The Guardian provided, as well, the organizing image for this mighty work. The “Heroic Age” of Bahá’u’lláh’s Dispensation, he declared, had ended with the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The Bahá’í community now embarked on the “Iron Age”, the “Formative Age”, in which the Administrative Order would be erected throughout the planet, its institutions established and the “society building” powers inherent in it fully revealed. Far ahead lay what Shoghi Effendi called the “Golden Age” of the Dispensation, leading eventually to the emergence of the Bahá’í World Commonwealth that will constitute the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God and the creation of a world civilization.(72) The impulse that had been initially communicated to human consciousness through the revelation of the Creative Word itself, whose revolutionary social implications had been proclaimed by the Master, was now being translated by their appointed interpreter into the vocabulary of political and economic transformation in which the public discourse of the century was everywhere taking place. Lending the process irresistible force, illuminating ever new dimensions of Bahá’í experience, and serving as the mainspring of the unification of humankind it proclaimed was the Covenant that Bahá’u’lláh had established between Himself and those who turn to Him. Although not initially designated “Spiritual Assemblies”, the councils that local Bahá’í communities in Persia had been encouraged by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to create had assumed responsibility for the administration of their affairs. In the light of what was to follow, no one with a sense of history can fail to be struck by the fact that the Faith’s first Spiritual Assembly, that of Tehran, was founded in 1897, the year of Shoghi Effendi’s own birth. Under the Master’s guidance, intermittent meetings held by the four Hands of the Cause in Persia had gradually evolved into this institution that served simultaneously as Persia’s “Central Spiritual Assembly” and as the governing body of the local community in the capital. By the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, there were more than thirty Local Spiritual Assemblies established in Persia. In 1922 Shoghi Effendi called for the formal establishment of Persia’s National Spiritual Assembly, an achievement delayed until 1934 by the demands related to the taking of a reliable census of the community as a basis for the election of delegates.