lly the hospital, the school, the
university, the dispensary and the hospice, all functioning according to
the most efficient and orderly procedures, will follow.(27)

As with the process simultaneously unfolding in Persia, only future
historians will be able to appreciate adequately the creative power of
this dimension of the Western trips. Memoirs and letters have testified to
the way in which even brief encounters with the Master were to sustain
countless Western Baha'is through the years of effort and sacrifice that
followed, as they struggled to expand and consolidate the Faith. Without
such an intervention by the Centre of the Covenant Himself, it is
impossible to imagine little groups of Western believers--lacking entirely
the spiritual heritage that their Persian co-religionists derived from the
long involvement of parents and grandparents in the heroic events of Babi
and early Baha'i history--being able so quickly to grasp what the Cause
required of them and to undertake the daunting tasks involved.

His hearers were summoned to become the loving and confident agents of a
great civilizing process, whose pivot is recognition of the oneness of the
human race. In arising to undertake their mission, He promised that they
would find unlocked in both themselves and others entirely new capacities
with which God has in this Day endowed the human race:

Ye must become the very soul of the world, the living spirit in the body
of the children of men. In this wondrous Age, at this time when the
Ancient Beauty, the Most Great Name, bearing unnumbered gifts, hath risen
above the horizon of the world, the Word of God hath infused such awesome
power into the inmost essence of humankind that He hath stripped men's
human qualities of all effect, and hath, with His all-conquering might,
unified the peoples in a vast sea of oneness.(28)

Nothing perhaps testifies so strikingly to the response the believers made
to this appeal than the fact that the unity established among them did not
inhibit their vivid individual ways of expressing the truths of the Faith.
The relationship between the individual and the community has always been
one of the most challenging issues in the development of society. One has
only to read, even cursorily, accounts of the lives of the early Baha'is
in the West to become aware of the high degree of individuality that
characterized many of them, particularly the most active and creative. Not
infrequently