view of the restricted size of
their community and the limited influence it now wields, of producing any
marked effect on the great mass of their countrymen, let them focus their
attention, for the present, on their own selves, their own individual
needs, their own personal deficiencies and weaknesses, ever mindful that
every intensification of effort on their part will better equip them for
the time when they will be called upon to eradicate in their turn such
evil tendencies from the lives and the hearts of the entire body of their
fellow-citizens. Nor must they overlook the fact that the World Order,
whose basis they, as the advance-guard of the future Baha'i generations of
their countrymen, are now laboring to establish, can never be reared
unless and until the generality of the people to which they belong has
been already purged from the divers ills, whether social or political,
that now so severely afflict it.

Surveying as a whole the most pressing needs of this community, attempting
to estimate the more serious deficiencies by which it is being handicapped
in the discharge of its task, and ever bearing in mind the nature of that
still greater task with which it will be forced to wrestle in the future,
I feel it my duty to lay special stress upon, and draw the special and
urgent attention of the entire body of the American believers, be they
young or old, white or colored, teachers or administrators, veterans or
newcomers, to what I firmly believe are the essential requirements for the
success of the tasks which are now claiming their undivided attention.
Great as is the importance of fashioning the outward instruments, and of
perfecting the administrative agencies, which they can utilize for the
prosecution of their dual task under the Seven Year Plan; vital and urgent
as are the campaigns which they are initiating, the schemes and projects
which they are devising, and the funds which they are raising, for the
efficient conduct of both the Teaching and Temple work, the imponderable,
the spiritual, factors, which are bound up with their own individual and
inner lives, and with which are associated their human and social
relationships, are no less urgent and vital, and demand constant scrutiny,
continual self-examination and heart-searching on their part, lest their
value be impaired or their vital necessity be obscured or forgotten.

Of these spiritual prerequisites of success, which constitute the bedrock
on wh