unification of humanity a realistic
objective. It was this vision that, for the thirty-six years of his
Guardianship, provided the organizing force of Shoghi Effendi's work. Its
implications were the theme of some of the most important messages he
wrote. Addressing in 1931 the friends in the West, he opened for them a
brilliant vista:

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind--the pivot round which all the
teachings of Baha'u'llah revolve--is no mere outburst of ignorant
emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its appeal is not
to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood
and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of
harmonious cooeperation among individual peoples and nations. Its
implications are deeper, its claims greater than any which the Prophets of
old were allowed to advance. Its message is applicable not only to the
individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those
essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as
members of one human family.... It implies an organic change in the
structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not
experienced.... It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the
demilitarization of the whole civilized world --a world organically unified
in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its
spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and
yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its
federated units.(59)

A concept that showed itself strongly in the Guardian's writings was the
organic metaphor in which Baha'u'llah, and subsequently 'Abdu'l-Baha, had
captured the millennia-long process that has carried humanity to this
culminating point in its collective history. That image was the analogy
that can be drawn between, on the one hand, the stages by which human
society has been gradually organized and integrated, and, on the other,
the process by which each human being slowly develops out of the
limitations of infantile existence into the powers of maturity. It appears
prominently in several of Shoghi Effendi's writings on the transformation
taking place in our time:

The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race had
to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is now experiencing
the commotions invariably associated with the most turbulent stage of its
evolution, the