…in the Garden of Ridván, on the eve of His banishment to
Constantinople, the ten-year delay, ordained by an inscrutable Providence, had
been terminated through the Declaration of His Mission and the visible
emergence of what was to become the nucleus of a world-embracing Fellowship.
What now remained to be achieved was the proclamation, in the city of
Adrianople, of that same Mission to the world’s secular and ecclesiastical
leaders, to be followed, in successive decades, by a further unfoldment, in the
prison-fortress of Akká, of the principles and precepts constituting the
bedrock of that Faith, by the formulation of the laws and ordinances designed
to safeguard its integrity, by the establishment, immediately after His
ascension, of the Covenant designed to preserve its unity and perpetuate its
influence, by the prodigious and world-wide extension of its activities, under
the guidance of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Center of that Covenant, and lastly, by the
rise, in the Formative Age of that Faith, of its Administrative Order, the
harbinger of its Golden Age and future glory.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’)
