|
The moment had now arrived for that undying, that world- vitalizing Spirit that was born in Shiraz, that had been rekindled in Tihran, that had been fanned into flame in Baghdad and Adrianople, that had been carried to the West, and was now illuminating the fringes of five continents, to incarnate itself in institutions designed to canalize its outspreading energies and stimulate its growth. The Age that had witnessed the birth and rise of the Faith had now closed. The Heroic, the Apostolic Age of the Dispensation of Baha'u'llah, that primitive period in which its Founders had lived, in which its life had been generated, in which its greatest heroes had struggled and quaffed the cup of martyrdom, and its pristine foundations been established-- a period whose splendors no victories in this or any future age, however brilliant, can rival-- had now terminated with the passing of One Whose mission may be regarded as the link binding the Age in which the seed of the newborn Message had been incubating and those which are destined to witness its efflorescence and ultimate fruition. (324:1) The Formative Period, the Iron Age, of that Dispensation was now beginning, the Age in which the institutions, local, national and international, of the Faith of Baha'u'llah were to take shape, develop and become fully consolidated, in anticipation of the third, the last, the Golden Age destined to witness the emergence of a world- embracing Order enshrining the ultimate fruit of God's latest Revelation to mankind, a fruit whose maturity must signalize the establishment of a world civilization and the formal inauguration of the Kingdom of the Father upon earth as promised by Jesus Christ Himself. (324:2) To this World Order the Bab Himself had, whilst a prisoner in the mountain fastnesses of Adhirbayjan, explicitly referred in His Persian Bayan, the Mother- Book of the Babi Dispensation, had announced its advent, and associated it with the name of Baha'u'llah, Whose Mission He Himself had heralded. "Well is it with Him," is His remarkable statement in the sixteenth chapter of the third Vahid, "who fixeth his gaze upon the Order of Baha'u'llah, and rendereth thanks unto his Lord! For He will assuredly be made manifest..." To this same Order Baha'u'llah Who, in a later period, revealed the laws and principles that must govern the operation of that Order, had thus referred in the Kitab- i- Aqdas, the Mother- Book of His Dispensation: "The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this Most Great Order. Mankind's ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System, the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed." Its features Abdu'l- Baha, its great Architect, delineated in His Will and Testament, whilst the foundations of its rudimentary institutions are now being laid after Him by His followers in the East and in the West in this, the Formative Age of the Baha'i Dispensation.
(324:3)
|