Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
Preface
sores, whose panniers sag first on one side and then on the other, and asks that the ill-balanced load be taken from him, and that instead he be made to roll here and there like a polo ball. In contrast with such a view was the way of life in Calvin’s Geneva, where according to laws regulating inns, no one was permitted “to sit up after nine o'clock at night, except spies.”
When the balance between the person and society finally obtains we shall know that man has begun his maturity. Obviously, both individual and group will have to give up something of what they now have, just as the nations will have to yield some of their present sovereignty in favor of the world commonwealth, but this will prove no more of a hardship than the sacrifice of bait to catch fish.
2.
Here is a world religion to match the new world. It has no priesthood; it accepts no funds except from registered adherents. It has solved the problems of successorship, administration and schism, factors which virtually destroyed, almost at their inception, the unity of all previous
faiths. In this case
Bahá’u’lláh the Founder Himself designated in
His written Covenant that His eldest son
‘Abdu’l-Bahá was His authorized Successor and Interpreter. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His own
Will and Testament appointed as
Guardian and Interpreter His grandson
Shoghi Effendi, who in turn is to appoint the next Guardian, the written appointment to be ratified by vote of a council of “
Hands of the Cause.” The democratically-elected institutions which
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