The great problem is how to teach the wayward, burning, insatiable heart its discipline and abnegation without changing its quality. To borrow a crude figure from science the question is how to change it from one of those highly unstable elements that is ever seeking com- bination, into a catalyzer, when it has reached this high calling of divine love, that changes those things that come into its presence without itself suffering change.

But that abundant life to which the great Prophets call us inheres in the idea that the heart can mature and at the same time never lose its response to life's infinite variety.

The sister and wife and daughters of 'Abdu'l-Bahi are like this—divine catalyzers, as it were. They do not preach to you nor attempt to reform you, but by coming into their presence you—became something; something a little nobler, a little worthier than you had been before. Bahíyyih Khánum, the sister of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, has, from the age of five, lived through experiences and calamities the like of which no Occidental woman could faintly imagine. Exquisite, fragrant, imperturbable, assured, she walks among the fluctuating conditions of the world like a star through its appointed course in the heavens. After one has been stirred by the presence of women like the sister and the wife of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, our curious little evidences of “firmness” are practically meaningless. That self-congratulatory state of the Occidental when he has performed some little service for his Cause is unknown in Haifa. “Leave faith to the faithful and faithlessness to the infidel; one drop of pain in Thy Love is enough for the heart.” Until the heart be eternally bruised by this sweet wound of love we may never hope to shed fragrance, such as these great women shed, about us. Day and night the daughters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, without stint and without rest, are building up through their deeds of continual kindness those solid barricades against the forces of ignorance, prejudice and malevolence; those outposts of service, love and peace that mark the boundaries of another world. We see in these six women a faith that never waivers, a gift that never varies, a love that never tires—celestial caryatides, it might be, bearing on their heads the structure of the new civilization.

The unique and outstanding figure in the world today is Shoghi Effendi. Unique, because the guardianship of this great Cause is in his hands, and his humility, modesty, economy and self-effacement are monumental. Outstanding because he is the only person, we may safely say, who entrusted with the affairs of millions of souls, has but one thought and one mind—the speedy promulgation of peace and good-will throughout the world. His personal life is absolutely and definitely sacrificed. The poorest boy in America struggling for an education would consider himself hardly used to have no more than those bare necessities which this young man voluntarily chooses for himself. The ladies of the household typify the Cause as Love and Faith. Shoghi Effendi adds to this the elan of the New Day, Action and Progress.