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Shoghi Effendi’s words on the consequences of this obduracy of heart and mind make sober reading: Adversities unimaginably appalling, undreamed of crises and upheavals, war, famine, and pestilence, might well combine to engrave in the soul of an unheeding generation those truths and principles which it has disdained to recognize and follow.
In these days, when we are all mourning the loss of our beloved Greatest Holy Leaf, Shoghi Effendi’s sole comfort is to see the friends as ever devoted and active and striving day and night to promote the teachings of the Cause.
In Shoghi Effendi’s words: Leaders of religion, exponents of political theories, governors of human institutions, who at present are witnessing with perplexity and dismay the bankruptcy of their ideas, and the disintegration of their handiwork, would do well to turn their gaze to the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, and to meditate upon the World Order which, lying enshrined in His teachings, is slowly and imperceptibly rising amid the welter and chaos of present-day civilization.
The Master has given us the assurance that He will bless our efforts and will not leave us alone and unaided. With the renewed assurance of Shoghi Effendi’s best wishes and of his fervent prayers on behalf of every one of you....
In the perspective of the more than forty years since Shoghi Effendi’s passing, the long-term significance of his work in the evolution of the Administrative Order has begun to emerge with brilliant clarity. Had circumstances been different, the Master’s Will and Testament had provided for the possibility that one or more successors might have followed in the institution Shoghi Effendi embodied.
It appears prominently in several of Shoghi Effendi’s writings on the transformation taking place in our time: The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race had to pass, have receded into the background.
That same year, with Shoghi Effendi’s encouragement, the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada submitted to the international organization a document entitled “A Bahá’í Declaration on Human Obligations and Rights”, which was to inspire the work of Bahá’í writers and spokespersons over the decades that followed.
He sincerely hopes that before long we will have some of the younger members of the German Bahá’ís who would make translation their life-work, and with that object in mind make a thorough study of Persian and Arabic. They would surely be rendering a wonderful service to their nation as well as to the Faith as a whole. In closing may I assure you of Shoghi Effendi’s prayers and best wishes.
Let us therefore take a lesson from what has passed and render to the Cause services still unseen in the history of the movement. In closing may I assure you of Shoghi Effendi’s prayers and loving greetings,... My dearly-beloved friends: The expression of your loyalty and perseverance has rejoiced my heart. You are truly the heroic pioneers of the Cause of God.
Less than a month thereafter, the Bahá’í world was devastated by the news of Shoghi Effendi’s death on 4 November 1957 from complications following an attack of Asiatic influenza contracted during the course of a visit to London.
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