of the indefatigable irresistably advancing,
majestically unfolding American Baha'i community and for the unrelaxing
vigilance of its national elected representatives, are immense, highly
diversified, truly challenging, sacred in character, undreamt of in their
potentialities, urgent by their very nature, and inescapable in the
responsibilities they involve. At the World Center of the Faith, where, at
long last the machinery of its highest institutions has been erected, and
around whose most holy shrines the supreme organs of its unfolding Order,
are, in their embryonic form, unfolding; amidst the diversified tribes and
races, peopling the Dependencies and Principalities of the Dark Continent
of Africa; in the far-flung territories of Central and South America so
alien in culture, temperament, habits, language and outlook; in the
capital cities and traditional strongholds of a materially highly advanced
yet spiritually famished, much tormented, fear-ridden,
hopelessly-sundered, heterogeneous conglomeration of races, nations, sects
and classes overspreading the continent of Europe; in the heart of the
African continent, in the capital city of the Indian sub-continent; in one
of the leading capitals of the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe;
in the very heart of the leading Republic of the Western Hemisphere, the
standard-bearers of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, the champion-builders of the
Administrative Order, the vanguard of the Heralds of His World Order, and
the Chief and appointed executors of the Master Plan of the Center of His
Covenant, have, in the course of the few, fast-fleeting months ahead,
separating them from the grandest crusade thus far launched in Baha'i
history, been assigned tasks, obligations and responsibilities that they
can afford to neither minimize, neglect or shirk for a moment.

Within only a few weeks the Baha'i World will enter upon the centenary of
that fateful day of August the fifteenth, when a dastardly act, fraught
with such terrible consequences, unleashed a series of tragic events that
stained the annals of the Faith, that precipitated calamities on a scale
unprecedented since its inception and unsurpassed in their tragic
character by any event except the martyrdom of its Herald, which
culminated in an holocaust reminiscent of the direst tribulations
undergone by the persecuted followers of any previous religion, and which,
in turn, paved the way, even as the darkest hour of the nig