mple--the most sacred House of Worship in the Baha'i
world, whether of the present or of the future--by Dr. Rexford Newcomb,
Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of
Illinois: "This 'Temple of Light' opens upon the terrain of human
experience nine great doorways which beckon men and women of every race
and clime, of every faith and conviction, of every condition of freedom or
servitude to enter here into a recognition of that kinship and brotherhood
without which the modern world will be able to make little further
progress ...The dome, pointed in form, aiming as assuredly as did the
aspiring lines of the medieval cathedrals toward higher and better things,
achieves not only through its symbolism but also through its structural
propriety and sheer loveliness of form, a beauty not matched by any
domical structure since the construction of Michelangelo's dome on the
Basilica of St. Peter in Rome."

Chapter XXIII: Attacks on Baha'i Institutions

The institutions signalizing the rise and establishment of the
Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah did not (as the history
of their unfoldment abundantly demonstrates) remain immune against the
assaults and persecutions to which the Faith itself, the progenitor of
that Order, had, for over seventy years, been subjected, and from which it
is still suffering. The emergence of a firmly knit community, advancing
the claims of a world religion, with ramifications spread over five
continents representing a great variety of races, languages, classes and
religious traditions; provided with a literature scattered over the
surface of the earth, and expounding in several languages its doctrine;
clear-visioned, unafraid, alert and determined to achieve at whatever
sacrifice its goal; organically united through the machinery of a divinely
appointed Administrative Order; non-sectarian, non-political, faithful to
its civil obligations yet supranational in character; tenacious in its
adherence to the laws and ordinances regulating its community life--the
emergence of such a community, in a world steeped in prejudice,
worshipping false gods, torn by intestine divisions, and blindly clinging
to obsolescent doctrines and defective standards, could not but
precipitate, sooner or later, crises no less grave, though less
spectacular, than the persecutions which, in an earlier age, had raged
around the Founders of that community and their early disciples. Ass