r in even their simplest
operations, one is humbled by a much greater awareness. In the raising up
of the supreme governing institution of our Faith, one is witnessing a
striving to the utmost of human capacity to win the good pleasure of God,
a united and ardent determination that nothing whatever, in either
cultural conditioning or the promptings of personal desire, should be
allowed to stain the purity of this ultimate collective act. Nothing
beyond this lies within human power. By its action, humanity has done
literally everything of which it is capable, and God, in accepting this
consecrated effort on the part of those who have embraced His Cause,
endows the institution thus brought into existence with those powers
promised to it in the Kitab-i-Aqdas and the Will and Testament of
'Abdu'l-Baha. Little wonder that 'Abdu'l-Baha foresaw in the process
leading up to the culminating historical moment reached in 1963, the
centenary of Baha'u'llah's declaration of His mission, the fulfilment of
the vision of the prophet Daniel, "Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh
unto the thousand, three hundred and five and thirty days." In the
Master's words:

For according to this calculation a century will have elapsed from the
dawn of the Sun of Truth, then will the teachings of God be firmly
established upon the earth, and the Divine Light shall flood the world
from the East even unto the West. Then, on this day, will the faithful
rejoice!(110)

With the establishment of the Universal House of Justice, the second of
the two successor institutions named by 'Abdu'l-Baha as the guarantors of
the integrity of the Cause had emerged. The vast body of the Guardian's
writings and the pattern of administrative life he had created and which
were imprinted indelibly in Baha'i consciousness, had endowed the Baha'i
world with the means to ensure universal agreement about the intent of the
Revelation of God. In the Universal House of Justice it now also possessed
the ultimate authority conceived by Baha'u'llah for the exercise of the
decision-making functions of the Administrative Order. As the Will and
Testament explains, the two institutions share jointly in the Divine
promise of unfailing guidance:

The sacred and youthful branch, the guardian of the Cause of God as well
as the Universal House of Justice, to be universally elected and
established, are both under the care and protection of the Abha Beauty,
under the shelter and unerring gu