.."(20) Fuelling their endeavours and those of
their fellow believers, and drawing into the Cause growing numbers of new
adherents, was a flood of Tablets addressed by the Master to recipients on
both sides of the Atlantic, messages that threw open the imagination to
the concepts, principles and ideals of God's new Revelation. The power of
this creative force can be felt in the words with which the first American
believer, Thornton Chase, sought to describe what he was seeing:

His [the Master's] own writings, spreading like white-winged doves from
the Center of His Presence to the ends of the earth, are so many (hundreds
pouring forth daily) that it is an impossibility for him to have given
time to them for searching thought or to have applied the mental processes
of the scholar to them. They flow like streams from a gushing
fountain....(21)

These sentiments add their own perspective to the determination with which
the Master arose to undertake a venture so ambitious as to dismay many of
those immediately around Him. Setting aside concerns expressed about His
advanced age, His ill health, and the physical disabilities left by
decades of imprisonment, He set out on a series of journeys that would
last some three years, carrying Him eventually to the Pacific coast of the
North American continent. The stresses and risks of international travel
in the early years of the century were the least of the obstacles to the
realization of the objectives He had set Himself. In the words of Shoghi
Effendi:

He Who, in His own words, had entered prison as a youth and left it an old
man, Who never in His life had faced a public audience, had attended no
school, had never moved in Western circles, and was unfamiliar with
Western customs and language, had arisen not only to proclaim from pulpit
and platform, in some of the chief capitals of Europe and in the leading
cities of the North American continent, the distinctive verities enshrined
in His Father's Faith, but to demonstrate as well the Divine origin of the
Prophets gone before Him, and to disclose the nature of the tie binding
them to that Faith.(22)

* * * * *

No more brilliant a stage for the opening act of this great drama could
have been desired than London, capital city of the largest and most
cosmopolitan empire the world has ever known. In the eyes of the little
groups of believers who had made the practical arrangements and who longed