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THE UTMOST VIGOR, VIGILANCE AND CONSECRATION The new Plan on which the American Baha'i community has embarked, in the course of the opening years of the second Baha'i century, is of such vastness and complexity as to require the utmost vigor, vigilance and consecration on the part of both the general body of its prosecutors and those who are called upon, as their National elected representatives, to conduct its operation, define its processes, watch over its execution, and insure its ultimate success. The obstacles confronting both its participants and organizers, particularly in the European field, are formidable, and call for the utmost courage, perseverance, fortitude and self-sacrifice. (104:3) The precarious international situation in both Hemispheres, the distress and preoccupation of the masses, in most of the countries to which pioneers will soon be proceeding, with the cares of every day life, the severe restrictions which are still imposed on visitors and travellers in foreign lands, the religious conservatism and spiritual lethargy which characterize the population in most of the lands where the new pioneers are to labor, add to the challenge of the task, and render all the more glorious the labors of the national community that has arisen to achieve what posterity will regard as the greatest collective enterprise, not only in the history of the community itself, but in the annals of the Faith with which it stands identified.
(104:4)
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