Recall with feelings of profound emotion, as mid-August approaches, the distressing circumstances attending the dastardly act which, one hundred years ago, precipitated the chain of calamitous events, unparalleled in scope and severity in the annals of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh and constituting, next to the martyrdom of its Herald, the darkest, bloodiest and most tragic episode of the Heroic Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation. Invite members of all communities of the Bahá’í World, standing at the threshold of the Holy Year to call to mind the manifold tribulations afflicting God’s infant Faith immediately preceding, accompanying and following the imprisonment of the Author of the Bahá’í Revelation in the Síyáh-Chál in Tihrán, the somber scene of the birth of His glorious mission. Urge them to remember the multitude of barbarous acts in which king, government, people and ecclesiastics participated; to ponder the ferocious character of the persecutions; and to meditate upon the vastness of their range as well as their far-reaching consequences. 40 Request them to dwell particularly upon the seeming helplessness of God’s struggling Faith and direct special attention to the ordeals undergone by Bahá’u’lláh, its sole surviving pillar, subsequent to the birth of His Mission, His ultimate banishment, and culminating in His incarceration in the Holy Land and in the fulfilment of age-long prophecies.

Address to them, as well as to their national representatives, my last appeal here at the commencement of the forthcoming Centenary Celebrations to exert in the course of the critical, fleeting months ahead, one final, supreme effort to ensure complete, total success of all plans formulated by National Assemblies in every continent of the globe, culminating in the Ridván period, falling in the middle and marking the central features of the celebrations of the Holy Year.

Supplicating God’s bountiful blessings on each and every national enterprise, the triumphant consummation of which will be regarded by posterity as a befitting tribute paid by their participants to the immortal memory of the unexampled heroism of the dawn-breakers of the Apostolic Age of the Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh and will crown the festivities commemorating the centenary of the birth of His Mission and will constitute a worthy prelude to the launching of the global spiritual crusade destined to culminate in the one hundredth anniversary of the formal assumption by the Author of the Bahá’í Revelation of His Prophetic Office, and to diffuse the radiance of His Faith over the face of the entire planet.

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