epoch of the
Formative Age of the Faith, over ninety-four sovereign states,
dependencies and islands of the planet, as a result of the prosecution of
a series of national plans, initiated by eleven national spiritual
assemblies throughout the Baha'i world, utilizing the agencies of a newly
emerged, divinely appointed Administrative Order, and which has now
culminated in the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Baha'u'llah's
Mission. The ninth part of this process--the stage we are now entering--is
the further diffusion of that same light over one hundred and thirty-one
additional territories and islands in both the Eastern and Western
Hemispheres, through the operation of a decade-long world spiritual
crusade whose termination will, God willing, coincide with the Most Great
Jubilee commemorating the centenary of the declaration of Baha'u'llah in
Ba_gh_dad. And finally the tenth part of this mighty process must be the
penetration of that light, in the course of numerous crusades and of
successive epochs of both the Formative and Golden Ages of the Faith, into
all the remaining territories of the globe through the erection of the
entire machinery of Baha'u'llah's Administrative Order in all territories,
both East and West, the stage at which the light of God's triumphant Faith
shining in all its power and glory will have suffused and enveloped the
entire planet.

This present Crusade, on the threshold of which we now stand, will,
moreover, by virtue of the dynamic forces it will release and its wide
repercussions over the entire surface of the globe, contribute effectually
to the acceleration of yet another process of tremendous significance
which will carry the steadily evolving Faith of Baha'u'llah through its
present stages of obscurity, of repression, of emancipation and of
recognition--stages one or another of which Baha'i national communities in
various parts of the world now find themselves in--to the stage of
establishment, the stage at which the Faith of Baha'u'llah will be
recognized by the civil authorities as the state religion, similar to that
which Christianity entered in the years following the death of the Emperor
Constantine, a stage which must later be followed by the emergence of the
Baha'i state itself, functioning, in all religious and civil matters, in
strict accordance with the laws and ordinances of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the
Most Holy, the Mother-Book of the Baha'i Revelation, a stage which, in th