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Citadel of Faith
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Pages 66-67
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A Testing Period Recalling Ordeals of the Dawn-Breakers
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The first half of the opening decade of the second Bahá'í century is
terminating. The great-minded, stout-hearted, high-spirited American
Bahá'í Community, laden with the trophies accumulated in the course
of its fifty years' magnificent stewardship of the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh is
irresistibly embarking upon a two and a half year period unsurpassed in
its fateful consequences by any previous stage traversed in the community's
eventful history.
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Its members, without exception, are called upon to steel themselves
without delay to face an unexpected emergency, seize a God-given
opportunity, meet a supreme challenge, and show forth a tenacity of
purpose, a solidarity in sacrifice, an austerity in everyday life, worthy
the Martyr-Prophet of their Faith as well as their heroic spiritual
forebears, the hundredth anniversary of whose agonizing tribulations,
including captivity, sieges, betrayals, spoliation and martyrdom, is
being commemorated during this same period.
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No lesser tribute can be paid the memory of the glorious Báb, the
immortal Quddús, the lion-hearted Mullá Husayn, the erudite Vahíd,
the audacious Hujjat, the illustrious seven martyrs of Tihrán and a host
of unnumbered heroes whose lifeblood flowed so copiously in the
course of the opening decade of the first Bahá'í century, by the
privileged champion-builders of the World Order of Bahá'u'lláh during
the present critical stage in the unfoldment of the Formative Age of
His Dispensation, than a parallel outpouring of their substance by the
builders of the most holy House of Worship laboring in the corresponding
decade of the succeeding century.
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The American Bahá'í Community, exalted, singled out among
sister communities of East and West through revelation of the Tablets
of the Divine Plan, is unavoidably approaching a testing period,
crucial, prolonged, potent, purifying, clearly envisaged by `Abdu'l-Bahá,
different from but recalling in its severity the ordeals which
afflicted the dawn-breakers in a former Age.
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The anticipated trials will enable its members to plumb greater
depths of consecration, soar to nobler heights of collective endeavor,
and disclose in fuller measure the future glory of their destiny.
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Might not the strain, the stress, of the strenuous period now being
ushered in through inscrutable dispensations of Providence be productive
of perspicuous benefits and blessings reminiscent of the incalculable
outpourings of divine grace which followed closely in the train
of the woeful trials immortalizing the initial, the bloodiest, the most
dramatic period in the Heroic Age of the Bahá'í Dispensation.
[March 16, 1949]
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