ap of 'Abdu'l-Baha and been
lovingly trained by Him through the revelation of unnumbered Tablets,
through the dispatch of special and successive messengers, and through His
own prolonged visit to the North American continent in the evening of His
life. It was to the members of this community, the spiritual descendants
of the dawn-breakers of the Heroic Age of our Faith, that He, whilst
sojourning in the City of the Covenant, chose to reveal the implications
of that Covenant. It was in the vicinity of this community's earliest
established center that He laid, with His own hands, the cornerstone of
the first Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar of the western world. It was to the
members of this community that He subsequently addressed His Tablets of
the Divine Plan, investing it with a spiritual primacy, and singling it
out for a glorious mission among its sister communities. It was this
community which won the immortal honor of being the first to introduce the
Faith in the British Isles, in France and in Germany, and which sent forth
its consecrated pioneers and teachers to China, Japan and India, to
Australia and New Zealand, to the Balkan Peninsula, to South Africa, to
Latin America, to the Baltic States, to Scandinavia and the islands of the
Pacific, hoisting thereby its banner in the vast majority of the countries
won over to its cause, in both the East and the West, prior to
'Abdu'l-Baha's passing.

It was this community, the cradle and stronghold of the Administrative
Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, which, on the morrow of 'Abdu'l-Baha's
ascension, was the first among all other Baha'i communities in East and
West to arise and champion the cause of that Order, to fix its pattern, to
erect its fabric, to initiate its endowments, to establish and consolidate
its subsidiary institutions, and to vindicate its aims and purposes. To it
belongs the unique distinction of having erected, in the heart of the
North American continent, the first Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar of the West, the
holiest edifice ever to be reared by the hands of the followers of
Baha'u'llah in either the Eastern or Western Hemisphere. It was through
the assiduous and unflagging labors of the most distinguished and
consecrated among its itinerant teachers that the allegiance of royalty to
the Cause of Baha'u'llah was won, and unequivocally proclaimed in
successive testimonies as penned by the royal convert herself. To its
members, the vanguard of the torchbearers of the