a share in the erection of its Administrative
Order, and are now engaged in the final stage of the building of the House
that incarnates the soul of that Faith in the American continent. No
sacrifice can be deemed too great to insure the completion of such an
edifice--the most holy House of Worship ever to be associated with the
Faith of the Most Great Name--an edifice whose inception has shed such a
luster on the closing years of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i Dispensation,
which has assumed a concrete shape in the present Formative stage in the
evolution of our beloved Faith, whose dependencies must spring into
existence in the course of successive epochs of this same Age, and whose
fairest fruits will be garnered in the Age that is to come, the last, the
Golden Age of the initial and brightest Dispensation of the
five-thousand-century Baha'i Cycle.

"A most wonderful and thrilling motion will appear in the world of
existence," are 'Abdu'l-Baha's own words, predicting the release of
spiritual forces that must accompany the completion of this most hallowed
House of Worship. "From that point of light," He, further glorifying that
edifice, has written, "the spirit of teaching ... will permeate to all
parts of the world." And again: "Out of this Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar,
without doubt, thousands of Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kars will be born." "It
marks the inception of the Kingdom of God on earth."

Again I repeat--and I cannot overrate the vital, the unique importance of
the campaign now launched to insure the completion of such an edifice--the
immediate destiny of the American Baha'i Community is intimately and
inescapably bound up with the outcome of this newly launched, this
severely trying, soul-purging, spiritually uplifting campaign. The
God-given mission, constituting the birthright, and proclaiming the
primacy of a community whose members the Founder of that community, the
Center of the Covenant Himself, has addressed as the "Apostles of
Baha'u'llah," can only be fulfilled if they befittingly obey the specific
Mandate issued by 'Abdu'l-Baha in His Tablets of the Divine Plan. The
execution of this Mandate is, in its turn, dependent upon the triumphant
conclusion of the Second Seven Year Plan, the second stage in the series
of specific plans formulated to insure the successful termination of the
opening phase in the execution of that Mandate. Indeed, the successive
plans, inaugurated since the birth of the second Baha'i centu