ointed
Messenger for this day, must, alas, inevitably experience. It is this same
all-pervasive, pernicious materialism against which the voice of the
Center of Baha'u'llah's Covenant was raised, with pathetic persistence,
from platform and pulpit, in His addresses to the heedless multitudes,
which, on the morrow of His fateful visit to both Europe and America,
found themselves suddenly swept into the vortex of a tempest which in its
range and severity was unsurpassed in the world's history.

Collateral with this ominous laxity in morals, and this progressive stress
laid on man's material pursuits and well-being, is the darkening of the
political horizon, as witnessed by the widening of the gulf separating the
protagonists of two antagonistic schools of thought which, however
divergent in their ideologies, are to be commonly condemned by the
upholders of the standard of the Faith of Baha'u'llah for their
materialistic philosophies and their neglect of those spiritual values and
eternal verities on which alone a stable and flourishing civilization can
be ultimately established. The multiplication, the diversity and the
increasing destructive power of armaments to which both sides, in this
world contest, caught in a whirlpool of fear, suspicion and hatred, are
rapidly contributing; the outbreak of two successive bloody conflicts,
entangling still further the American nation in the affairs of a
distracted world, entailing a considerable loss in blood and treasure,
swelling the national budget and progressively depreciating the currency
of the state; the confusion, the vacillation, the suspicions besetting the
European and Asiatic nations in their attitude to the American nation; the
overwhelming accretion of strength to the arch enemy of the system
championed by the American Union in consequence of the re-alignment of the
powers in the Asiatic continent and particularly in the Far East--these
have, moreover, contributed their share, in recent years, to the
deterioration of a situation which, if not remedied, is bound to involve
the American nation in a catastrophe of undreamed-of dimensions and of
untold consequences to the social structure, the standard and conception
of the American people and government.

No less serious is the stress and strain imposed on the fabric of American
society through the fundamental and persistent neglect, by the governed
and governors alike, of the supreme, the inescapable and urgent duty--s