“THIS MOST GREAT ORDER”

It should be noted, in this connection, that in the third Vahid of this Book [the Bayan] there occurs a passage which, alike in its explicit reference to the name of the Promised One, and in its anticipation of the Order which, in a later age, was to be identified with His Revelation, deserves to rank as one of the most significant statements recorded in any of the Báb’s writings, “Well is it with him,” is His prophetic announcement, “who fixeth his gaze upon the Order of Bahá’u’lláh and rendereth thanks unto his Lord. For He will assuredly be made manifest. God hath indeed irrevocably ordained it in the Bayan.” It is with that self-same Order that the Founder of the promised Revelation, twenty years later—incorporating that same term in His Kitab-i-Aqdas—identified the System envisaged in that Book, affirming that “this most great Order” had deranged the world’s equilibrium and revolutionized mankind’s ordered life. It is the features of that self-same Order which, at a later stage in the evolution of the Faith, the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant and the appointed Interpreter of His teachings, delineated through the provisions of His Will and Testament. It is the structural basis of that self-same Order which, in the Formative Age of that same Faith, the stewards of that same Covenant, the elected representatives of the world-wide Bahá’í community, are now laboriously and unitedly establishing. It is the superstructure of that self-same Order, attaining its full stature through the emergence of the Bahá’í World Commonwealth—the Kingdom of God on earth—which the Golden Age of that same Dispensation must, in the fullness of time, ultimately witness.

Shoghi Effendi — GOD PASSES BY (pp.25-26)

How can any faithful Bahá’í after reading the above words of Shoghi Effendi and gaining thereby an understanding of the momentous significance of the “most great Order,” prophetically announced by the Bab, subsequently identified by Bahá’u’lláh with the System revealed in His Most Holy Book and then formally delineated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His divinely-conceived, sacred and immortal Will and Testament, believe that this God-given Order destined in the fullness of time to usher in the long-promised Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven in this, the Day of God, was brought to an untimely and premature end, a mere thirty-six years after its inception, while still in its embryonic form, upon the passing of Shoghi Effendi? Or, how can any true believer suffer under the illusion that this “most great Order”— “this Divine Masterpiece which the hand of the Master-builder of the world has designed for the unification of the world-wide Faith of Bahá’u’lláh”— will ever be supplanted by a man-made imperfect system, minus the living Guardian presiding as its “sacred head,” that has now been ignominiously erected outside the sacred provisions of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament by those who, in their lack of faith in the indestructible Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh and in the immortality of this divinely-conceived “Child,” have repudiated this glorious Testament and have declared that the Guardianship of the Cause of God came to an end with the passing of Shoghi Effendi?