The weight of the potentialities with which this Faith,
possessing no peer or equal in the world’s spiritual history, and marking the
culmination of a universal prophetic cycle, has been endowed, staggers our
imagination. The brightness of the millennial glory which it must shed in the
fullness of time dazzles our eyes. The magnitude of the shadow which its Author
will continue to cast on successive Prophets destined to be raised up after Him
eludes our calculation.
Already in the space of less than a century the operation of
the mysterious processes generated by its creative spirit has provoked a tumult
in human society such as no mind can fathom. Itself undergoing a period of
incubation during its primitive age, it has, through the emergence of its
slowly-crystallizing system, induced a fermentation in the general life of
mankind designed to shake the very foundations of a disordered society, to
purify its life-blood, to reorientate and reconstruct its institutions, and
shape its final destiny. (Shoghi Effendi, forward to ‘God Passes By’)
