f suffering, revitalized and functioning with unity, zeal, fidelity
and enthusiasm, must address itself without delay, with complete
dedication and renewed and undefected resolve, as a prelude to the future
unfoldment of its mission, beyond the confines of its homeland. For a
national community so vibrant with life, so painstaking in its labours, so
efficient in its methods, so impervious to the slings and arrows of
affliction, occupying so central a position in a continent, so politically
confused, so spiritually starved, so socially agitated, and the recipient
of such favours and promises, from the lips and pen of 'Abdu'l-Baha,
cannot, if faithful to its destiny, remain confined in its future
activities, to the narrow compass of its homeland, and fall behind its
sister communities in East and West, which are forging ahead and are in
addition to their tasks at home, carrying forward the banner of the Faith
in both distant lands and neighbouring territories, such as Latin America,
the Goal countries of Europe, the Dependencies in the Far North, the
Territories of the Arabian Peninsula, Central, East and West Africa, the
Islands of the Pacific and South East Asia.

Already this community has, in the years preceding the great ordeal to
which it has been subjected, initiated in however tentative a manner, its
teaching enterprises beyond the confines of its homeland in one of the
neighbouring Balkan Territories, and laid to rest, as an everlasting
memorial to its pioneering spirit, the remains of its first martyr in the
soil of that Territory.

No more adequate and better field can be imagined, as an outlet for the
long-hemmed in energies of a spiritually virile, highly developed
outstandingly loyal branch of the family of Baha'i national communities,
than the neighbouring territories situated in the Balkan Peninsula, the
Baltic States, and further afield the vast stretches now enveloped in
darkness, and whose teeming millions hunger for the Light of God's saving
grace and redemptive power.

For so glorious and mighty a mission, this community, however limited its
present resources, however circumscribed in its numbers, however
formidable the various obstacles that now stand in its path, must, by
applying itself assiduously to the tasks of the present hour, prepare
itself and acquire the necessary spiritual capacity to launch, in the
years that lie ahead and possibly on the morrow of the celebrations of the
centenary of t