_God Passes By_ elevates this great work of the mind to a level ardently striven after but never attained in any of ages past. Those who open themselves to its vision discover in it an avenue of approach to understanding the Purpose of God, an avenue that converges with the vast expanse spread out in the Guardian’s matchless translations of the Revealed Texts. Its appearance on the centenary of the birth of the Cause—just as the Bahá’í world was celebrating the success of the first collective effort it had ever been able to undertake—summoned up for believers everywhere the full majesty and meaning of a hundred years of ceaseless sacrifice. * * * * * At a relatively early point in the second world war, the Guardian set that conflict in a perspective for Bahá’ís that was very different from the one generally prevailing. The war should be regarded, he said, “as the direct continuation” of the conflagration ignited in 1914. It would come to be seen as the “essential pre-requisite to world unification”. The entry into the war by the United States, whose president had initiated the project of a system of international order, but which had itself rejected this visionary initiative, would lead that nation, Shoghi Effendi predicted, to “assume through adversity its preponderating share of responsibility to lay down, once for all, broad, worldwide, unassailable foundations of that discredited yet immortal System.”(88) These statements proved prophetic. With the end of hostilities, it gradually became apparent that a fundamental shift in consciousness was under way throughout the world and that inherited assumptions, institutions and priorities that had been progressively undermined by forces at work during the first half of the century were now crumbling. If the change could not yet be described as an emerging conviction about the oneness of humankind, no objective observer could mistake the fact that barriers blocking such a realization, which had survived all the assaults against them earlier in the century, were at last giving way. One’s mind turns to the prophetic words of the Qur’án: “And you see the mountains and think them solid, but they shall pass away as the passing away of the clouds.” (27:88) The effect was to inspire in progressive minds a sense of confidence that it would be possible to construct a new kind of society that would not only preserve the long-term peace of the world, but enrich the lives of all of its inhabitants.