The two chief instruments by which Shoghi Effendi set about cultivating a heightened devotion to teaching in both East and West were the same as those on which the Master had relied. A steady stream of letters to communities and individuals alike opened up for the recipients new dimensions in the beliefs they had embraced. The most important of these communications, however, now became those addressed to National and Local Spiritual Assemblies. Their effect was intensified by the stream of returning pilgrims who shared insights gained by direct contact with the Centre of the Cause. Through these connections every individual believer was encouraged to see himself or herself as an instrument of the power flowing through the Covenant. The invaluable compilation that eventually appeared under the title _Messages to America, 1932-1946_ provides a review of the steps by which Shoghi Effendi drew the North American believers ever deeper into the implications of the Master’s Divine Plan for “the spiritual conquest of the planet”: By the sublimity and serenity of their faith, by the steadiness and clarity of their vision, the incorruptibility of their character, the rigor of their discipline, the sanctity of their morals, and the unique example of their community life, they can and indeed must in a world polluted with its incurable corruptions, paralyzed by its haunting fears, torn by its devastating hatreds, and languishing under the weight of its appalling miseries demonstrate the validity of their claim to be regarded as the sole repository of that grace upon whose operation must depend the complete deliverance, the fundamental reorganization and the supreme felicity of all mankind.(84) The Guardian held up before the eyes of the North American Bahá’í community a vision of their spiritual destiny. Its members were, he said, “the spiritual descendants of the heroes of God’s Cause”, their rising institutions were “the visible symbols of its [the Faith’s] undoubted sovereignty”, the teachers and pioneers it sent out were “torch-bearers of an as yet unborn civilization”, it was their collective challenge to assume “a preponderating share” in laying the foundations of the World Order “which the Báb has heralded, which the mind of Bahá’u’lláh has envisioned, and whose features ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, its Architect, has delineated....”(85) The language of the messages is magnificent, enthralling. In acknowledging the darkness that widespread godlessness, violence and creeping immorality was engendering, Shoghi Effendi described the role that Bahá’ís everywhere must play as instruments of the transforming power of the new Revelation: