fail to achieve their supreme purpose if not
supplemented by the equally vital task--which is one that primarily
concerns continually and challenges each single individual believer
whatever his rank, capacity or origin--of winning to the Faith fresh
recruits to the slowly yet steadily advancing army of the Lord of Hosts,
whose reinforcing strength is so essential to the safeguarding of the
victories which the band of heroic Baha'i conquerors are winning in the
course of their several campaigns in all the continents of the globe.

Such a steady flow of reinforcements is absolutely vital and is of extreme
urgency, for nothing short of the vitalizing influx of new blood that will
reanimate the world Baha'i community can safeguard the prizes which, at so
great a sacrifice involving the expenditure of so much time, effort and
treasure, are now being won in virgin territories by Baha'u'llah's valiant
Knights, whose privilege is to constitute the spearhead of the onrushing
battalions which, in diverse theaters and in circumstances often adverse
and extremely challenging, are vying with each other for the spiritual
conquest of the unsurrendered territories and islands on the surface of
the globe.

This flow, moreover, will presage and hasten the advent of the day which,
as prophesied by 'Abdu'l-Baha, will witness the entry by troops of peoples
of divers nations and races into the Baha'i world--a day which, viewed in
its proper perspective, will be the prelude to that long-awaited hour when
a mass conversion on the part of these same nations and races, and as a
direct result of a chain of events, momentous and possibly catastrophic in
nature, and which cannot as yet be even dimly visualized, will suddenly
revolutionize the fortunes of the Faith, derange the equilibrium of the
world, and reinforce a thousandfold the numerical strength as well as the
material power and the spiritual authority of the Faith of Baha'u'llah.

MOST VITAL OBJECTIVE IN THE CRUSADE'S OPENING YEAR

Of all the objectives enumerated in my message to the representatives of
this community, assembled on the occasion of the celebration of the climax
of the Holy Year, of the convocation of the second Intercontinental
Teaching Conference, of the inauguration of the Mother Temple of the West
and of the launching of the World Spiritual Crusade, the most vital,
urgent and meritorious, in this the opening year of the initial phase of
this world-embracing