INTRODUCTION
During the past ten years the Bahá’í community of East and West has learned to anticipate each successive volume of THE BAHÁ’Í WORLD (the first number was entitled “ Bahá’í Year Book”) as the best means by which the individual believer may keep abreast of the steady development of the Faith throughout the world. This work, in its illustrations as well as in its text, has recorded as completely as possible the progress of current Bahá’í events and activities over an area now embracing forty countries. In addition, each volume has presented those “historical facts and fundamental principles that constitute the distinguishing features of the Message of Bahá’u’lláh to this age.”
The existence of so many evidences of a newly revealed Faith and Gospel for a humanity arrived at a turning point in its spiritual and social evolution has likewise a profound significance for the non-Bahá’í student and scholar who desires to investigate the world religion founded by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. For in these pages the reader encounters both the revealed Word in its spiritual power, and the response which that utterance has evoked during the first ninety years of the Bahá’í era. He will find what is unparalleled in relig- ious history—the unbroken continuity of a divine Faith from the Manifestation onward through three generations of human experience, and will be able to apprehend what im- pregnable foundations the Bahá’í World Order rests upon in the life and teachings of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, the life and interpretation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and (since the year 1921), in the development of an administrative order under the direction of the Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi.
It is the avowed faith of Bahá’ís that this Revelation has established upon earth the spiritual impulse and the definite principles necessary for social regeneration and the attain- ment of one true religion and social order throughout the world. In THE BAHÁ’Í WORLD, therefore, those who seek a higher will and wisdom than man possesses may learn how, amid the trials and tribulations of a decadent society, a new age has begun to emerge from the world of the spirit to the realm of human action and belief.
