outstanding functions which the members of this Assembly must discharge, namely, the solemn consecration of the completed House of Worship and the commemoration of its Jubilee, the formal convocation of the Inter-continental Conference, and the holding of the Annual Convention in Wilmette, and the effective participation of the members of the American Bahá’í Community, both officially and unofficially, in the three other historic Inter-continental Conferences to be convened successively in Kampala, Stockholm and New Delhi. The tasks ahead, calling for the expenditure of every ounce of energy on the part of the members of the indefatigable irresistably advancing, majestically unfolding American Bahá’í community and for the unrelaxing vigilance of its national elected representatives, are immense, highly diversified, truly challenging, sacred in character, undreamt of in their potentialities, urgent by their very nature, and inescapable in the responsibilities they involve. At the World Center of the Faith, where, at long last the machinery of its highest institutions has been erected, and around whose most holy shrines the supreme organs of its unfolding Order, are, in their embryonic form, unfolding; amidst the diversified tribes and races, peopling the Dependencies and Principalities of the Dark Continent of Africa; in the far-flung territories of Central and South America so alien in culture, temperament, habits, language and outlook; in the capital cities and traditional strongholds of a materially highly advanced yet spiritually famished, much tormented, fear-ridden, hopelessly-sundered, heterogeneous conglomeration of races, nations, sects and classes overspreading the continent of Europe; in the heart of the African continent, in the capital city of the Indian sub-continent; in one of the leading capitals of the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe; in the very heart of the leading Republic of the Western Hemisphere, the standard-bearers of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, the champion-builders of the Administrative Order, the vanguard of the Heralds of His World Order, and the Chief and appointed executors of the Master Plan of the Center of His Covenant, have, in the course of the few, fast-fleeting months ahead, separating them from the grandest crusade thus far launched in Bahá’í history, been assigned tasks, obligations and responsibilities that they can afford to neither minimize, neglect or shirk for a moment.