United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
American missions have done much for humanity in the East, while as regards their own sub-continent the Catholic Church has held that field for centuries, and no reasonable being wants to see the two great divisions of Christianity sparring with each other about the spiritual education of greasers.
There are the temperate and fruitful inland reaches along the southern and south-eastern littoral, and again further inward the vast plateaux at 2,000 to 6,500 feet elevation, which represent nearly one-half of the sub-continent with quite other climatic aspects.
A plot lying in the outskirts of New Delhi has been secured at the price of a hundred thousand rupees as the site of the first Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of the Indian sub-continent. A twelve thousand dollar plot has been bought in Johannesburg as the site of the first Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of South Africa.
That Hollander element comprises the most insidious menace, and, like a cancer, must be unsparingly excised from South Africa, unless encouragement is intended to be given for an attempt to go one better next time, with a repetition, or rather an aggravation, of the horrors of war and the cost in life and treasure, turning the sub-continent into a second vast Algeria, with perhaps such another "Abd El Kadr" to subdue, and without any reserve asset, as now, to fall back upon towards reimbursing the expense.
At the World Center of the Faith, where, at long last the machinery of its highest institutions has been erected, and around whose most holy shrines the supreme organs of its unfolding Order, are, in their embryonic form, unfolding; amidst the diversified tribes and races, peopling the Dependencies and Principalities of the Dark Continent of Africa; in the far-flung territories of Central and South America so alien in culture, temperament, habits, language and outlook; in the capital cities and traditional strongholds of a materially highly advanced yet spiritually famished, much tormented, fear-ridden, hopelessly-sundered, heterogeneous conglomeration of races, nations, sects and classes overspreading the continent of Europe; in the heart of the African continent, in the capital city of the Indian sub-continent; in one of the leading capitals of the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe; in the very heart of the leading Republic of the Western Hemisphere, the standard-bearers of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, the champion-builders of the Administrative Order, the vanguard of the Heralds of His World Order, and the Chief and appointed executors of the Master Plan of the Center of His Covenant, have, in the course of the few, fast-fleeting months ahead, separating them from the grandest crusade thus far launched in Bahá’í history, been assigned tasks, obligations and responsibilities that they can afford to neither minimize, neglect or shirk for a moment.
Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the geographical position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land side exposed only to incursions from the north through mountainous and desolate regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts impenetrable, and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles triangle by broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct intercourse with the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages, European navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East.
They were at ease, too, among themselves, with that pleasant intimacy that stamps every branch of Our Family and every boat that it uses on its homeward way. A Cape liner is all the sub-Continent from the Equator to Simon's Town; an Orient boat is Australasian throughout, and a C.P.R. steamer cannot be confused with anything except Canada.
The community there has today become a giant of the Cause, numbering well over a million souls. Its work stretches across the expanse of a vast sub-continent, home to an immense diversity of cultures, languages, ethnic groups and religious traditions.
But that Southern India where Hinduism is supreme should have remained hitherto so little affected by the political agitation which has swept across India further north from the Deccan to Bengal may at first sight cause some surprise. Yet the explanation is not far to seek, if one bears in mind the profound differences which nature itself has imposed upon this vast sub-continent.
Experiments with civilization on and near the Indian sub-continent centered around the Indonesian archipelago and the rich, semi-tropical and tropical valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Gadari, the Irra-waddy and the Mekong.
Word Of The Day