It is upon the individual believer, constituting the fundamental unit in
the structure of the home front, that the revitalization, the expansion,
and the enrichment of the home front must ultimately depend. The more
strenuous the effort exerted, daily and methodically, by the individual
laboring on the home front to rise to loftier heights of consecration, of
self-abnegation, to contribute, through pioneering at home, to the
multiplication of Baha'i isolated centers, groups and assemblies, and to
raise, through diligent, painstaking and continual endeavor to convert
receptive souls to the Faith he has espoused, the number of its active and
wholehearted supporters, the sooner will the vast and multiple
enterprises, launched beyond the confines of the homeland, and now so
desperately calling for a greater supply of men and means, be provided
with the necessary support that will ensure their uninterrupted
development and hasten their ultimate fruition, and the lighter will be
the burden of the impending contest that must be waged, sooner or later,
within the borders of the Union itself, between the rising institutions of
Baha'u'llah's embryonic divinely appointed Order, and the exponents of
obsolescent doctrines and the defenders, both secular and religious, of a
corrupt and fast-declining society.
The fourth phase of the Ten-Year Plan, which the prosecutors of a
world-encompassing Crusade are about to enter, must witness on the one
hand, on every home front, and particularly within the confines of the
American homeland, this same spiritual reinvigoration, administrative
expansion, and material replenishment, constituting the triple facets of a
task which can brook no further delay, and, on the other, an acceleration,
particularly in connection with the construction of the Mother Temples of
Australia and Germany (the needs of the Mother Temple of Africa having, to
all intents and purposes, been met) in the contributions to be made, by
individual believers as well as national spiritual assemblies, to ensure
the uninterrupted progress and the early completion of these mighty and
historic enterprises.
As the members of the valiant American Baha'i Community have, in the space
of more than four years, blazed the trail, and vindicated their primacy,
through the share they have had in opening the chief remaining virgin
territories of the globe, in contributing to the furtherance of the
interests of the institutions of the Faith at its World Center, and in
hastening the acquisition of national Haziratu'l-Quds, the establishment
of Baha'i national endowments, and the purchase of sites for future Baha'i
Temples, so must they, if they be intent on safeguarding that primacy, and
on preserving, intact and untarnished, the noble example they have already
set the Baha'i world, maintain their enviable position, as the vanguard of
the army of Baha'u'llah's crusaders, in rescuing, while there is yet time,
their home front from the precarious position in which it now finds
itself, and in displaying for the purpose of ensuring the erection of the
Mother Temples of three continents--tasks which tower far above any of the
national enterprises hitherto undertaken--be they Haziratu'l-Quds,
endowments or Temple sites--that selfsame generosity and self-abnegation
which have distinguished their stewardship to the Cause of Baha'u'llah in
the past.
The year, the opening of which will mark the midway point of this World
Spiritual Crusade, must be distinguished from all previous years, by the
special allotment of a substantial sum from the national budget that will
adequately meet the urgent needs of these Houses of Worship, and
particularly those that are to be erected in the European and Australian
continents.