Let us acknowledge at the outset the magnitude of the ruin
that the human race has brought upon itself during the period of history under
review. [20th Century] The loss of life alone has been beyond counting. The
disintegration of basic institutions of social order, the violation—indeed, the
abandonment—of standards of decency, the betrayal of the life of the mind
through surrender to ideologies as squalid as they have been empty, the
invention and deployment of monstrous weapons of mass annihilation, the
bankrupting of entire nations and the reduction of masses of human beings to
hopeless poverty, the reckless destruction of the environment of the
planet—such are only the more obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to even
the darkest of ages past. Merely to mention them is to call to mind the Divine
warnings expressed in Bahá’u’lláh’s words of a century ago: “O heedless ones!
Though the wonders of My mercy have encompassed all created things, both
visible and invisible, and though the revelations of My grace and bounty have
permeated every atom of the universe, yet the rod with which I can chastise the
wicked is grievous, and the fierceness of Mine anger against them terrible.”
(‘Century of Light’, a document prepared under the supervision of the Universal
House of Justice and published in 2001)
