when
God will demand to know "what mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces,
and grind the faces of the poor";(73) the Day when scriptures that have
been "sealed till the time of the end"(74) would be opened and union with
God will find expression in "a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall
name";(75) an age utterly beyond anything humanity will have experienced,
the mind conceived or language as yet encompassed: "even as We produced
the first Creation, so shall We produce a new one: a promise We have
undertaken: truly shall We fulfil it."(76)

The declared purpose of history's series of prophetic revelations,
therefore, has been not only to guide the individual seeker on the path of
personal salvation, but to prepare the whole of the human family for the
great eschatological Event lying ahead, through which the life of the
world will itself be entirely transformed. The revelation of Baha'u'llah
is neither preparatory nor prophetic. It _is_ that Event. Through its
influence, the stupendous enterprise of laying the foundations of the
Kingdom of God has been set in motion, and the population of the earth has
been endowed with the powers and capacities equal to the task. That
Kingdom is a universal civilization shaped by principles of social justice
and enriched by achievements of the human mind and spirit beyond anything
the present age can conceive. "This is the Day", Baha'u'llah declares, "in
which God's most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Day
in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created
things.... Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one
spread out in its stead."(77)

Service to the goal calls for an understanding of the fundamental
difference distinguishing the mission of Baha'u'llah from political and
ideological projects of human design. The moral vacuum that produced the
horrors of the twentieth century exposed the outermost limits of the
mind's unaided capacity to devise and construct an ideal society, however
great the material resources harnessed to the effort. The suffering
entailed has engraved the lesson indelibly on the consciousness of the
earth's peoples. Religion's perspective on humanity's future, therefore,
has nothing in common with systems of the past--and only relatively little
relationship with those of today. Its appeal is to a reality in the
genetic code, if it can be so described, of the rational soul. The Kingdom
of Heaven, Jes