er "which the Bab has heralded, which the mind of Baha'u'llah has
envisioned, and whose features 'Abdu'l-Baha, its Architect, has
delineated...."(85)

The language of the messages is magnificent, enthralling. In acknowledging
the darkness that widespread godlessness, violence and creeping immorality
was engendering, Shoghi Effendi described the role that Baha'is everywhere
must play as instruments of the transforming power of the new Revelation:

Theirs is the duty to hold, aloft and undimmed, the torch of Divine
guidance, as the shades of night descend upon, and ultimately envelop the
entire human race. Theirs is the function, amidst its tumults, perils and
agonies, to witness to the vision, and proclaim the approach, of that
re-created society, that Christ-promised Kingdom, that World Order whose
generative impulse is the spirit of none other than Baha'u'llah Himself,
whose dominion is the entire planet, whose watchword is unity, whose
animating power is the force of Justice, whose directive purpose is the
reign of righteousness and truth, and whose supreme glory is the complete,
the undisturbed and everlasting felicity of the whole of human kind.(86)

In 1936 the Guardian judged that the administrative structure of the Cause
was sufficiently broad and consolidated in North America that he could
begin the first stage of the implementation of the Divine Plan itself.
With the world sliding into another global conflagration, and the scope
possible to the efforts of the Persian believers being severely limited,
the focus would necessarily have to be on the expansion and consolidation
of the Baha'i community in the Western hemisphere in preparation for the
much larger undertakings that lay ahead. Calling on the Plan's appointed
"executors", the believers in North America, the Guardian laid out a Seven
Year Plan, scheduled to run from 1937 to 1944. Its objectives were to
establish at least one Local Spiritual Assembly in every state of the
United States and every province of Canada, and to open to the Cause
fourteen republics in Latin America. To these objectives was added the
task, immensely demanding of a community with still very limited numbers
and severely straitened financial resources, of completing the exterior
ornamentation of the "Mother Temple of the West".

Ruhiyyih _Kh_anum has pointed out a striking parallel between two
developments during this period of history. On the one hand, powerful
nations were launch