Messages to America: Selected Letters and Cablegrams Addressed to the Bahá'í's of North America 1932–1946Shoghi, Effendi
Religion
Messages to America: Selected Letters and Cablegrams Addressed to the Bahá'í's of North America 1932–1946
Shoghi, Effendi
Bahai Faith -- North America; Shoghi, Effendi, 1897-1957 -- Correspondence
That same impulse was markedly accelerated when the Center of the Covenant
Himself, through a series of successive acts, chose to disclose, to an
unprecedented extent, the character of the Mission reserved for the
followers of Bahá’u’lláh in that continent, and to delineate the tasks
whereby that God-given design was to be fulfilled. No sooner had He
mounted the helm of the Faith than He unmistakably revealed to His
followers His purpose of making the establishment of that Faith in the
West, and particularly in the New World, one of the chief objectives of
His ministry. No sooner had that great feat been accomplished than He
undertook to visit those centers which His disciples had labored to
establish, and, through a number of symbolic acts and weighty
pronouncements, to pave the way for the inauguration of the collective
undertaking He was preparing those disciples to carry out. In the Tablets
of the Divine Plan, revealed at a later stage, and in circumstances almost
as critical as those which had accompanied the inception of the Faith in
the West, and which may be designated as the Charter of the Plan with
which He was to entrust them in the evening of His life, He, in a language
still more graphic and in terms more definite than those used by either
the Báb or Bahá’u’lláh, revealed the high distinction and the glorious
work which America, and particularly the United States and Canada, was to
achieve in both the Formative and Golden Ages of the Bahá’í Dispensation.
His references to the “extraordinary brilliancy” of the light which His
Father’s Revelation was to shed in the West; His prediction that “the West
will have replaced the East” “through the splendor” of that Faith; His
specific prophecies regarding the future of the American continent, as the
“land wherein the splendors of His light shall be revealed” and “the
mysteries of His Faith shall be unveiled,” and which “will lead all
nations spiritually”; His even more specific tribute to the Great Republic
of the West which He proclaims to be “worthy of being the first to build
the Tabernacle of the Most Great Peace and proclaim the oneness of
mankind,” to be “equipped and empowered to accomplish that which will
adorn the pages of history, to become the envy of the world, and be blest
in both the East and the West”; His yet more startling words addressed to
the followers of the Faith in that Republic, referring to them as
“apostles of Bahá’u’lláh,” characterizing their mission as “unspeakably
glorious,” and assuring them that “should success crown your enterprise
... the throne of the Kingdom of God will, in the plenitude of its majesty
and glory, be firmly established”; and finally, His soul-stirring
assertion that “the moment this Divine Message is carried forward by the
American believers from the shores of America, and is propagated through
the continents of Europe, of Asia, of Africa and of Australasia, and as
far as the islands of the Pacific, this community will find itself
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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