nd the cylinder, involving an
additional expenditure of no less than twenty thousand dollars, to which
must be added the cost of the excavation for and the sinking of the eight
piers designed to support the weight of the dome and the immediate
construction of the octagon--these call for a stupendous effort on the part
of all Baha'i communities and a self-abnegation unprecedented in Baha'i
history. A drastic reduction of national and local budgets; the allocation
of substantial sums by all national assemblies; the participation of
individuals through sustained and direct donations to the first
international and incomparably holy enterprise synchronizing with the
birth of the International Baha'i Council at the very heart and center of
a world-encircling Faith can alone insure the uninterrupted progress of an
undertaking which, coupled with the completion of the Mother Temple of the
West, cannot fail to produce tremendous repercussions in the Holy Land, in
the North American continent and throughout the world. A period of
austerity covering the two-year interval separating us from the Centenary
celebrations of the Year Nine, prolonging so unexpectedly the austerity
period already traversed by the American Baha'i Community, and now
extended to embrace its sister communities throughout the Baha'i world, is
evidently not only essential for the attainment of so transcendent a goal,
but also supremely befitting when we recall the nature and dimensions of
the holocaust which a hundred years ago crimson-dyed the annals of our
Faith, which posterity will recognize as the bloodiest episode of the most
tragic period of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i Dispensation, which involved
the martyrdom of that incomparable heroine Tahirih, which was immediately
preceded by the imprisonment of Baha'u'llah in the subterranean dungeon of
Tihran, and which sealed the fate of thousands of men, women and children
in circumstances of unspeakable savagery and on a scale unapproached
throughout subsequent stages of Baha'i history.

NO SACRIFICE TOO GREAT

No sacrifice can be deemed too great, no expenditure of material
resources, no degree of renunciation of worldly benefits, comfort and
pleasures, can be regarded as excessive when we recall the precious blood
that flowed, the many lives that were snuffed out, the wealth of material
possessions that was plundered during these most tumultuous and
cataclysmic years of the Heroic Age of our Faith.