rld of being hath never had, nor doth it
yet possess, the capacity for such a revelation. The day, however, is
approaching when the potentialities of so great a favor will, by virtue of
His behest, be manifested unto men."

For the revelation of so great a favor a period of intense turmoil and
wide-spread suffering would seem to be indispensable. Resplendent as has
been the Age that has witnessed the inception of the Mission with which
Baha'u'llah has been entrusted, the interval which must elapse ere that
Age yields its choicest fruit must, it is becoming increasingly apparent,
be overshadowed by such moral and social gloom as can alone prepare an
unrepentant humanity for the prize she is destined to inherit.

Into such a period we are now steadily and irresistibly moving. Amidst the
shadows which are increasingly gathering about us we can faintly discern
the glimmerings of Baha'u'llah's unearthly sovereignty appearing fitfully
on the horizon of history. To us, the "generation of the half-light,"
living at a time which may be designated as the period of the incubation
of the World Commonwealth envisaged by Baha'u'llah, has been assigned a
task whose high privilege we can never sufficiently appreciate, and the
arduousness of which we can as yet but dimly recognize. We may well
believe, we who are called upon to experience the operation of the dark
forces destined to unloose a flood of agonizing afflictions, that the
darkest hour that must precede the dawn of the Golden Age of our Faith has
not yet struck. Deep as is the gloom that already encircles the world, the
afflictive ordeals which that world is to suffer are still in preparation,
nor can their blackness be as yet imagined. We stand on the threshold of
an age whose convulsions proclaim alike the death-pangs of the old order
and the birth-pangs of the new. Through the generating influence of the
Faith announced by Baha'u'llah this New World Order may be said to have
been conceived. We can, at the present moment, experience its stirrings in
the womb of a travailing age--an age waiting for the appointed hour at
which it can cast its burden and yield its fairest fruit.

"The whole earth," writes Baha'u'llah, "is now in a state of pregnancy.
The day is approaching when it will have yielded its noblest fruits, when
from it will have sprung forth the loftiest trees, the most enchanting
blossoms, the most heavenly blessings. Immeasurably exalted is the breeze
that waftet