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USBN #129 August 1939, p4-5
The Guardian wishes me to express his approval of the budget of $150,000 fixed by the N. S. A. for teaching work and Temple construction during the current Baha'i Year, and trusts that the individual believers as well as all the local Assemblies will cooperate in raising that sum, and thus make it possible for your Assembly to carry on, regularly and uninterruptedly, its twofold national tasks in this third year of the Seven Year Plan.
The Guardian also welcomes your Assembly's decision to maintain the plan of holding public meetings and regional conferences in various parts of the country, and also views with approval your decision to include the city of Toronto in the schedule of the N. S. A. meetings for this year.
In closing I wish to express the Guardian's unbounded satisfaction at the most gratifying news of the opening up of the three Central American Republics of Cuba, Panama and Honduras to the light of the Cause, and to urge your Assembly, on his behalf, to make a special, and indeed supreme effort for the settlement, in the course of this year, of the six remaining Republics of Central America. Whatever the cost and sacrifices which such admittedly difficult campaign would entail, and however tentative the efforts of those pioneers who offer themselves for service in these religiously conservative, politically unsettled, and climatically inhospitable countries, the one supreme and immediate objective is to insure laying down, ere the termination of the current year, and in each one of these Republics such foundations, rudimentary though they may be, as would provide future Baha'i teachers working in these regions such means and openings as would considerably facilitate their task of further extending the scope and consolidating the foundations of the Cause in Central America.
Whoever feels the urge to volunteer for pioneer work in either one of these Central American States should be encouraged to do so and while the N. S. A. is conscientiously bound to facilitate his settlement it has also the right of exercising its own discretion whenever there are a number of similar applicants, through extending special financial support to all those pioneers whom it considers to be best qualified for the task.
This present phase of the inter-continental teaching campaign, coinciding as it does with the steadily rising tide of uncertainty and gloom throughout the world, acquires a special significance, and offers indeed a unique challenge to the community of the American believers, who, as the undisputed “vanguards of the Faith in the West" are now called upon to demonstrate, in fields hitherto unexplored and through exploits as yet unrivaled by any of their sister-communities throughout the West, the efficacy of this new saving grace of God revealed in this age through the person of Bahá’u’lláh.
The Guardian will continue to pray that the members of the American Baha'i community may arise and meet the challenge of the present hour with such audacity, such self-sacrifice and such unflinching determination as truly befits their incontestably high spiritual position, and in a manner that would evoke the admiration and excite the envy not only of the entire body of their co-religionists, but of the whole unbelieving world outside.
July 4. 1939.
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