I have come here to visit you. With the greatest longing I have
wished to see you. Realizing it was only with great difficulty that
you could come to me and that very few could make the trip, I decided
to come to you so that all might have the pleasure of meeting.
Praise be to God! I am here, and I am looking into your faces—faces radiant with inner beauty, hearts attracted to the Kingdom of
Abhá, spirits exhilarated through the glad tidings of God. Therefore,
I have experienced the greatest possible happiness. And
surely this happiness must be mutual, for the hearts are connected
with each other and are filled with the same vibration. The flame
and the light of love are reflected in all. Spiritual susceptibilities
and heart longings fill every heart. If we should offer a hundred
thousand thanksgivings every moment to the threshold of God for
this love which has blended the Orient and Occident, we would fail
to express our gratitude sufficiently. If all the powers of earth should
seek to bring about this love between East and West, they would
prove incapable. If they wished to establish this unity, it would
prove impossible. But Bahá’u’lláh has accomplished both through
the power of the Holy Spirit, and this bond of unity through love is
indissoluble. It shall continue unto time everlasting, and day by
day its power shall increase. Erelong it shall enchain the world,
and eventually the hearts of all the nations of the world will be
brought together by its constraining clasp. The world of humanity
shall become the manifestation of the lights of Divinity, and the
bestowals of God shall surround all. From the standpoints of both
material and spiritual civilization extraordinary progress and development
will be witnessed. In this present cycle there will be an
evolution in civilization unparalleled in the history of the world.
The world of humanity has, heretofore, been in the stage of infancy;
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now it is approaching maturity. Just as the individual human
organism, having attained the period of maturity, reaches its fullest
degree of physical strength and ripened intellectual faculties so that
in one year of this ripened period there is witnessed an unprecedented
measure of development, likewise the world of humanity
in this cycle of its completeness and consummation will realize an
immeasurable upward progress, and that power of accomplishment
whereof each individual human reality is the depository of
God—that outworking Universal Spirit—like the intellectual faculty,
will reveal itself in infinite degrees of perfection.