ty's members, and held up to
the eyes of all it reached a vision of a coming age of social justice. If
the boasts of liberty and equality that inflated patriotic rhetoric in
Western lands were a far cry from conditions actually prevailing,
Westerners could justly celebrate the advances toward those ideals that
had been accomplished in the nineteenth century.

From a spiritual perspective the age was gripped by a strange, paradoxical
duality. In almost every direction the intellectual horizon was darkened
by clouds of superstition produced by unthinking imitation of earlier
ages. For most of the world's peoples, the consequences ranged from
profound ignorance about both human potentialities and the physical
universe, to naive attachment to theologies that bore little or no
relation to experience. Where winds of change did dispel the mists, among
the educated classes in Western lands, inherited orthodoxies were all too
often replaced by the blight of an aggressive secularism that called into
doubt both the spiritual nature of humankind and the authority of moral
values themselves. Everywhere, the secularization of society's upper
levels seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism
among the general population. At the deepest level--because religion's
influence reaches far into the human psyche and claims for itself a unique
kind of authority--religious prejudices in all lands had kept alive in
successive generations smouldering fires of bitter animosity that would
fuel the horrors of the coming decades.(5)

II

On this landscape of false confidence and deep despair, of scientific
enlightenment and spiritual gloom, there appeared, as the twentieth
century opened, the luminous figure of 'Abdu'l-Baha. The journey that had
brought Him to this pivotal moment in the history of humankind had led
through more than fifty years of exile, imprisonment and privation, hardly
a month having passed in anything that resembled tranquillity and ease. He
came to it resolved to proclaim to responsive and heedless alike the
establishment on earth of that promised reign of universal peace and
justice that had sustained human hope throughout the centuries. Its
foundation, He declared, would be the unification, in this "century of
light", of the world's people:

In this day ... means of communication have multiplied, and the five
continents of the earth have virtually merged into one.... In like manner
all the