Messages to America

The assistance extended by the American Bahá’í Community to the long-suffering German believers is a further evidence of their readiness, so abundantly demonstrated in the past, to champion the interests, and to rehabilitate the institutions of their sister communities throughout the Bahá’í world. This support, so generously extended, so consistently and faithfully offered by the rank and file of the American believers, and particularly by their elected National representatives, is but a subsidiary aspect of the tremendous undertakings which, in both the North and South American continents, the standard bearers of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh have initiated and developed, for the promotion of its interests, during the concluding decades of the first Bahá’í century.

The twofold task which they have so nobly undertaken—the proclamation of the Faith in the North American continent and the consolidation of its nascent institutions in Latin America—must, whatever plan is devised in the coming years for the furtherance of their world-wide mission—be relentlessly prosecuted. That further responsibilities, of a momentous character, will have to be superimposed on the stalwart prosecutors of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Divine Plan, as they gird up their loins to carry a stage further their historic labors in obedience to His wishes, no one can for a moment doubt. 87 As the field of their activities, ranging over entire continents, grows in scope and in importance, the aims and purposes associated with the first stage of their glorious mission must, in no wise, be either neglected or forgotten. The steady multiplication of groups and of Spiritual Assemblies throughout the States of the great American Republic, the continual broadcasting of the Divine Message to the leaders of public opinion and the masses, as well as the establishment of the newly fledged local Assemblies throughout Latin America on an unassailable basis, and the dissemination of Bahá’í literature among its people, demand whatever the nature of the supplementary responsibilities that will have to be assumed in the years to come, the closest attention on the part of the entire body of the American believers, and must continue to be regarded as the fundamental issues facing their national representatives. The exploits immortalizing the first stage of the Divine Plan, however glorious their record, have yet to yield their noblest fruits. Efforts unremitting, systematic, and continent-wide in their scope, can alone garner a harvest worthy of the high confidence placed in them by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. May they prove themselves increasingly worthy of so high a privilege, so glorious a task.

March 25, 1946