I may be delivered from the darkness of
the cruelty inflicted by them upon me, and may enter the luminous
atmosphere of Thy nearness, O my Lord, the All-Glorious, and may rest
under the shadow of Thy most great mercy." "Ya Baha'u'l-Abha [O Thou the
Glory of Glories]!" He wrote in a Tablet revealed during the last week of
His life, "I have renounced the world and the people thereof, and am
heartbroken and sorely afflicted because of the unfaithful. In the cage of
this world I flutter even as a frightened bird, and yearn every day to
take my flight unto Thy Kingdom. Ya Baha'u'l-Abha! Make me to drink of the
cup of sacrifice, and set me free. Relieve me from these woes and trials,
from these afflictions and troubles."

Dear friends! Alas, a thousand times alas, that a Revelation so
incomparably great, so infinitely precious, so mightily potent, so
manifestly innocent, should have received, at the hands of a generation so
blind and so perverse, so infamous a treatment! "O My servants!"
Baha'u'llah Himself testifies, "The one true God is My witness! This most
great, this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto
you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the
twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this
imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this
most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty."

A WORLD RECEDED FROM HIM

After a revolution of well nigh one hundred years what is it that the eye
encounters as one surveys the international scene and looks back upon the
early beginnings of Baha'i history? A world convulsed by the agonies of
contending systems, races and nations, entangled in the mesh of its
accumulated falsities, receding farther and farther from Him Who is the
sole Author of its destinies, and sinking deeper and deeper into a
suicidal carnage which its neglect and persecution of Him Who is its
Redeemer have precipitated. A Faith, still proscribed, yet bursting
through its chrysalis, emerging from the obscurity of a century-old
repression, face to face with the awful evidences of God's wrathful anger,
and destined to arise above the ruins of a smitten civilization. A world
spiritually destitute, morally bankrupt, politically disrupted, socially
convulsed, economically paralyzed, writhing, bleeding and breaking up
beneath the avenging rod of God. A Faith Whose call remained unanswered,
Whose claims were reject