apparently limitless patience with which He responded to questions, many
of whose assumptions about reality had long since lost whatever validity
they might once have possessed.

Yet another insight that a detached examination of the historical
situation to which the Master addressed Himself in the West helps provide
for our generation is an appreciation of the spiritual greatness of those
who responded to Him. These souls answered His summons in spite, not
because, of the liberal and economically advanced world they knew, a world
they no doubt cherished and valued, and in which they had necessarily to
carry on their daily lives. Their response arose from a level of
consciousness that recognized, even if sometimes only dimly, the desperate
need of the human race for spiritual enlightenment. To remain steadfast in
their commitment to this insight required of these early believers--on
whose sacrifice of self much of the foundation of the present-day Baha'i
communities both in the West and many other lands were laid--that they
resist not only family and social pressures, but also the easy
rationalizations of the world-view in which they had been raised and to
which everything around them insistently exposed them. There was a heroism
about the steadfastness of these early Western Baha'is that is, in its own
way, as affecting as that of their Persian co-religionists who, in these
same years, were facing persecution and death for the Faith they had
embraced.

In the forefront of the Westerners who responded to the Master's summons
were the little groups of intrepid believers whom Shoghi Effendi has
hailed as "God-intoxicated pilgrims" and who had the privilege of visiting
'Abdu'l-Baha in the prison-city of 'Akka, of seeing for themselves the
luminosity of His Person and of hearing from His own lips words that had
the power to transform human life. The effect on these believers has been
expressed by May Maxwell:

"Of that first meeting," ... "I can remember neither joy nor pain, nor
anything that I can name. I had been carried suddenly to too great a
height, my soul had come in contact with the Divine Spirit, and this
force, so pure, so holy, so mighty, had overwhelmed me...."(19)

Their return to their homes became, Shoghi Effendi explains, "the signal
for an outburst of systematic and sustained activity, which ... spread its
ramifications over Western Europe and the states and provinces of the
North American continent..