lture
evolves into a civilization, it assimilates achievements and insights of
past eras in a multitude of fresh permutations. Features of past cultures
that cannot be incorporated atrophy or are taken up by marginal elements
among the population. The Word of God creates new possibilities within
both the individual consciousness and human relationships.

Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God is endowed with such
potency as can instill new life into every human frame... All the wondrous
works ye behold in this world have been manifested through the operation
of His supreme and most exalted Will, His wondrous and inflexible
Purpose.... No sooner is this resplendent word uttered, than its animating
energies, stirring within all created things, give birth to the means and
instruments whereby such arts can be produced and perfected.... In the
days to come, ye will, verily, behold things of which ye have never heard
before.... Every single letter proceeding out of the mouth of God is
indeed a mother letter, and every word uttered by Him Who is the Well
Spring of Divine Revelation is a mother word....(48)

The sequence of the Divine Revelations, the Bab asserts, is "a process
that hath had no beginning and will have no end."(49) Although the mission
of each of the Manifestations is limited in time and in the functions it
performs, it is an integral part of an ongoing and progressive unfoldment
of God's power and will:

Contemplate with thine inward eye the chain of successive Revelations that
hath linked the Manifestation of Adam with that of the Bab. I testify
before God that each one of these Manifestations hath been sent down
through the operation of the Divine Will and Purpose, that each hath been
the bearer of a specific Message, that each hath been entrusted with a
divinely revealed Book... The measure of the Revelation with which every
one of them hath been identified had been definitely foreordained....(50)

Eventually, as an ever-evolving civilization exhausts its spiritual
sources, a process of disintegration sets in, as it does throughout the
phenomenal world. Turning again to analogies offered by nature,
Baha'u'llah compares this hiatus in the development of civilization to the
onset of winter. Moral vitality diminishes, as does social cohesion.
Challenges which would have been overcome at an earlier age, or been
turned into opportunities for exploration and achievement, become
insuperable barriers.