I feel impelled, on this historic occasion, when the members of the American, the British, the German and the newly formed Italo-Swiss National Spiritual Assemblies, as well as representatives of the Bahá’ís of the United Kingdom, of Eire, of Germany, of Austria, of the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, of the Iberian Peninsula, of Italy, of Switzerland, of France and of Finland are assembled, to pay a warm tribute to the valiant labors of the early British and French Bahá’í pioneers, who at the very dawn of the Faith in Europe, strove with such diligence, consecration and resolution, to fan into flame that holy fire which the hand of the appointed Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant had kindled in the northwest extremity of that continent on the morrow of His Father’s ascension. I recall the slow eastward spread of that infant light which led to the gradual emergence of the German and Austrian Bahá’í Communities, during the darkest period of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s incarceration in the prison-fortress of Akká. I am reminded of His subsequent epoch-making visit, soon after His providential release from His forty-year confinement in the Most Great Prison, to these newly fledged struggling communities, of His patient seed-sowing destined to yield at a later age its first fruits, and constituting a landmark of the utmost significance in the rise and establishment of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh in that continent. EMERGENCE OF FAITH’S EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS I, moreover, call to mind, on this occasion, the successive episodes which, on the morrow of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ascension, in the course of the initial epoch of the Formative Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation, signalized the emergence of those administrative institutions, both local and national, which proclaimed the germination of those potent seeds which had lain dormant for more than a decade in these newly opened European territories, and which culminated in the construction of the framework of the Administrative Order of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh and the erection of the first two pillars destined to sustain in that continent the weight of the final unit of that Order.