Bahai Faith -- North America; Shoghi, Effendi, 1897-1957 -- Correspondence
Observations such as these, however distasteful and depressing they may
be, should not, in the least, blind us to those virtues and qualities of
high intelligence, of youthfulness, of unbounded initiative, and
enterprise which the nation as a whole so conspicuously displays, and
which are being increasingly reflected by the community of the believers
within it. Upon these virtues and qualities, no less than upon the
elimination of the evils referred to, must depend, to a very great extent,
the ability of that community to lay a firm foundation for the country’s
future role in ushering in the Golden Age of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh.
How great, therefore, how staggering the responsibility that must weigh
upon the present generation of the American believers, at this early stage
in their spiritual and administrative evolution, to weed out, by every
means in their power, those faults, habits, and tendencies which they have
inherited from their own nation, and to cultivate, patiently and
prayerfully, those distinctive qualities and characteristics that are so
indispensable to their effective participation in the great redemptive
work of their Faith. Incapable as yet, in view of the restricted size of
their community and the limited influence it now wields, of producing any
marked effect on the great mass of their countrymen, let them focus their
attention, for the present, on their own selves, their own individual
needs, their own personal deficiencies and weaknesses, ever mindful that
every intensification of effort on their part will better equip them for
the time when they will be called upon to eradicate in their turn such
evil tendencies from the lives and the hearts of the entire body of their
fellow-citizens. Nor must they overlook the fact that the World Order,
whose basis they, as the advance-guard of the future Bahá’í generations of
their countrymen, are now laboring to establish, can never be reared
unless and until the generality of the people to which they belong has
been already purged from the divers ills, whether social or political,
that now so severely afflict it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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