ar of the World Spiritual Crusade, I hail with feelings of
joy and wonder the superb feats of the heroic company of the Knights of
the Lord of Hosts in pursuance of their sublime mission for the spiritual
conquest of the planet. The first twelve months of this decade-long
enterprise unexampled in its scope, significance and potentialities in the
world's spiritual history and launched simultaneously, amidst the climax
of the world-wide festivities of a memorable Holy Year, in the American,
the European, the African, the Asiatic and the Australian continents, have
witnessed the hoisting of the banner of the Faith of Baha'u'llah in no
less than a hundred virgin territories of the globe. The total number of
the newly opened sovereign states and dependencies comprising
Principalities, Sultanates, Emirates, Sheikhdoms, Protectorates, Trust
Territories and Crown Colonies, scattered over the face of the earth,
represents almost seven-eighths of all the territories, exclusive of the
Soviet Republics and Satellites, destined to be opened in the course of an
entire decade. The northern frontiers of a divinely guided, rapidly
marching, majestically expanding Faith have been pushed, in consequence of
the phenomenal success recently achieved by the vanguard of Baha'u'llah's
crusaders, beyond the Arctic Circle as far as Arctic Bay, Franklin, 73
degrees latitude. Its southern limits have now reached the Falkland
Islands in the neighborhood of Magallanes, the world's southernmost city.
Other outlying outposts have been established in places as far apart as
Sikkim at the foot of the Himalayas, the Lofoten Islands in the heart of
the European Northland, Fezzan on the northern fringe of the Sahara
Desert, the Andaman Islands and the Seychelles, the penal colonies in the
Indian Ocean, the three Guianas and the leper colonies on the Atlantic
Coast, the Faroe and Shetland Islands, the wind-swept and inhospitable
archipelagos of the North Sea, Hadhramaut on the sun-baked shores of the
Arabian Peninsula, St. Helena isolated in the midst of the South Atlantic
Ocean and the Gilbert Islands, the war-devastated, sparsely populated
Atolls situated in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

God's infant Faith, confined during the first nine years of its existence
to its birthland and the adjoining territory of 'Iraq, reaching, in the
course of the thirty-nine years of Baha'u'llah's Ministry, to thirteen
other lands, enlarged, during 'Abdu'l-Baha's twenty-nine