ntably defective."

The disquieting influence of over thirty million souls living under
minority conditions throughout the continent of Europe; the vast and
ever-swelling army of the unemployed with its crushing burden and
demoralizing influence on governments and peoples; the wicked, unbridled
race of armaments swallowing an ever-increasing share of the substance of
already impoverished nations; the utter demoralization from which the
international financial markets are now increasingly suffering; the
onslaught of secularism invading what has hitherto been regarded as the
impregnable strongholds of Christian and Muslim orthodoxy--these stand out
as the gravest symptoms that bode ill for the future stability of the
structure of modern civilization. Little wonder if one of Europe's
preeminent thinkers, honored for his wisdom and restraint, should have
been forced to make so bold an assertion: "The world is passing through
the gravest crisis in the history of civilization." "We stand," writes
another, "before either a world catastrophe, or perhaps before the dawn of
a greater era of truth and wisdom." "It is in such times," he adds, "that
religions have perished and are born."

Might we not already discern, as we scan the political horizon, the
alignment of those forces that are dividing afresh the continent of Europe
into camps of potential combatants, determined upon a contest that may
mark, unlike the last war, the end of an epoch, a vast epoch, in the
history of human evolution? Are we, the privileged custodians of a
priceless Faith, called upon to witness a cataclysmical change,
politically as fundamental and spiritually as beneficent as that which
precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in the West? Might it not
happen--every vigilant adherent of the Faith of Baha'u'llah might well
pause to reflect--that out of this world eruption there may stream forces
of such spiritual energy as shall recall, nay eclipse, the splendor of
those signs and wonders that accompanied the establishment of the Faith of
Jesus Christ? Might there not emerge out of the agony of a shaken world a
religious revival of such scope and power as to even transcend the potency
of those world-directing forces with which the Religions of the Past have,
at fixed intervals and according to an inscrutable Wisdom, revived the
fortunes of declining ages and peoples? Might not the bankruptcy of this
present, this highly-vaunted materialistic civilization,