the Cause of God. They were aware that a new Messenger of the Divine
had appeared, had caught something of the spirit of faith, and had been
strongly affected by the Baha'i teaching of the oneness of humankind. A
small minority among them were able to go beyond this point. For the most
part, however, these friends were essentially recipients of teaching
programmes conducted by teachers and pioneers from outside. One of the
great strengths of the masses of humankind from among whom the newly
enrolled believers came lies in an openness of heart that has the
potentiality to generate lasting social transformation. The greatest
handicap of these same populations has so far been a passivity learned
through generations of exposure to outside influences which, no matter how
great their material advantages, have pursued agendas that were often
related only tangentially--if at all--to the realities of the needs and
daily lives of indigenous peoples.

The Four Year Plan, which was a major advance on those that immediately
preceded it, was designed to take advantage of the opportunities and
insights thus offered. The goal of advancing the process of entry by
troops became the single-minded aim of the enterprise. The lessons that
had been learned during earlier Plans now placed the emphasis on
developing the capacities of believers--wherever they might be--so that all
could arise as confident protagonists of the Faith's mission. The
instrument to accomplish this objective had been undergoing steady
refinement during the earlier Plans and had demonstrated its efficacy.

As with most of the other methods and activities by which the Faith was
advancing, this instrument had likewise been conceived decades earlier by
the Master, who calls in the Tablets of the Divine Plan for deepened
believers to "gather together the youths of the love of God in schools of
instruction and teach them all the divine proofs and irrefragable
arguments, explain and elucidate the history of the Cause, and interpret
also the prophecies and proofs which are recorded and are extant in the
divine books and epistles regarding the manifestation of the Promised
One...."(126) Pioneering work and organized training of this nature had
already been done in Iran, during the early years of the century, by the
much-loved Sadru's-Sudur.(127) As the years passed, winter and summer
schools had multiplied, and successive Plans also encouraged
experimentation in the developmen