ommunity,
its representatives, national, local and regional, its pioneers at home
and overseas, discharge in distant fields, despite the smallness of their
numbers and their limited resources, tasks of such vast dimensions, of so
diversified a character, of such great moment, at so significant a stage
in the declining fortunes of an imperiled society. I feel convinced that
unflinching maintenance of so exalted a standard of stewardship at the
threshold of Baha'u'llah must release in still greater measure the
outpouring of His grace so essential and befitting the consummation of a
Divine Plan deriving its authority from the pen of the Center of His
Covenant and propelled by agencies created through the generative
influence of His Will and Testament.

[September 14, 1948]

APPEAL TO ENTIRE COMMUNITY TO PERSEVERE

Appreciate Assembly's message. Praying for success of plans. Urge special
effort to expedite work of Temple, reinforce pioneer endeavor in Europe
owing to deteriorating international situation. Appeal to entire community
wholeheartedly to persevere irrespective of darkened outlook.

[October 21, 1948]

SCALE NOBLER HEIGHTS OF HEROISM

The deepening crisis ominously threatening further to derange the
equilibrium of a politically convulsed, economically disrupted, socially
subverted, morally decadent and spiritually moribund society is testing
the tenacity, taxing the resources and challenging the spirit throughout
three continents of the chosen trustees and valiant executors of
'Abdu'l-Baha's Divine Plan. This present hour, however critical, fraught
with uncertainty, cannot and must not retard the unfoldment of the
manifold tasks so brilliantly inaugurated, so diligently prosecuted, so
dazzling in their prospects.

The record of the Baha'i community since inception of the Formative Age
conclusively demonstrates that accomplishment of signal acts accompanied,
or followed upon, periods of acute distress in European and American
contemporary history. The machinery of the Administrative Order was
established, and preliminary stage of construction of the House of Worship
was undertaken, by a grief-stricken community in the anxious years
following the sudden removal of its loving, watchful Founder. The
superstructure of the Temple was erected amid the strain and stress of an
economic depression of an unprecedented severity gripping the North
American continent. The first Seven Year Plan, open