Theirs is the duty to hold, aloft and undimmed, the torch of Divine guidance, as the shades of night descend upon, and ultimately envelop the entire human race. Theirs is the function, amidst its tumults, perils and agonies, to witness to the vision, and proclaim the approach, of that re-created society, that Christ-promised Kingdom, that World Order whose generative impulse is the spirit of none other than Bahá’u’lláh Himself, whose dominion is the entire planet, whose watchword is unity, whose animating power is the force of Justice, whose directive purpose is the reign of righteousness and truth, and whose supreme glory is the complete, the undisturbed and everlasting felicity of the whole of human kind.(86) In 1936 the Guardian judged that the administrative structure of the Cause was sufficiently broad and consolidated in North America that he could begin the first stage of the implementation of the Divine Plan itself. With the world sliding into another global conflagration, and the scope possible to the efforts of the Persian believers being severely limited, the focus would necessarily have to be on the expansion and consolidation of the Bahá’í community in the Western hemisphere in preparation for the much larger undertakings that lay ahead. Calling on the Plan’s appointed “executors”, the believers in North America, the Guardian laid out a Seven Year Plan, scheduled to run from 1937 to 1944. Its objectives were to establish at least one Local Spiritual Assembly in every state of the United States and every province of Canada, and to open to the Cause fourteen republics in Latin America. To these objectives was added the task, immensely demanding of a community with still very limited numbers and severely straitened financial resources, of completing the exterior ornamentation of the “Mother Temple of the West”. Rúḥíyyih _Kh_ánum has pointed out a striking parallel between two developments during this period of history. On the one hand, powerful nations were launching armies of invasion whose goal was to seize the natural resources of neighbour states—or simply to satisfy an appetite for conquest. During this same period, Shoghi Effendi was mobilizing the painfully small band of pioneers available to him, and dispatching them to the teaching goals of the Plan he had created. Within a few short years, the vast battalions of aggression would be shattered beyond recovery, their names and conquests erased from history. The little company of believers who had gone out with their lives in their hands to fulfil the mission entrusted to them by the Guardian would have achieved or exceeded all of their objectives, objectives that soon became the foundations of flourishing communities.(87)