The first half of the opening decade of the second Baha'i century is
terminating. The great-minded, stout-hearted, high-spirited American
Baha'i Community, laden with the trophies accumulated in the course of its
fifty years' magnificent stewardship of the Faith of Baha'u'llah is
irresistibly embarking upon a two and a half year period unsurpassed in
its fateful consequences by any previous stage traversed in the
community's eventful history.
Its members, without exception, are called upon to steel themselves
without delay to face an unexpected emergency, seize a God-given
opportunity, meet a supreme challenge, and show forth a tenacity of
purpose, a solidarity in sacrifice, an austerity in everyday life, worthy
the Martyr-Prophet of their Faith as well as their heroic spiritual
forebears, the hundredth anniversary of whose agonizing tribulations,
including captivity, sieges, betrayals, spoliation and martyrdom, is being
commemorated during this same period.
No lesser tribute can be paid the memory of the glorious Bab, the immortal
Quddus, the lion-hearted Mulla Husayn, the erudite Vahid, the audacious
Hujjat, the illustrious seven martyrs of Tihran and a host of unnumbered
heroes whose lifeblood flowed so copiously in the course of the opening
decade of the first Baha'i century, by the privileged champion-builders of
the World Order of Baha'u'llah during the present critical stage in the
unfoldment of the Formative Age of His Dispensation, than a parallel
outpouring of their substance by the builders of the most holy House of
Worship laboring in the corresponding decade of the succeeding century.
The American Baha'i Community, exalted, singled out among sister
communities of East and West through revelation of the Tablets of the
Divine Plan, is unavoidably approaching a testing period, crucial,
prolonged, potent, purifying, clearly envisaged by 'Abdu'l-Baha, different
from but recalling in its severity the ordeals which afflicted the
dawn-breakers in a former Age.
The anticipated trials will enable its members to plumb greater depths of
consecration, soar to nobler heights of collective endeavor, and disclose
in fuller measure the future glory of their destiny.
Might not the strain, the stress, of the strenuous period now being
ushered in through inscrutable dispensations of Providence be productive
of perspicuous benefits and blessings reminiscent of the incalculable
outpourings of divine grace which followed closely in the train of the
woeful trials immortalizing the initial, the bloodiest, the most dramatic
period in the Heroic Age of the Baha'i Dispensation.
[March 16, 1949]