Soon," Baha'u'llah Himself has prophesied, "will the present-day order be
rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead." And again: "By Myself!
The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that
is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead." "The day is
approaching when God will have raised up a people who will call to
remembrance Our days, who will tell the tale of Our trials, who will
demand the restitution of Our rights, from them who, without a tittle of
evidence, have treated Us with manifest injustice."
Dear friends! For the trials which have afflicted the Faith of Baha'u'llah
a responsibility appalling and inescapable rests upon those into whose
hands the reins of civil and ecclesiastical authority were delivered. The
kings of the earth and the world's religious leaders alike must primarily
bear the brunt of such an awful responsibility. "Everyone well knoweth,"
Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, "that all the kings have turned aside from
Him, and all the religions have opposed Him." "From time immemorial," He
declares, "they who have been outwardly invested with authority have
debarred men from setting their faces towards God. They have disliked that
men should gather together around the Most Great Ocean, inasmuch as they
have regarded, and still regard, such a gathering as the cause of, and the
motive for, the disruption of their sovereignty." "The kings," He moreover
has written, "have recognized that it was not in their interest to
acknowledge Me, as have likewise the ministers and the divines,
notwithstanding that My purpose hath been most explicitly revealed in the
Divine Books and Tablets, and the True One hath loudly proclaimed that
this Most Great Revelation hath appeared for the betterment of the world
and the exaltation of the nations." "Gracious God!" writes the Bab in the
Dala'il-i-Sab'ih (Seven Proofs) with reference to the "seven powerful
sovereigns ruling the world" in His day, "None of them hath been informed
of His [the Bab's] Manifestation, and if informed, none hath believed in
Him. Who knoweth, they may leave this world below full of desire, and
without having realized that the thing for which they were waiting had
come to pass. This is what happened to the monarchs that held fast unto
the Gospel. They awaited the coming of the Prophet of God [Muhammad], and
when He did appear, they failed to recognize Him. Behold how great are the
sums which these sovereigns expend without even the slightest thought of
appointing an official charged with the task of acquainting them in their
own realms with the Manifestation of God! They would thereby have
fulfilled the purpose for which they have been created. All their desires
have been and are still fixed upon leaving behind them traces of their
names." The Bab, moreover, in that same treatise, censuring the failure of
the Christian divines to acknowledge the truth of Muhammad's mission,
makes this illuminating statement: "The blame falleth upon their doctors,
for if these had believed, they would have been followed by the mass of
their countrymen. Behold then, that which hath come to pass! The learned
men of Christendom are held to be learned by virtue of their safeguarding
the teaching of Christ, and yet consider how they themselves have been the
cause of men's failure to accept the Faith and attain unto salvation!"