The year that has just ended--a year which posterity cannot fail to regard
as one of the most eventful and challenging in the annals of the Formative
Age of the Baha'i Dispensation--has been overshadowed, in the course of its
opening months, by a sudden and highly menacing crisis in the fortunes of
this Faith, a crisis which, though as yet not fully resolved, has already
led to a remarkable victory over the combined forces of its traditional
adversaries in the land of its birth, who, for more than a century, have
plotted assiduously to disrupt its foundations, tarnish its glory and
extinguish its light. A long-abused, down-trodden, sorely tried community,
constituting the overwhelming majority of Baha'u'llah's followers,
subjected recently to the strain and stress of a violent recrudescence of
persecution, which was marked throughout by intense vilification,
intimidation, spoliation, expulsion, arson, rape, and murder, has emerged
triumphant from yet another gruelling experience--a testing period of
exceptional severity--its unity unbroken, its confidence reinforced, its
prestige considerably enhanced, its fame noised abroad to an unprecedented
degree, its administrative agencies unshaken, its endowments unimpaired,
and the grim, boastful and reiterated threats of its sworn enemies to
outlaw it through formal legislative action, confiscate its property,
demolish its edifices, imprison and deport its members, and extirpate it,
root and branch, in the native land of its Founder unenforced.