to ultimate victory.

Dearly-beloved friends! I feel it incumbent upon me, by virtue of the
obligations and responsibilities which as Guardian of the Faith of
Baha'u'llah I am called upon to discharge, to lay special stress, at a
time when the light of publicity is being increasingly focussed upon us,
upon certain truths which lie at the basis of our Faith and the integrity
of which it is our first duty to safeguard. These verities, if valiantly
upheld and properly assimilated, will, I am convinced, powerfully
reinforce the vigor of our spiritual life and greatly assist in
counteracting the machinations of an implacable and vigilant enemy.

To strive to obtain a more adequate understanding of the significance of
Baha'u'llah's stupendous Revelation must, it is my unalterable conviction,
remain the first obligation and the object of the constant endeavor of
each one of its loyal adherents. An exact and thorough comprehension of so
vast a system, so sublime a revelation, so sacred a trust, is for obvious
reasons beyond the reach and ken of our finite minds. We can, however, and
it is our bounden duty to seek to derive fresh inspiration and added
sustenance as we labor for the propagation of His Faith through a clearer
apprehension of the truths it enshrines and the principles on which it is
based.

In a communication addressed to the American believers I have in the
course of my explanation of the station of the Bab made a passing
reference to the incomparable greatness of the Revelation of which He
considered Himself to be the humble Precursor. He Whom Baha'u'llah has
acclaimed in the Kitab-i-Iqan as that promised Qa'im Who has manifested no
less than twenty-five out of the twenty-seven letters which all the
Prophets were destined to reveal--so great a Revealer has Himself testified
to the preeminence of that superior Revelation that was soon to supersede
His own. "The germ," the Bab asserts in the Persian Bayan, "that holds
within itself the potentialities of the Revelation that is to come is
endowed with a potency superior to the combined forces of all those who
follow me." "Of all the tributes," He again affirms, "I have paid to Him
Who is to come after Me, the greatest is this, My written confession, that
no words of Mine can adequately describe Him, nor can any reference to Him
in My Book, the Bayan, do justice to His Cause." "The Bayan," He in that
same Book categorically declares, "and whosoever is therein revolv