will be decades--or perhaps a great deal longer--before the vision
contained in this remarkable document is fully realized, the essential
features of what it promised are now established facts throughout the
world. In several of the great changes envisioned--unity of race and unity
of religion--the intent of the Master's words is clear and the processes
involved are far advanced, however great may be the resistance in some
quarters. To a large extent this is also true of unity of language. The
need for it is now recognized on all sides, as reflected in the
circumstances that have compelled the United Nations and much of the
non-governmental community to adopt several "official languages". Until a
decision is taken by international agreement, the effect of such
developments as the Internet, the management of air traffic, the
development of technological vocabularies of various kinds, and universal
education itself, has been to make it possible, to some extent, for
English to fill the gap.

"Unity of thought in world undertakings", a concept for which the most
idealistic aspirations at the opening of the twentieth century lacked even
reference points, is also in large measure everywhere apparent in vast
programmes of social and economic development, humanitarian aid and
concern for protection of the environment of the planet and its oceans. As
to "unity in the political realm", Shoghi Effendi has explained that the
reference is to unity which sovereign states achieve among themselves, a
developing process the present stage of which is the establishment of the
United Nations. The Master's promise of "unity of nations", on the other
hand, looked forward to today's widespread acceptance among the peoples of
the world of the fact that, however great the differences among them may
be, they are the inhabitants of a single global homeland.

"Unity in freedom" has today, of course, become a universal aspiration of
the Earth's inhabitants. Among the chief developments giving substance to
it, the Master may well have had in mind the dramatic extinction of
colonialism and the consequent rise of self-determination as a dominant
feature of national identity at century's end.

Whatever threats still hang over humanity's future, the world has been
transformed by the events of the twentieth century. That the features of
the process should also have been described by the Voice that predicted it
with such confidence ought to command earn