Suffice it to say that, despite these interminable delays, protests and evasions ... the publicity achieved for the Faith by this memorable litigation, and the defence of its cause—the cause of truth and justice—by the world’s highest tribunal, have been such as to excite the wonder of its friends and to fill with consternation its enemies.(135) The birth of the United Nations opened to the Faith a far broader and more effective forum for its efforts toward exerting a spiritual influence on the life of society. As early as 1947, a special “Palestine Committee” of the United Nations solicited the views of the Guardian on the future of that mandated territory. His response to the inquiry provided an opportunity for him to forward an authoritative exposition of the history and teachings of the Cause itself. That same year, with Shoghi Effendi’s encouragement, the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada submitted to the international organization a document entitled “A Bahá’í Declaration on Human Obligations and Rights”, which was to inspire the work of Bahá’í writers and spokespersons over the decades that followed.(136) A year later the eight National Spiritual Assemblies then in existence secured from the responsible United Nations body accreditation for “The Bahá’í International Community” as an international non-governmental organization. It was not only the Faith’s slowly emerging relationship with the new international order that elicited support of this kind from the Guardian. The pages of _God Passes By_ and Amatu’l-Bahá’s memoirs of the Guardian are filled with references to responses that influential individuals and organizations made to initiatives taken by Shoghi Effendi and to the events around the world in which Bahá’í representatives were invited to participate. In the perspective of history, one is struck by the vast disparity between many of these relatively inconsequential occasions and the attention given them by a figure whose work was not only of enormous importance to humanity’s future, but who understood fully the relative significance of events unfolding around him. What the Bahá’í community has been given in this careful record is a guide to the way that it must take up the growing opportunities born out of modest beginnings.