Messages to America

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. Ṭihrán 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 Ṭihrán, Wilmette and Baghdád, are now added similar centers in Cairo, Delhi and Sydney, officially 68 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 Ṭihrán 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