After a revolution of well nigh one hundred years what is it
that the eye encounters as one surveys the international scene and looks back
upon the early beginnings of Bahá’í history? A world convulsed by the agonies
of contending systems, races and nations, entangled in the mesh of its
accumulated falsities, receding farther and farther from Him Who is the sole
Author of its destinies, and sinking deeper and deeper into a suicidal carnage
which its neglect and persecution of Him Who is its Redeemer have precipitated.
A Faith, still proscribed, yet bursting through its chrysalis, emerging from
the obscurity of a century-old repression, face to face with the awful
evidences of God’s wrathful anger, and destined to arise above the ruins of a
smitten civilization. A world spiritually destitute, morally bankrupt,
politically disrupted, socially convulsed, economically paralyzed, writhing,
bleeding and breaking up beneath the avenging rod of God. A Faith Whose call
remained unanswered, Whose claims were rejected, Whose warnings were brushed
aside, Whose followers were mowed down, Whose aims and purposes were maligned,
Whose summons to the rulers of the earth were ignored, Whose Herald drained the
cup of martyrdom, over the head of Whose Author swept a sea of unheard-of
tribulations, and Whose Exemplar sank beneath the weight of lifelong sorrows
and dire misfortunes. A world that has lost its bearings, in which the bright
flame of religion is fast dying out, in which the forces of a blatant
nationalism and racialism have usurped the rights and prerogatives of God
Himself, in which a flagrant secularism—the direct offspring of irreligion—has
raised its triumphant head and is protruding its ugly features, in which the
“majesty of kingship” has been disgraced, and they who wore its emblems have,
for the most part, been hurled from their thrones, in which the once
all-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies of Islám, and to a lesser extent those
of Christianity, have been discredited, and in which the virus of prejudice and
corruption is eating into the vitals of an already gravely disordered society.
A Faith Whose institutions—the pattern and crowning glory of the age which is
to come—have been ignored and in some instances trampled upon and uprooted,
Whose unfolding system has been derided and partly suppressed and crippled,
Whose rising Order—the sole refuge of a civilization in the embrace of doom—has
been spurned and challenged, Whose Mother-Temple has been seized and
misappropriated, and Whose “House”—the “cynosure of an adoring world”—has,
through a gross miscarriage of justice, as witnessed by the world’s highest
tribunal, been delivered into the hands of, and violated by, its implacable
enemies.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Promised Day Is Come’)
