He thus addresses the Chief Magistrates of that continent, "and
the Presidents of the Republics therein.... Adorn the temple of your
dominion with the ornament of Justice and of the fear of God, and its head
with the crown of the remembrance of your Lord, the Maker of the heavens."
The Great Republic of the West, an object of special solicitude throughout
the ministry of the Center of the Covenant, whose soil has been hallowed
by His footsteps, and the foundation of whose edifice--the Mother Temple of
the West--has been consecrated by His hand, has been singled out through
the operation of His Will, and been invested by His Pen with an unique, an
inescapable, a weighty and most sacred responsibility. The Mission
entrusted to the community of the North American believers in the darkest
days of the last war, is, after a period of incubation of well nigh twenty
years, and through the instrumentality of the administrative agencies
erected after 'Abdu'l-Baha's passing, efflorescing under our very eyes.
Already, since the inception of the Seven Year Plan, this community can
well claim to have attained, through its deeds, a stature that dwarfs its
sister communities, and can glory in a parentage that embraces every
Republic of Latin America. The first Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar of the West,
its beauteous and noble handiwork, is virtually completed. A nucleus for a
future flourishing local community is already formed in every state and
province in North America. The administrative structure, following the
pattern of its prototype in the U.S.A. is, through the agency of that same
Plan, raising its triumphant head in the Central and South American
Republics. The Plan itself, propelled by the agencies released by those
immortal Tablets which constitute its charter, bids fair, in the fifth
year of its operation, to exceed the highest expectations of those who
have so courageously launched it. Its consummation, coinciding with the
termination of the first century of the Baha'i Era, will mark the opening
of yet another phase in a series of crusades which must carry, in the
course of the succeeding century, the privileged recipients of those
epoch-making Tablets beyond the Western Hemisphere to the uttermost ends
of the earth, to implant the banner, and lay an unassailable basis for the
administrative structure of the Faith of Baha'u'llah.

The quality and magnitude of the work already achieved by these stalwart
champions of God's New World