tion to fan into flame that holy Fire which the
hand of the appointed Centre of Baha'u'llah's Covenant had kindled in the
north-west extremity of that continent on the morrow of His Father's
ascension. I recall the slow eastward spread of that infant Light which
led to the gradual emergence of the German and Austrian Baha'i
communities, during the darkest period of 'Abdu'l-Baha's incarceration in
the prison-fortress of Akka. I am reminded of His subsequent epoch-making
visit, soon after His providential release from His forty-year confinement
in the Most Great Prison, to these newly-fledged struggling communities,
of His patient seed-sowing destined to yield at a later age its first
fruits, and constituting a landmark of the utmost significance in the rise
and establishment of the Faith of Baha'u'llah in that continent.

I, moreover, call to mind, on this occasion, the successive episodes
which, on the morrow of 'Abdu'l-Baha's ascension, in the course of the
initial Epoch of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Dispensation, signalised
the emergence of those administrative institutions, both local and
national, which proclaimed the germination of those potent seeds which had
lain dormant for more than a decade in these newly-opened European
territories, and which culminated in the construction of the framework of
the Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah and the erection of
the first two pillars destined to sustain in that continent the weight of
the final unit of that Order.

Nor can I fail to acclaim, as a further milestone in the irresistible
evolution of that Faith, the launching, following the creation of the
administrative agencies designed to provide the effectual instruments for
its propagation, of the Six Year Plan of the British Baha'i community
followed successively by the European Teaching Campaign, inaugurated in
accordance with the provisions of the second Seven Year Plan of the
American Baha'i community, the Five Year Plan conceived by the German and
Austrian Baha'i communities and the Two Year Plan later initiated by the
British Baha'i community--Plans which, within less than a decade, succeeded
in laying the structural basis of the Administrative Order of the Faith in
Wales, in Scotland, in Northern Ireland and in Eire, in multiplying and
consolidating Baha'i institutions throughout the British Isles, in
broadening and strengthening the foundations of that same Order in Germany
and Austria, in ere