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THE AUSPICIOUS YEAR The auspicious year destined to witness the Centenary of the Birth of the Faith of Baha'u'llah is brilliantly opening. The last year of the first Baha'i Century is more than half spent. The tempo of organized, concerted activities of the members of the worldwide Baha'i 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 Baha'i Era. Tihran reports thirty-four Assemblies constituted, fifty-four groups reinforced, fifty-eight new centers established. Messages from Delhi indicate that Baha'is have established residence in over sixty localities in India and eighteen Assemblies are already functioning. To the National Baha'i Headquarters previously founded in Tihran, Wilmette and Baghdad, are now added similar centers in Cairo, Delhi and Sydney, officially registered in the names of their respective National Assemblies, and representing an addition to Baha'i national endowments amounting to approximately eighteen thousand pounds. The Baha'i international endowments have been further enriched by a recent acquisition on Mount Carmel in the vicinity of the Bab'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 Baha'u'llah. The recent acquisition of land adjacent to the site of the projected Tihran 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 Baha'i communities throughout the whole century, must, ere the hundred years run out, culminate in one last, supreme effort whose repercussions will resound throughout the Baha'i world.
(67:1)
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