I feel truly exhilarated as I witness the ever-recurrent manifestations
of unbroken solidarity and unquenchable enthusiasm that distinguish every
stage in the progressive development of the nation-wide enterprise which
is being so unflinchingly pursued by the whole American Bahá'í community.
The marked deterioration in world affairs, the steadily deepening gloom
that envelops the storm-tossed peoples and nations of the Old World,
invest the Seven Year Plan, now operating in both the northern and southern
American continents, with a significance and urgency that cannot be
overestimated. Conceived as the supreme agency for the establishment, in
the opening century of the Bahá'í Era, of what is but the initial stage in
the progressive realization of `Abdu'l-Bahá's Plan for the American believers,
this enterprise, as it extends its ramifications throughout the entire New
World, is demonstrating its power to command all the resources and utilize
all the facilities which the machinery of a laboriously evolved Administrative
Order can place at its disposal. However we view its aspects, it offers in its
functioning a sharp contrast to the workings of the moribund and obsolescent
institutions to which a perverse generation is desperately clinging.
Tempestuous are the winds that buffet and will, as the days go by, fiercely
assail the very structure of the Order through the agency of which this twofold
task is being performed. The potentialities with which an almighty Providence
has endowed it will no doubt enable its promoters to achieve their
purpose. Much, however, will depend upon the spirit and manner in which
that task will be conducted. Through the clearness and steadiness of their
vision, through the unvitiated vitality of their belief, through the
incorruptibility of their character, through the adamantine force of their
resolve, the matchless superiority of their aims and purpose, and the
unsurpassed range of their accomplishments, they who labor for the glory of the
Most Great Name throughout both Americas can best demonstrate to the
visionless, faithless and restless society to which they belong their power to
proffer a haven of refuge to its members in the hour of their realized doom.
Then and only then will this tender sapling, embedded in the fertile soil of a
Divinely appointed Administrative Order, and energized by the dynamic
processes of its institutions, yield its richest and destined fruit. That the
community of the American believers, to whose keeping so vast, so delicate
and precious a trust has been committed will, severally and collectively
prove themselves worthy of their high calling, I for one, who in my
association with them have been privileged to observe more closely than
perhaps any one else the nature of their reactions to the momentous issues
that have confronted them in the past, will refuse to doubt.
September 10, 1938