g designed to supplement and
enrich the record of signal collective services rendered by the members of
this community within the confines and throughout the length and breadth
of its homeland. On it, however great the support it will receive from its
sister communities in the days to come, will devolve the chief
responsibility of guiding the destinies, of supplying the motive power,
and of contributing to the resources of a crusade which, for the first
time in Baha'i history, involves the collaboration, and affects the
fortunes, of no less than four National Assemblies, in both Hemispheres
and within four continents of the globe.

On the success of this enterprise, unprecedented in its scope, unique in
its character and immense in its spiritual potentialities, must depend the
initiation, at a later period in the Formative Age of the Faith, of
undertakings embracing within their range all National Assemblies
functioning throughout the Baha'i World, undertakings constituting in
themselves a prelude to the launching of world-wide enterprises destined
to be embarked upon, in future epochs of that same Age, by the Universal
House of Justice, that will symbolise the unity and coordinate and unify
the activities of these National Assemblies.

Indeed the birth of this African enterprise, in the opening decade of the
second Baha'i century, coinciding as it does with the formation of the
International Baha'i Council, should be acclaimed as an event of peculiar
significance in the evolution of our beloved Faith. Both events will, no
doubt, be hailed by posterity as simultaneous and compelling evidences of
the irresistible unfoldment of a divinely appointed Administrative Order
and of the development, on an international scale, of its subsidiary
agencies, heralding the establishment of the Supreme Legislative Body
designed to crown the Administrative Edifice now being laboriously erected
by the privileged builders of a Divine Order, whose features have been
delineated by the Centre of the Covenant in His Will and Testament, whose
fundamental laws have been revealed by the Founder of our Faith in His
Kitab-i-Aqdas, and Whose advent has been foreshadowed by the Herald of the
Baha'i Dispensation in the Bayan, His most weighty Book.

To be singled out as the chief agency in the prosecution of a task of such
dimensions, such significance, and the harbinger of events so glorious, is
indeed at once an inestimable blessing and a staggeri