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Community of the Most Great Name
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Who else can be the blissful if not the community of the Most
Great Name, whose world-embracing, continually consolidating activities
constitute the one integrating process in a world whose institutions,
secular as well as religious, are for the most part dissolving?
They indeed are "the people of the right," whose "noble
habitation" is fixed on the foundations of the World Order of Bahá'u'lláh
--the Ark of everlasting salvation in this most grievous
Day. Of all the kindreds of the earth they alone can recognize,
amidst the welter of a tempestuous age, the Hand of the Divine
Redeemer that traces its course and controls its destinies. They alone
are aware of the silent growth of that orderly world polity whose
fabric they themselves are weaving.
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Conscious of their high calling, confident in the society-building
power which their Faith possesses, they press forward, undeterred
and undismayed, in their efforts to fashion and perfect the necessary
instruments wherein the embryonic World Order of Bahá'u'lláh can
mature and develop. It is this building process, slow and unobtrusive,
to which the life of the world-wide Bahá'í Community is
wholly consecrated, that constitutes the one hope of a stricken society.
For this process is actuated by the generating influence of
God's changeless Purpose, and is evolving within the framework
of the Administrative Order of His Faith.
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In a world the structure of whose political and social institutions
is impaired, whose vision is befogged, whose conscience is bewildered,
whose religious systems have become anemic and lost their
virtue, this healing Agency, this leavening Power, this cementing
Force, intensely alive and all-pervasive, has been taking shape, is
crystallizing into institutions, is mobilizing its forces, and is preparing
for the spiritual conquest and the complete redemption of
mankind. Though the society which incarnates its ideals be small,
and its direct and tangible benefits as yet inconsiderable, yet the
potentialities with which it has been endowed, and through which it
is destined to regenerate the individual and rebuild a broken world,
are incalculable.
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For well nigh a century it has, amid the noise and tumult of a
distracted age, and despite the incessant persecutions to which its
leaders, institutions, and followers have been subjected, succeeded
in preserving its identity, in reinforcing its stability and strength,
in maintaining its organic unity, in preserving the integrity of its
laws and its principles, in erecting its defenses, and in extending and
consolidating its institutions. Numerous and powerful have been
the forces that have schemed, both from within and from without,
in lands both far and near, to quench its light and abolish its holy
name. Some have apostatized from its principles, and betrayed ignominiously
its cause. Others have hurled against it the fiercest anathemas
which the embittered leaders of any ecclesiastical institution are
able to pronounce. Still others have heaped upon it the afflictions and
humiliations which sovereign authority can alone, in the plenitude
of its power, inflict.
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The utmost its avowed and secret enemies could hope to achieve
was to retard its growth and obscure momentarily its purpose.
What they actually accomplished was to purge and purify its life,
to stir it to still greater depths, to galvanize its soul, to prune its
institutions, and cement its unity. A schism, a permanent cleavage
in the vast body of its adherents, they could never create.
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They who betrayed its cause, its lukewarm and faint-hearted
supporters, withered away and dropped as dead leaves, powerless to
cloud its radiance or to imperil its structure. Its most implacable
adversaries, they who assailed it from without, were hurled from
power, and, in the most astonishing fashion, met their doom. Persia
had been the first to repress and oppose it. Its monarchs had miserably
fallen, their dynasty had collapsed, their name was execrated,
the hierarchy that had been their ally and had propped their declining
state, had been utterly discredited. Turkey, which had thrice
banished its Founder and inflicted on Him cruel and life-long imprisonment,
had passed through one of the severest ordeals and far-reaching
revolutions that its history has recorded, had shrunk from
one of the most powerful empires to a tiny Asiatic republic, its
Sultanate obliterated, its dynasty overthrown, its Caliphate, the
mightiest institution of Islám, abolished.
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Meanwhile the Faith that had been the object of such monstrous
betrayals, and the target for such woeful assaults, was going from
strength to strength, was forging ahead, undaunted and undivided
by the injuries it had received. In the midst of trials it had inspired
its loyal followers with a resolution that no obstacle, however formidable,
could undermine. It had lighted in their hearts a faith that
no misfortune, however black, could quench. It had infused into
their hearts a hope that no force, however determined, could shatter.
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