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Citadel of Faith
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Pages 124-127
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AMERICA PASSING THROUGH CRISIS
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Moreover, the country of which it forms a part is passing through a
crisis which, in its spiritual, moral, social and political aspects, is of
extreme seriousness--a seriousness which to a superficial observer is
liable to be dangerously underestimated.
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The steady and alarming deterioration in the standard of morality
as exemplified by the appalling increase of crime, by political corruption
in ever widening and ever higher circles, by the loosening of the
sacred ties of marriage, by the inordinate craving for pleasure and
diversion, and by the marked and progressive slackening of parental
control, is no doubt the most arresting and distressing aspect of the
decline that has set in, and can be clearly perceived, in the fortunes of
the entire nation.
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Parallel with this, and pervading all departments of life--an evil
which the nation, and indeed all those within the capitalist system,
though to a lesser degree, share with that state and its satellites regarded
as the sworn enemies of that system--is the crass materialism, which
lays excessive and ever-increasing emphasis on material well-being,
forgetful of those things of the spirit on which alone a sure and stable
foundation can be laid for human society. It is this same cancerous
materialism, born originally in Europe, carried to excess in the North
American continent, contaminating the Asiatic peoples and nations,
spreading its ominous tentacles to the borders of Africa, and now
invading its very heart, which Bahá'u'lláh in unequivocal and emphatic
language denounced in His Writings, comparing it to a devouring
flame and regarding it as the chief factor in precipitating the dire
ordeals and world-shaking crises that must necessarily involve the
burning of cities and the spread of terror and consternation in the
hearts of men. Indeed a foretaste of the devastation which this consuming
fire will wreak upon the world, and with which it will lay waste the
cities of the nations participating in this tragic world-engulfing contest,
has been afforded by the last World War, marking the second stage in
the global havoc which humanity, forgetful of its God and heedless of
the clear warnings uttered by His appointed Messenger for this day,
must, alas, inevitably experience. It is this same all-pervasive, pernicious
materialism against which the voice of the Center of Bahá'u'lláh'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.
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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 Bahá'u'lláh
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.
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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--so repeatedly and graphically represented and stressed by
`Abdu'l-Bahá in His arraignment of the basic weaknesses in the social
fabric of the nation--of remedying, while there is yet time, through a
revolutionary change in the concept and attitude of the average white
American toward his Negro fellow citizen, a situation which, if allowed
to drift, will, in the words of `Abdu'l-Bahá, cause the streets of American
cities to run with blood, aggravating thereby the havoc which the
fearful weapons of destruction, raining from the air, and amassed by
a ruthless, a vigilant, a powerful and inveterate enemy, will wreak
upon those same cities.
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The American nation, of which the community of the Most Great
Name forms as yet a negligible and infinitesimal part, stands, indeed,
from whichever angle one observes its immediate fortunes, in grave
peril. The woes and tribulations which threaten it are partly avoidable,
but mostly inevitable and God-sent, for by reason of them a government
and people clinging tenaciously to the obsolescent doctrine of absolute
sovereignty and upholding a political system, manifestly at variance
with the needs of a world already contracted into a neighborhood and
crying out for unity, will find itself purged of its anachronistic conceptions,
and prepared to play a preponderating role, as foretold by `Abdu'l-Bahá,
in the hoisting of the standard of the Lesser Peace, in the
unification of mankind, and in the establishment of a world federal
government on this planet. These same fiery tribulations will not only
firmly weld the American nation to its sister nations in both hemispheres,
but will through their cleansing effect, purge it thoroughly of
the accumulated dross which ingrained racial prejudice, rampant
materialism, widespread ungodliness and moral laxity have combined,
in the course of successive generations, to produce, and which have
prevented her thus far from assuming the role of world spiritual
leadership forecast by `Abdu'l-Bahá's unerring pen--a role which she is
bound to fulfill through travail and sorrow.
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