Humanity,
heedless and impenitent, is admittedly hovering on the edge of an awful abyss,
ready to precipitate itself into that titanic struggle, that crucible whose
chastening fires alone can and will weld its antagonistic elements of race,
class, religion and nation into one coherent system, one world commonwealth.
“The hour is approaching” is Bahá’u’lláh’s own testimony, “when the most great
convulsion will have appeared... I swear by God! The promised day is come, the
day when tormenting trials will have surged above your heads, and beneath your
feet, saying: ‘Taste ye, what your hands have wrought.’” Not ours to question
the almighty wisdom or fathom the inscrutable ways of Him in whose hands the
ultimate destiny of an unregenerate yet potentially glorious race must lie.
Ours rather is the duty to believe that the world-wide community of the Most
Great Name, and in particular, at the present time its vanguard in North America, however buffeted by the powerful currents of
these troublous times, and however keen their awareness of the inevitability of
the final eruption, can, if they will, rise to the level of their calling and
discharge their functions, both in the period which is witnessing the confusion
and breakdown of human institutions, and in the ensuing epoch during which the
shattered basis of a dismembered society is to be recast, and its forces reshaped,
re-directed and unified.
(Shoghi Effendi, from a letter dated July 28, 1939;
‘Messages to America’)
