But the equation of divine purpose was not yet complete. The coming of Bahá’u’lláh had fulfilled the prophetic promises of the sacred books of the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and others. Like mighty rivers restricted to their own watersheds these separate systems of religious belief and worship, incapable of mingling their courses, had found their destined union and confluence in the infinite ocean of Bahá’u’lláh’s utterance. Furthermore, the supreme and ultimate product of divine revelation, the apotheosis of prophecy and the universal outcome in which all the heavenly religions would consummate was that quintessence of the cycles, that “Mystery of God,” a perfected “Servant” in whom the divine and human wills had found complete blending. This sanctified personage was to appear in the great Day of God, that Day of universal splendor when “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the nations and peoples of the world had become so closely associated and wrought together in their physical existence, so interwoven and interdependent in the necessities and requirements of life, that the problems and politics of one government now affected and influenced the conditions of them all. The world had become one vast human family wherein interests were intimately related, responsibilities mutual and problems universal. Therefore, the Word of God revealed by Bahá’u’lláh was universal in its provision and remedy for the conditions of mankind—conditions which, although they were direct outcomes of human will and making, had been eternally foreseen by the omniscient eye and spoken by the tongues of prophets as recorded in all the holy books. Great numbers of brilliant souls throughout the east had accepted and followed this manifest standard of unity and reconciliation. In religious heredity, training and belief they had been diverse, hostile and irreconcilable, but under the benign , penetrating influence of the Holy Spirit of the Word made flesh in Bahá’u’lláh, they attained the blessed station of oneness and love in the heaven of the kingdom.

To strengthen, safeguard and increase this unity and love Bahá’u’lláh appointed a successor to Whom all should turn for guidance and illumination after His own departure, naming in the Book of the Covenant written by His own blessed hand His eldest son, the Greatest Branch, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Center of the Covenant in Whom Bahá’ís throughout the world recognise the authority of perfect