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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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