If the Light that is now streaming forth upon an
increasingly responsive humanity with a radiance that bids fair to eclipse the
splendor of such triumphs as the forces of religion have achieved in days past;
if the signs and tokens which proclaimed its advent have been, in many
respects, unique in the annals of past Revelations; if its votaries have
evinced traits and qualities unexampled in the spiritual history of mankind;
these should be attributed not to a superior merit which the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh,
as a Revelation isolated and alien from any previous Dispensation, might
possess, but rather should be viewed and explained as the inevitable outcome of
the forces that have made of this present age an age infinitely more advanced,
more receptive, and more insistent to receive an ampler measure of Divine
Guidance than has hitherto been vouchsafed to mankind. (Shoghi Effendi, from a
letter dated March 21, 1932; ‘The World Order of Baha’u’llah’)
