On the occasion of the launching of an epochal, global, spiritual,
decade-long crusade, constituting the high-water mark of the festivities
commemorating the centenary of the birth of the Mission of Baha'u'llah,
coinciding with the ninetieth anniversary of the declaration of that same
Mission in the Garden of Ridvan, and synchronizing with both the
convocation of the All-American Intercontinental Teaching Conference in
Chicago, and the fiftieth anniversary of the inception of the holiest
Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar of the Baha'i world and its dedication to public
worship--on such a solemn and historic occasion I invite His followers, the
world over, to contemplate with me the glorious and manifold evidences of
the onward march of His Faith and of the steady unfoldment of its
embryonic World Order both in the Holy Land and in the five continents of
the globe.
This infinitely precious Faith, despite eleven decades of uninterrupted
persecution, on the part of governments and ecclesiastics, involving the
martyrdom of its Prophet-Herald, the four banishments and forty-year-long
exile suffered by its Founder, the forty years of incarceration inflicted
upon its Exemplar, and the sacrifice of no less than twenty thousand of
its followers, has succeeded in firmly establishing itself in all the
continents of the globe, and is irresistibly forging ahead, with
accelerating momentum, bidding fair to envelop, at the close of the coming
decade, the whole planet with the radiance of its splendor.
Confined within the lifetime of its Martyr-Prophet to two countries,
reaching during the period of the ministry of its Author thirteen other
lands, planting its banner in the course of the ministry of the Center of
the Covenant in twenty additional sovereign states and dependencies in
both hemispheres, this Faith has spread, since the ascension of
'Abdu'l-Baha, to ninety-four countries, raising the total number of the
territories within its pale to one hundred twenty-nine, no less than
eighteen of which were added in a single year, while fifty-one were opened
in the course of the nine-year interval separating the first from the
second Baha'i Jubilee. The number of eastern and western languages into
which its literature has been translated and printed, or is in the process
of translation, and which reached forty-one a decade ago, is now
ninety-one, including thirteen African and twenty-five Indian and Burmese
languages. The number of settlements in Greenland provided with Baha'i
scriptures in the Greenlandic tongue has been raised to forty-eight,
including Thule beyond the Arctic Circle and Etah near the 80th latitude,
whilst Baha'i literature in that same language has been dispatched as far
north as the radio station at Brondlunsfjord, Pearyland, 82nd latitude,
the northernmost outpost of the world. Representatives of thirty-one races
and of twenty-four African tribes have been enrolled in the Baha'i World
Community. Contact has been established with the following seventeen
minority groups and races: the Eskimos of Alaska and Greenland, the Lapps
of Scandinavia, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Sea-Dayaks of Sarawak, the
Polynesians of the Fiji Islands, the Cree Indians of Prairie Provinces,
Canada, the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the Oneida Indians in
Wisconsin, the Omaha Indians in Nebraska, the Seminole Indians in Florida,
the Mexican Indians in Mexico, the Indians of the San Blas Islands, the
Indians of Chichicastenango in Guatemala, the Mayans in Yucatan, the
Patagonian Indians in Argentina, the Indians of La Paz in Bolivia and the
Inca Indians in Peru.