Antipodes, in the city of Sydney; to Keith
Ransom-Kehler, entombed in distant Isfahan; to Susan Moody and Lillian
Kappes and their valiant associates who lie buried in Tihran; to Lua
Getsinger, reposing forever in the capital of Egypt, and last but not
least to Martha Root, interred in an island in the bosom of the Pacific,
belong the matchless honor of having conferred, through their services and
sacrifice, a lustre upon the American Baha'i community for which its
representatives, while celebrating at their historic, their first
All-American Convention, their hard-won victories, may well feel eternally
grateful.

Gathered within the walls of its national Shrine--the most sacred Temple
ever to be reared to the glory of Baha'u'llah; commemorating at once the
centenary of the birth of the Babi Dispensation, of the inauguration of
the Baha'i era, of the inception of the Baha'i Cycle and of the birth of
'Abdu'l-Baha, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of
the Faith in the Western Hemisphere; associated in its celebration with
the representatives of American Republics, foregathered in the close
vicinity of a city that may well pride itself on being the first Baha'i
center established in the Western world, this community may indeed feel,
on this solemn occasion, that it has, in its turn, through the triumphal
conclusion of the first stage of the Plan traced for it by 'Abdu'l-Baha,
shed a lasting glory upon its sister communities in East and West, and
written, in golden letters, the concluding pages in the annals of the
first Baha'i century.

Retrospect and Prospect

Thus drew to a close the first century of the Baha'i era--an epoch which,
in its sublimity and fecundity, is without parallel in the entire field of
religious history, and indeed in the annals of mankind. A process,
God-impelled, endowed with measureless potentialities, mysterious in its
workings, awful in the retribution meted out to every one seeking to
resist its operation, infinitely rich in its promise for the regeneration
and redemption of human kind, had been set in motion in _Sh_iraz, had
gained momentum successively in Tihran, Ba_gh_dad, Adrianople and Akka,
had projected itself across the seas, poured its generative influences
into the West, and manifested the initial evidences of its marvelous,
world-energizing force in the midst of the North American continent.

It had sprung from the heart of Asia, and pressing westward