Holy Land, the
spiritual as well as the administrative centre of the World Faith of
Baha'u'llah. It must, however long and tortuous the way, lead, through a
series of victories and reverses, to the political unification of the
Eastern and Western Hemispheres, to the emergence of a world government,
and the establishment of the Lesser Peace, as foretold by Baha'u'llah and
foreshadowed by the Prophet Isaiah. It must, in the end, culminate in the
unfurling of the banner of the Most Great Peace, in the Golden Age of the
Dispensation of Baha'u'llah.

(5 June 1947 to the Baha'is of West, published in "Citadel of Faith:
Messages to America 1947-1957" (Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1980),
p. 6, pp. 32-33) [52]

53: The raising of this Edifice will in turn herald the construction, in
the...

The raising of this Edifice will in turn herald the construction, in the
course of successive epochs of the Formative Age of the Faith, of several
other structures, which will serve as the administrative seats of such
divinely appointed institutions as the Guardianship, the Hands of the
Cause, and the Universal House of Justice. These Edifices will, in the
shape of a far-flung arc, and following a harmonizing style of
architecture, surround the resting-places of the Greatest Holy Leaf,
ranking as foremost among the members of her sex in the Baha'i
Dispensation, of her Brother, offered up as a ransom by Baha'u'llah for
the quickening of the world and its unification, and of their Mother,
proclaimed by Him to be His chosen "consort in all the worlds of God". The
ultimate completion of this stupendous undertaking will mark the
culmination of the development of a world-wide divinely-appointed
Administrative Order whose beginnings may be traced as far back as the
concluding years of the Heroic Age of the Faith.

This vast and irresistible process, unexampled in the spiritual history of
mankind, and which will synchronize with two no less significant
developments--the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of
Baha'i national and local institutions--the one outside and the other
within the Baha'i world--will attain its final consummation, in the Golden
Age of the Faith, through the raising of the standard of the Most Great
Peace, and the emergence, in the plenitude of its power and glory, of the
focal Centre of the agencies constituting the World Order of Baha'u'llah.
The final establishment of this seat of the future