Friends and fellow-workers in the Vineyard of God! After a long and unbroken silence, it gives me the greatest joy to be enabled to correspond again with my dearly-beloved co-workers of the National Spiritual Assembly. Your three letters, dated June 8th, July 10th and October 12th, have been safely received, and to each I have given my earnest and fullest attention. Their perusal which reflects only a certain amount of your activities together with the study of the enclosed communications and circulars and of the detailed and admirable report of the proceedings of the Annual Convention have all served to heighten my admiration for the thoroughness, the ability, and the devotion with which you are conducting the affairs of the Cause of God in that land. How often I have wished and yearned to be nearer to the field of your activities and thus be able to keep in a more constant and closer touch with every detail of the manifold and all-important services you render. I cherish the hope that erelong the facilities in the means of communication and transport will serve to draw us still nearer to one another, and fulfill, though partially, this long-desired wish. The Annual Convention I have been made happy and grateful to learn from your first letter that “throughout the sessions (of the last Convention) the atmosphere was one of great detachment and spirituality combined with practical vision and purpose.” I am deeply convinced that if the Annual Convention of the friends in America, as well as the National Spiritual Assembly, desire to become potent instruments for the speedy realization of the Beloved’s fondest hopes for the future of that country, they should endeavor, first and foremost, to exemplify, in an increasing degree, to all Bahá’ís and to the world at large the high ideals of fellowship and service which Bahá’u’lláh and the beloved Master repeatedly set before them. They can claim the admiration, the support and eventually the allegiance of their fellow-countrymen only by their strict regard for the dignity, the welfare, and the unity of the Cause of God, by their zeal, their disinterestedness, and constancy in the service of mankind, and by demonstrating, through their words and deeds, the need and practicability of the lofty principles which the Movement has proclaimed to the world. The efforts you have displayed, and the considerable success you have achieved in consolidating the forces of the Movement in the United States and Canada have been a source of inspiration to every one of us, and, I am certain, will spur the friends throughout the East to combined and sympathetic activity for the promotion of the Cause.