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The Signs of Impending Chaos
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Never indeed have there been such widespread and basic upheavals,
whether in the social, economic or political spheres of human
activity as those now going on in different parts of the world. Never
have there been so many and varied sources of danger as those that
now threaten the structure of society. The following words of
Bahá'u'lláh are indeed significant as we pause to reflect upon the
present state of a strangely disordered world: "How long will
humanity persist in its waywardness? How long will injustice continue?
How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men?
How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of
despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that
divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of
impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as
the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective."
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The disquieting influence of over thirty million souls living under
minority conditions throughout the continent of Europe; the vast
and ever-swelling army of the unemployed with its crushing burden
and demoralizing influence on governments and peoples; the wicked,
unbridled race of armaments swallowing an ever-increasing share of
the substance of already impoverished nations; the utter demoralization
from which the international financial markets are now
increasingly suffering; the onslaught of secularism invading what
has hitherto been regarded as the impregnable strongholds of Christian
and Muslim orthodoxy--these stand out as the gravest symptoms
that bode ill for the future stability of the structure of modern
civilization. Little wonder if one of Europe's préeminent thinkers,
honored for his wisdom and restraint, should have been forced to
make so bold an assertion: "The world is passing through the
gravest crisis in the history of civilization." "We stand," writes
another, "before either a world catastrophe, or perhaps before the
dawn of a greater era of truth and wisdom." "It is in such times,"
he adds, "that religions have perished and are born."
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Might we not already discern, as we scan the political horizon,
the alignment of those forces that are dividing afresh the continent
of Europe into camps of potential combatants, determined upon a
contest that may mark, unlike the last war, the end of an epoch, a
vast epoch, in the history of human evolution? Are we, the privileged
custodians of a priceless Faith, called upon to witness a cataclysmical
change, politically as fundamental and spiritually as beneficent
as that which precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in the
West? Might it not happen--every vigilant adherent of the Faith
of Bahá'u'lláh might well pause to reflect--that out of this world
eruption there may stream forces of such spiritual energy as shall
recall, nay eclipse, the splendor of those signs and wonders that
accompanied the establishment of the Faith of Jesus Christ? Might
there not emerge out of the agony of a shaken world a religious
revival of such scope and power as to even transcend the potency of
those world-directing forces with which the Religions of the Past
have, at fixed intervals and according to an inscrutable Wisdom,
revived the fortunes of declining ages and peoples? Might not the
bankruptcy of this present, this highly-vaunted materialistic civilization,
in itself clear away the choking weeds that now hinder the
unfoldment and future efflorescence of God's struggling Faith?
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Let Bahá'u'lláh Himself shed the illumination of His words upon
our path as we steer our course amid the pitfalls and miseries of
this troubled age. More than fifty years ago, in a world far removed
from the ills and trials that now torment it, there flowed from
His Pen these prophetic words: "The world is in travail and its
agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness
and unbelief. Such shall be its plight that to disclose it now
would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long continue. And
when the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that
which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake. Then and only
then will the Divine Standard be unfurled and the Nightingale of
Paradise warble its melody."
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