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During this Formative Age of the Faith, and in the course of the present and succeeding epochs, the last and crowning stage in the erection of the framework of the Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah-- the election of the Universal House of Justice-- will have been completed, the "Kitab- i- Aqdas", the Mother- Book of His Revelation, will have been codified and its laws promulgated, the Lesser Peace will have been established, the unity of mankind will have been achieved and its maturity attained, the Plan conceived by Abdu'l- Baha will have been executed, the emancipation of the Faith from the fetters of religious orthodoxy will have been effected, and its independent religious status will have been universally recognized.. (30:2) ..we cannot fail to perceive the workings of two simultaneous processes, generated as far back as the concluding years of the Heroic Age of our Faith, each clearly defined, each distinctly separate, yet closely related and destined to culminate, in the fullness of time, in a single glorious consummation. (30:3) One of these processes is associated with the mission of the American Baha'i community, the other with the destiny of the American nation. The one serves directly the interests of the Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah.. (30:4) The other process dates back to the outbreak of the First World War that threw the Great Republic of the West into the vortex of the first stage of a world upheaval. It received its initial impetus through the formulation of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, closely associating for the first time that Republic with the fortunes of the Old World. It suffered its first set- back through the dissociation of that Republic from the newly- born League of Nations which that President had laboured to create. It acquired added momentum through the outbreak of the Second World War, inflicting unprecedented suffering on that Republic, and involving it still further in the affairs of all the continents of the globe. It was further reinforced through the declaration embodied in the Atlantic Charter, as voiced by one of its chief progenitors, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It assumed a definite outline through the birth of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference. It acquired added significance through the choice of the City of the Covenant itself as the seat of the newly- born organization, through the declaration recently made by the American President related to his country's commitments in Greece and Turkey, as well as through the submission to the General Assembly of the United Nations of the thorny and challenging problem of the Holy Land, the spiritual as well as the administrative centre of the World Faith of Baha'u'llah. It must, however long and tortuous the way, lead, through a series of victories and reverses, to the political unification of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, to the emergence of a world government, and the establishment of the Lesser Peace, as foretold by Baha'u'llah and foreshadowed by the Prophet Isaiah. It must, in the end, culminate in the unfurling of the banner of the Most Great Peace, in the Golden Age of the Dispensation of Baha'u'llah. (5 June 1947 to the Baha'is of West, published in "Citadel of Faith: Messages to America 1947- 1957" (Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1980), p. 6, pp. 32- 33) [52] (30:5) The raising of this Edifice will in turn herald the construction, in the course of successive epochs of the Formative Age of the Faith, of several other structures, which will serve as the administrative seats of such divinely appointed institutions as the Guardianship, the Hands of the Cause, and the Universal House of Justice. These Edifices will, in the shape of a far- flung arc, and following a harmonizing style of architecture, surround the resting- places of the Greatest Holy Leaf, ranking as foremost among the members of her sex in the Baha'i Dispensation, of her Brother, offered up as a ransom by Baha'u'llah for the quickening of the world and its unification, and of their Mother, proclaimed by Him to be His chosen "consort in all the worlds of God". The ultimate completion of this stupendous undertaking will mark the culmination of the development of a world- wide divinely- appointed Administrative Order whose beginnings may be traced as far back as the concluding years of the Heroic Age of the Faith. (31:1) This vast and irresistible process, unexampled in the spiritual history of mankind, and which will synchronize with two no less significant developments-- the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of Baha'i national and local institutions-- the one outside and the other within the Baha'i world-- will attain its final consummation, in the Golden Age of the Faith, through the raising of the standard of the Most Great Peace, and the emergence, in the plenitude of its power and glory, of the focal Centre of the agencies constituting the World Order of Baha'u'llah. The final establishment of this seat of the future Baha'i World Commonwealth will signalize at once the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Founder of our Faith and the advent of the Kingdom of the Father repeatedly lauded and promised by Jesus Christ. (31:2) This World Order will, in turn, in the course of successive Dispensations of the Baha'i Cycle, yield its fairest fruit through the birth and flowering of a civilization, divinely inspired, unique in its features, world- embracing in its scope, and fundamentally spiritual in its character-- a civilization destined as it unfolds to derive its initial impulse from the spirit animating the very institutions which, in their embryonic state, are now stirring in the womb of the present Formative Age of the Faith. (27 November 1954 to the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States, published in "Messages to the Baha'i World, 1950- 1957" (Wilmette: Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1971), pp. 74- 75) [53]
(31:3)
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