Century of Light | Page 2

planet--such are only the more obvious in a
catalogue of horrors unknown to even the darkest of ages past. Merely
to mention them is to call to mind the Divine warnings expressed in
Bahá'u'lláh's words of a century ago: "O heedless ones! Though the
wonders of My mercy have encompassed all created things, both
visible and invisible, and though the revelations of My grace and

bounty have permeated every atom of the universe, yet the rod with
which I can chastise the wicked is grievous, and the fierceness of Mine
anger against them terrible."(1)
Lest any observer of the Cause be tempted to misunderstand such
warnings as only metaphorical, Shoghi Effendi, drawing some of the
historical implications, wrote in 1941:
A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course,
catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its
ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its
driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its
cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every
passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power,
is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive
its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome.
Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty
wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth,
rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations,
disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile
its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming
its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.(2)
* * * * *
From the point of view of wealth and influence, "the world" of 1900
was Europe and, by grudging concession, the United States.
Throughout the planet, Western imperialism was pursuing among the
populations of other lands what it regarded as its "civilizing mission".
In the words of one historian, the century's opening decade appeared to
be essentially a continuation of the "long nineteenth century",(3) an era
whose boundless self-satisfaction was perhaps best epitomized by the
celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, a parade that
rolled for hours through the streets of London, with an imperial
panoply and display of military power far surpassing anything
attempted in past civilizations.
As the century began, there were few, whatever their degree of social

or moral sensitivity, who perceived the catastrophes lying ahead, and
few, if any, who could have conceived their magnitude. The military
leadership of most European nations assumed that war of some kind
would break out, but viewed the prospect with equanimity because of
the twin fixed convictions that it would be short and would be won by
their side. To an extent that seemed little short of miraculous, the
international peace movement was enlisting the support of statesmen,
industrialists, scholars, the media, and influential personalities as
unlikely as the tsar of Russia. If the inordinate increase in armaments
seemed ominous, the network of painstakingly crafted and often
overlapping alliances seemed to give assurance that a general
conflagration would be avoided and regional disputes settled, as they
had been through most of the previous century. This illusion was
reinforced by the fact that Europe's crowned heads--most of them
members of one extended family, and many of them exercising
seemingly decisive political power--addressed one another familiarly
by nicknames, carried on an intimate correspondence, married one
another's sisters and daughters, and vacationed together throughout
long stretches of each year at one another's castles, regattas and
shooting lodges. Even the painful disparities in the distribution of
wealth were being energetically--if not very systematically--addressed
in Western societies through legislation designed to restrain the worst
of the corporate freebooting of preceding decades and to meet the most
urgent demands of growing urban populations.
The vast majority of the human family, living in lands outside the
Western world, shared in few of the blessings and little of the optimism
of their European and American brethren. China, despite its ancient
civilization and its sense of itself as the "Middle Kingdom", had
become the hapless victim of plundering by Western nations and by its
modernizing neighbour Japan. The multitudes in India--whose
economy and political life had fallen so totally under the domination of
a single imperial power as to exclude the usual jockeying for
advantage--escaped some of the worst of the abuses afflicting other
lands, but watched impotently as their desperately needed resources
were drained away. The coming agony of Latin America was all too
clearly prefigured in the suffering of Mexico, large sections of which

had been annexed by its great northern neighbour, and whose natural
resources were already attracting the attention of avaricious foreign
corporations. Particularly embarrassing from a Western point of
view--because of its proximity to such brilliant European capitals as
Berlin and Vienna--was the medieval