ex than that which confronts a divided humanity in
its efforts to achieve the unification of all mankind.

Who knows that for so exalted a conception to take shape a suffering more
intense that any it has yet experienced will have to be inflicted upon
humanity? Could anything less than the fire of a civil war with all its
violence and vicissitudes--a war that nearly rent the great American
Republic--have welded the states, not only into a Union of independent
units, but into a Nation, in spite of all the ethnic differences that
characterized its component parts? That so fundamental a revolution,
involving such far-reaching changes in the structure of society, can be
achieved through the ordinary processes of diplomacy and education seems
highly improbable. We have but to turn our gaze to humanity's
blood-stained history to realize that nothing short of intense mental as
well as physical agony has been able to precipitate those epoch-making
changes that constitute the greatest landmarks in the history of human
civilization.

Great and far-reaching as have been those changes in the past, they cannot
but appear, when viewed in their proper perspective, except as subsidiary
adjustments preluding that transformation of unparalleled majesty and
scope which humanity is in this age bound to undergo. That the forces of a
world catastrophe can alone precipitate such a new phase of human thought
is, alas, becoming increasingly apparent. That nothing short of the fire
of a severe ordeal, unparalleled in its intensity, can fuse and weld the
discordant entities, that constitute the elements of present-day
civilization, into the integral components of the world Commonwealth of
the future is a truth which future events will increasingly demonstrate.

The prophetic voice of Baha'u'llah warning, in the concluding passages of
the "Hidden Words", "the peoples of the world" that "an unforeseen
calamity is following them and that grievous retribution awaiteth them"
throws indeed a lurid light upon the immediate fortunes of sorrowing
humanity. Nothing but a fiery ordeal, out of which humanity will emerge,
chastened and prepared, can succeed in implanting that sense of
responsibility which the leaders of a new-born age must arise to shoulder.

I would again direct your attention to those ominous words of Baha'u'llah
which I have already quoted: "And when the appointed hour is come, there
shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs