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May all the privileged participators, enlisting under the banner of Bahá’u’lláh for the promotion of so preeminent and meritorious a Cause, be they from the Eastern or Western Hemisphere, of either sex, white or colored, young or old, neophyte or veteran, whether serving in their capacity as expounders of the teachings, or administrators, of His Faith, as settlers or itinerant teachers, distinguish themselves by such deeds of heroism as will rival, nay outshine, the feats accomplished nineteen hundred years ago, by that little band of God-intoxicated disciples who, fearlessly preaching the Gospel of a newly arisen Messiah, contributed so decisively to the illumination, the regeneration and the advancement of the entire European continent.
The return of these God-intoxicated pilgrims, some to France, others to the United States, was the signal for an outburst of systematic and sustained activity, which, as it gathered momentum, and spread its ramifications over Western Europe and the states and provinces of the North American continent, grew to so great a scale that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Himself resolved that, as soon as He should be released from His prolonged confinement in Akká, He would undertake a personal mission to the West.
He could fold up his hands like a cup and at his whistle birds would drop into them as into a nest. His was a beautiful soul, and what Novalis said of Spinoza might have been said of him, "he was a God-intoxicated man."
If Franklin may in some ways be called the typical American, yet the lonely, introverted, God-intoxicated soul of Edwards stands as a solemn witness to depths of understanding in his countrymen which Dr. Franklin's keen wit had no means of fathoming.
"I think the poor man would be very thankful," said the Baron with a smile, "if he were always sure of eating it in one. He is what the Transcendentalists call a god-intoxicated man; and I advise him, as Sauteul advised Bossuet, to go to Patmos and write a new Apocalypse."
Yet, though there were in their world-conception many anticipations of the gospel of the "God-intoxicated man," whom the counsels of the Eternal reserved for the fulness of times, it would scarcely be accurate to describe the system of any of them as strictly Pantheistic.
Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law." "The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-flow of a spiritual imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous, God-intoxicated" Spinoza.
In the forefront of the Westerners who responded to the Master’s summons were the little groups of intrepid believers whom Shoghi Effendi has hailed as “God-intoxicated pilgrims” and who had the privilege of visiting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the prison-city of ‘Akká, of seeing for themselves the luminosity of His Person and of hearing from His own lips words that had the power to transform human life.
While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest in the following pregnant words:— “Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him.
As Spinoza was called by Novalis "a God-intoxicated man," so Comte was described by Mill as "morality-intoxicated," for in the purity and elevation of his ethical conceptions he comes nearest of all to the austere standard set up by Kant and Emerson. Nor do the points of resemblance stop here.
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