elation of God for this age, Baha'u'llah said, they will find in
themselves a moral empowerment which human effort alone has proven
incapable of generating. "A new race of men"(109) will emerge as the
result of this relationship, and the work of building a global
civilization will begin. The mission of the Baha'i community was to
demonstrate the efficacy of this Covenant in healing the ills that divide
the human race.

Baha'u'llah died at Bahji on May 29, 1892, in His 75th year. At the time
of His passing, the cause entrusted to Him forty years earlier in the
darkness of Teheran's Black Pit was poised to break free of the Islamic
lands where it had taken shape, and to establish itself first across
America and Europe and then throughout the world. In doing so, it would
itself become a vindication of the promise of the new Covenant between God
and humankind. For alone of all the world's independent religions, the
Baha'i Faith and its community of believers were to pass successfully
through the critical first century of their existence with their unity
firmly intact, undamaged by the age-old blight of schism and faction.
Their experience offers compelling evidence for Baha'u'llah's assurance
that the human race, in all its diversity, can learn to live and work as
one people, in a common global homeland.

Just two years before His death, Baha'u'llah received at Bahji one of the
few Westerners to meet Him, and the only one to leave a written account of
the experience. The visitor was Edward Granville Browne, a rising young
orientalist from Cambridge University, whose attention had originally been
attracted by the dramatic history of the Bab and His heroic band of
followers. Of his meeting with Baha'u'llah, Browne wrote:

Though I dimly suspected whither I was going and whom I was to behold (for
no distinct intimation had been given to me), a second or two elapsed ere,
with a throb of wonder and awe, I became definitely conscious that the
room was not untenanted. In the corner where the divan met the wall sat a
wondrous and venerable figure... The face of him on whom I gazed I can
never forget, though I cannot describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to
read one's very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow... No
need to ask in whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before one who is
the object of a devotion and love which kings might envy and emperors sigh
for in vain! A mild dignified voice bade me be seated, a