Messages to America

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 15 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