The auspicious year destined to witness the Centenary of the Birth of
the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh is brilliantly opening. The last year of the first
Bahá'í Century is more than half spent. The tempo of organized, concerted
activities of the members of the worldwide Bahá'í community is correspondingly
accelerating. Teaching campaigns, enterprises of institutional significance,
publicity measures, publication projects, and celebration plans are
rapidly multiplying. Inter-community competition is steadily mounting.
The world-desolating conflict, now in its fifth year, is powerless to cloud
the splendid prospect of the triumphant termination of the first, most shining
century of the Bahá'í Era. Tihrán reports thirty-four Assemblies
constituted, fifty-four groups reinforced, fifty-eight new centers
established. Messages from Delhi indicate that Bahá'ís have established
residence in over sixty localities in India and eighteen Assemblies are already
functioning. To the National Bahá'í Headquarters previously founded in
Tihrán, Wilmette and Baghdád, are now added similar centers in Cairo, Delhi
and Sydney, officially
registered in the names of their respective National Assemblies, and
representing an addition to Bahá'í national endowments amounting to
approximately eighteen thousand pounds. The Bahá'í international endowments
have been further enriched by a recent acquisition on Mount Carmel in the
vicinity of the Báb's Shrine transferred to the name of the Palestine Branch
of the American National Assembly. Twenty-five acres of land situated
in the Jordan Valley have just been dedicated to the Tomb of Bahá'u'lláh.
The recent acquisition of land adjacent to the site of the projected Tihrán
Temple raises the holding to over three and a half million square meters.
The Seven Year Plan, providing the chief impulse to the extraordinary expansion
of these magnificent activities, must, during the remaining five
months, as befitting thanksgiving act for continued outpouring of God's
unfailing grace, surge ahead to dazzling victory surpassing our highest
expectations. The prosecution of the Plan, whose scope transcends every
other enterprise launched by Bahá'í communities throughout the whole century,
must, ere the hundred years run out, culminate in one last, supreme
effort whose repercussions will resound throughout the Bahá'í world.
January 4, 1944