nstrument. At its best, it provides a perspective
on the past and casts a light on the future. It populates human
consciousness with heroes, saints and martyrs whose example awakens in
everyone touched by it capacities they had not imagined they possessed. It
helps make sense of the world--and of human experience. It inspires,
consoles and enlightens. It enriches life. In the great body of literature
and legend that it has left to humanity, history's hand can be seen at
work shaping much of the course of civilization--in the legends that have
inspired the ideals of every people since the dawn of recorded time, as
well as in the epics of the _Ramayana_, in the exploits celebrated in the
_Odyssey_ and the _Aeneid_, in the Nordic sagas, in the _Shahnameh_, and
in much of the Bible and the Qur'an.

_God Passes By_ elevates this great work of the mind to a level ardently
striven after but never attained in any of ages past. Those who open
themselves to its vision discover in it an avenue of approach to
understanding the Purpose of God, an avenue that converges with the vast
expanse spread out in the Guardian's matchless translations of the
Revealed Texts. Its appearance on the centenary of the birth of the
Cause--just as the Baha'i world was celebrating the success of the first
collective effort it had ever been able to undertake--summoned up for
believers everywhere the full majesty and meaning of a hundred years of
ceaseless sacrifice.

* * * * *

At a relatively early point in the second world war, the Guardian set that
conflict in a perspective for Baha'is that was very different from the one
generally prevailing. The war should be regarded, he said, "as the direct
continuation" of the conflagration ignited in 1914. It would come to be
seen as the "essential pre-requisite to world unification". The entry into
the war by the United States, whose president had initiated the project of
a system of international order, but which had itself rejected this
visionary initiative, would lead that nation, Shoghi Effendi predicted, to
"assume through adversity its preponderating share of responsibility to
lay down, once for all, broad, worldwide, unassailable foundations of that
discredited yet immortal System."(88)

These statements proved prophetic. With the end of hostilities, it
gradually became apparent that a fundamental shift in consciousness was
under way throughout the world and that inher