n the end took
him outside the pale of the Faith: he refused not to be handled always as
an exception, a privileged exception. In fact, if we keenly analyse it, it
is almost invariably the soaring ambition and deep self-love of people
that has led them to leave the Faith. Towards the end Sohrab used, in the
course of his lectures, to incorporate quotation after quotation of
Baha'u'llah's words in his lectures, without once stating they were
Baha'u'llah's, and when the believers remonstrated with him over this
plagiarism, it had no effect. After he had, of his own accord, left the
organized body of the Faith and refused to be reconciled with it, he began
to attack the administrators of it, first the American N.S.A., then the
entire administrative order, and in the end the Guardian. What he teaches
at present is so far divorced from our beloved Faith, and so tinged with
the doctrines of many "cults" which we see thriving at present, as to be
almost unrecognizable. Sohrab's influence and activities in America have
waned greatly, and he seems to now feel his only chance of causing
mischief is to be active with his "caravan" movement abroad. The books and
articles he published attacking the Guardian and, in fact, everything
established in the Master's Will, had no effect, and far from succeeding
in causing any breach in the Faith in America, some of the very few who
followed him out of the Cause, gave him up, and returned to serve the
Cause with redoubled enthusiasm!

The Guardian feels that one of the best antidotes to those--Sohrab or
others--who seek to undermine the faith of the believers, especially by
harping on the subject of excommunication, is to place in their hands a
German edition of "God Passes By". For in that book he (the Guardian) has
clearly pointed out that the Cause of God has always been attacked from
within, and that, beginning in the days of the Bab, the "Sea of Truth" has
over and over cast out its spiritually dead. It must do this, even as the
body seeks to rid itself of poisons so as to preserve the health of the
entire organism.

Your assembly should do all it can to protect and educate the believers so
that they will understand that it is not personal ill-will, or lack of
love, which leads to the excommunication of a person, but rather the fact
that he has become like a cancer which must be removed before the entire
body is destroyed.

He is very anxious to have the work on the National Headquart