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Citadel of Faith
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Pages 155-156
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MIGHTY AND HISTORIC ENTERPRISES
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It is upon the individual believer, constituting the fundamental
unit in the structure of the home front, that the revitalization, the
expansion, and the enrichment of the home front must ultimately
depend. The more strenuous the effort exerted, daily and methodically,
by the individual laboring on the home front to rise to loftier heights of
consecration, of self-abnegation, to contribute, through pioneering at
home, to the multiplication of Bahá'í isolated centers, groups and
assemblies, and to raise, through diligent, painstaking and continual
endeavor to convert receptive souls to the Faith he has espoused, the
number of its active and wholehearted supporters, the sooner will the
vast and multiple enterprises, launched beyond the confines of the
homeland, and now so desperately calling for a greater supply of men
and means, be provided with the necessary support that will ensure
their uninterrupted development and hasten their ultimate fruition,
and the lighter will be the burden of the impending contest that must
be waged, sooner or later, within the borders of the Union itself,
between the rising institutions of Bahá'u'lláh's embryonic divinely
appointed Order, and the exponents of obsolescent doctrines and the
defenders, both secular and religious, of a corrupt and fast-declining
society.
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The fourth phase of the Ten-Year Plan, which the prosecutors of a
world-encompassing Crusade are about to enter, must witness on the
one hand, on every home front, and particularly within the confines of
the American homeland, this same spiritual reinvigoration, administrative
expansion, and material replenishment, constituting the triple
facets of a task which can brook no further delay, and, on the other, an
acceleration, particularly in connection with the construction of the
Mother Temples of Australia and Germany (the needs of the Mother
Temple of Africa having, to all intents and purposes, been met) in the
contributions to be made, by individual believers as well as national
spiritual assemblies, to ensure the uninterrupted progress and the early
completion of these mighty and historic enterprises.
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As the members of the valiant American Bahá'í Community have,
in the space of more than four years, blazed the trail, and vindicated
their primacy, through the share they have had in opening the chief
remaining virgin territories of the globe, in contributing to the furtherance
of the interests of the institutions of the Faith at its World Center,
and in hastening the acquisition of national Hazíratu'l-Quds, the
establishment of Bahá'í national endowments, and the purchase of sites for
future Bahá'í Temples, so must they, if they be intent on safeguarding
that primacy, and on preserving, intact and untarnished, the noble
example they have already set the Bahá'í world, maintain their enviable
position, as the vanguard of the army of Bahá'u'lláh's crusaders, in
rescuing, while there is yet time, their home front from the precarious
position in which it now finds itself, and in displaying for the purpose
of ensuring the erection of the Mother Temples of three
continents--tasks which tower far above any of the national enterprises
hitherto undertaken--be they Hazíratu'l-Quds, endowments or Temple
sites--that selfsame generosity and self-abnegation which have
distinguished their stewardship to the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh in the past.
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The year, the opening of which will mark the midway point of this
World Spiritual Crusade, must be distinguished from all previous
years, by the special allotment of a substantial sum from the national
budget that will adequately meet the urgent needs of these Houses of
Worship, and particularly those that are to be erected in the European
and Australian continents.
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