is auspicious hour, marking yet another milestone in the progress of
the divinely-guided, world-embracing, steadily consolidating Community of
the followers of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, I feel once again impelled to
share with the elected representatives of the vast majority of its avowed
supporters, assembled on the occasion of the convocation of the
twenty-four Baha'i Conventions being held simultaneously in the American,
the European, the Asiatic, the African, and the Australian continents, the
latest evidences of its resistless march along the path traced for it by
both its Founder and the appointed Center of His Covenant.

The year that has just expired, signalized, at the hour of its birth, by
the emergence of three regional spiritual assemblies, on the northern
fringes, in the heart, and at the southern extremity of the long dormant
African continent, and ushering in the third phase of a decade-long,
world-encompassing Spiritual Crusade, has, as we look back on the triumphs
and trials that have marked its course, accelerated, to a notable extent,
the two parallel processes of integration and disintegration associated
respectively with the rising fortunes of God's infant Faith and the
sinking fortunes of the institutions of a declining civilization.

Indeed, as we gaze in retrospect beyond the immediate past, and survey, in
however cursory a manner, the vicissitudes afflicting an increasingly
tormented society, and recall the strains and stresses to which the fabric
of a dying Order has been increasingly subjected, we cannot but marvel at
the sharp contrast presented, on the one hand, by the accumulated
evidences of the orderly unfoldment, and the uninterrupted multiplication
of the agencies, of an Administrative Order designed to be the harbinger
of a world civilization, and, on the other, by the ominous manifestations
of acute political conflict, of social unrest, of racial animosity, of
class antagonism, of immorality and of irreligion, proclaiming, in no
uncertain terms, the corruption and obsolescence of the institutions of a
bankrupt Order.

PORTENTOUS PROPHECIES

Against the background of these afflictive disturbances--the turmoil and
tribulations of a travailing age--we may well ponder the portentous
prophecies uttered well-nigh fourscore years ago, by the Author of our
Faith, as well as the dire predictions made by Him Who is the unerring
Interpreter of His teachings, all foreshadowing a univers