Bahai Faith -- North America; Shoghi, Effendi, 1897-1957 -- Correspondence
The distance that the American nation has traveled since its formal and
categoric repudiation of the Wilsonian ideal, the changes that have
unexpectedly overtaken it in recent years, the direction in which world
events are moving, with their inevitable impact on the policies and the
economy of that nation, are to every Bahá’í observer, viewing the
developments in the international situation, in the light of the
prophecies of both Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, most significant, and
highly instructive and encouraging. To trace the exact course which, in
these troubled times and pregnant years, this nation will follow would be
impossible. We can only, judging from the direction its affairs are now
taking, anticipate the course she will most likely choose to pursue in her
relationships with both the Republics of America and the countries of the
remaining continents.
A closer association with these Republics, on the one hand, and an
increased participation, in varying degrees, on the other, in the affairs
of the whole world, as a result of recurrent international crises, appear
as the most likely developments which the future has in store for that
country. Delays must inevitably arise, setbacks must be suffered, in the
course of that country’s evolution towards its ultimate destiny. Nothing,
however, can alter eventually that course, ordained for it by the unerring
pen of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Its federal unity having already been achieved and
its internal institutions consolidated—a stage that marked its coming of
age as a political entity—its further evolution, as a member of the family
of nations, must, under circumstances that cannot at present be
visualized, steadily continue. Such an evolution must persist until such
time when that nation will, through the active and decisive part it will
have played in the organization and the peaceful settlement of the affairs
of mankind, have attained the plenitude of its powers and functions as an
outstanding member, and component part, of a federated world.
The immediate future must, as a result of this steady, this gradual, and
inevitable absorption in the manifold perplexities and problems afflicting
humanity, be dark and oppressive for that nation. The world-shaking ordeal
which Bahá’u’lláh, as quoted in the foregoing pages, has so graphically
prophesied, may find it swept, to an unprecedented degree, into its
vortex. Out of it it will probably emerge, unlike its reactions to the
last world conflict, consciously determined to seize its opportunity, to
bring the full weight of its influence to bear upon the gigantic problems
that such an ordeal must leave in its wake, and to exorcise forever, in
conjunction with its sister nations of both the East and the West, the
greatest curse which, from time immemorial, has afflicted and degraded the
human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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