Religion loses its relevance, and experimentation
becomes increasingly fragmented, further deepening social divisions.
Increasingly, uncertainty about the meaning and value of life generates
anxiety and confusion. Speaking about this condition in our own age
Baha'u'llah says:

We can well perceive how the whole human race is encompassed with great,
with incalculable afflictions. We see it languishing on its bed of
sickness, sore-tried and disillusioned. They that are intoxicated by
self-conceit have interposed themselves between it and the Divine and
infallible Physician. Witness how they have entangled all men, themselves
included, in the mesh of their devices. They can neither discover the
cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of the remedy. They have
conceived the straight to be crooked, and have imagined their friend an
enemy.(51)

When each of the Divine impulses has fulfilled itself, the process recurs.
A new Manifestation of God appears with the fuller measure of Divine
inspiration for the next stage in the awakening and civilizing of
humankind:

Consider the hour at which the supreme Manifestation of God revealeth
Himself unto men. Ere that hour cometh, the Ancient Being, Who is still
unknown of men and hath not as yet given utterance to the Word of God, is
Himself the All-Knower in a world devoid of any man that hath known Him.
He is indeed the Creator without a creation.... This is indeed the Day of
which it hath been written: "Whose shall be the Kingdom this Day?" And
none can be found ready to answer!(52)

Until a section of humanity begins to respond to the new Revelation, and a
new spiritual and social paradigm begins to take shape, people subsist
spiritually and morally on the last traces of earlier Divine endowments.
The routine tasks of society may or may not be done; laws may be obeyed or
flouted; social and political experimentation may flame up or fail; but
the roots of faith--without which no society can indefinitely endure--have
been exhausted. At the "end of the age," at the "end of the world," the
spiritually minded begin to turn again to the Creative source. However
clumsy or disturbing the process may be, however inelegant or unfortunate
some of the options considered, such searching is an instinctive response
to the awareness that an immense chasm has opened in the ordered life of
humankind.(53) The effects of the new Revelation, Baha'u'llah says, are
universal, and not limite