On the occasion of the launching of an epochal, global, spiritual, decade-long crusade, constituting the high-water mark of the festivities commemorating the centenary of the birth of the Mission of Bahá’u’lláh, coinciding with the ninetieth anniversary of the declaration of that same Mission in the Garden of Ridván, and synchronizing with both the convocation of the All-American Intercontinental Teaching Conference in Chicago, and the fiftieth anniversary of the inception of the holiest Ma_sh_riqu’l-A_dh_kár of the Bahá’í world and its dedication to public worship—on such a solemn and historic occasion I invite His followers, the world over, to contemplate with me the glorious and manifold evidences of the onward march of His Faith and of the steady unfoldment of its embryonic World Order both in the Holy Land and in the five continents of the globe. This infinitely precious Faith, despite eleven decades of uninterrupted persecution, on the part of governments and ecclesiastics, involving the martyrdom of its Prophet-Herald, the four banishments and forty-year-long exile suffered by its Founder, the forty years of incarceration inflicted upon its Exemplar, and the sacrifice of no less than twenty thousand of its followers, has succeeded in firmly establishing itself in all the continents of the globe, and is irresistibly forging ahead, with accelerating momentum, bidding fair to envelop, at the close of the coming decade, the whole planet with the radiance of its splendor.