foundations of a
disordered society, to purify its life-blood, to reorientate and
reconstruct its institutions, and shape its final destiny.

To what else can the observant eye or the unprejudiced mind, acquainted
with the signs and portents heralding the birth, and accompanying the
rise, of the Faith of Baha'u'llah ascribe this dire, this planetary
upheaval, with its attendant destruction, misery and fear, if not to the
emergence of His embryonic World Order, which, as He Himself has
unequivocally proclaimed, has "deranged the equilibrium of the world and
revolutionized mankind's ordered life"? To what agency, if not to the
irresistible diffusion of that world-shaking, world-energizing,
world-redeeming spirit, which the Bab has affirmed is "vibrating in the
innermost realities of all created things" can the origins of this
portentous crisis, incomprehensible to man, and admittedly unprecedented
in the annals of the human race, be attributed? In the convulsions of
contemporary society, in the frenzied, world-wide ebullitions of men's
thoughts, in the fierce antagonisms inflaming races, creeds and classes,
in the shipwreck of nations, in the downfall of kings, in the
dismemberment of empires, in the extinction of dynasties, in the collapse
of ecclesiastical hierarchies, in the deterioration of time-honored
institutions, in the dissolution of ties, secular as well as religious,
that had for so long held together the members of the human race--all
manifesting themselves with ever-increasing gravity since the outbreak of
the first World War that immediately preceded the opening years of the
Formative Age of the Faith of Baha'u'llah--in these we can readily
recognize the evidences of the travail of an age that has sustained the
impact of His Revelation, that has ignored His summons, and is now
laboring to be delivered of its burden, as a direct consequence of the
impulse communicated to it by the generative, the purifying, the
transmuting influence of His Spirit.

It is my purpose, on the occasion of an anniversary of such profound
significance, to attempt in the succeeding pages a survey of the
outstanding events of the century that has seen this Spirit burst forth
upon the world, as well as the initial stages of its subsequent
incarnation in a System that must evolve into an Order designed to embrace
the whole of mankind, and capable of fulfilling the high destiny that
awaits man on this planet. I shall endeavor to review