“We are told by Shoghi Effendi that two great processes are at work in the world: the Great Plan of God, tumultuous in its progress, working through mankind as a whole, tearing down barriers to world unity and forging humankind into a unified body in the fires of suffering and experience. This process will produce, in God’s due time, the Lesser Peace, the political unification of the world. Mankind at that time can be likened to a body that is unified but without life. The second process, the task of breathing life into this unified body, of creating true unity and spirituality culminating in the Most Great Peace - is that of the Bahá’ís, who are laboring consciously, with detailed instructions and continuing Divine guidance, to erect the fabric of the Kingdom of God on Earth, into which they call their fellow men, thus conferring upon them eternal life.”

“The working out of God’s Major Plan proceeds mysteriously in ways directed by Him alone, but the Minor Plan that He has given us to execute, as our part in His grand design for the redemption of mankind, is clearly delineated. It is to this work that we must devote all our energies, for there is no one else to do it.”

(Letter of 8 December 1967 written by Universal House of Justice, quoted in Wellspring of Guidance, p.134)

When Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed His Message to the world in the nineteenth century He made it abundantly clear that the first step essential for the peace and progress of mankind was its unification. As He says, "The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established."

To this day, however, you will find most people take the opposite point of view: they look upon unity as an ultimate, almost unattainable goal and concentrate first on remedying all the other ills of mankind. If they did but know it, these other ills are but various symptoms and side effects of the basic disease - disunity.

(Letter of 8 December 1967 written by Universal House of Justice, quoted in Wellspring of Guidance, p. 131)

... The Faith of God is the sole source of salvation for mankind today. The true cause of the ills of humanity is its disunity. No matter how perfect may be the machinery devised by the leaders of men for the political unity of the world, it will still not provide the antidote to the poison sapping the vigour of present-day society. These ills can be cured only through the instrumentality of God’s Faith. There are many well-wishers of mankind who devote their efforts to relief work and charity and to the material well-being of man, but only Bahá’ís can do the work which God most wants done. When we devote ourselves to the work of the Faith we are doing a work which is the greatest aid and only refuge for a needy and divided world...

(Universal House of Justice letter to the National Spiritual Assemblies of Africa, February , 1970)

... Because love for our fellowmen and anguish at their plight are essential parts of a true Baha’i’s life, we are continually drawn to do what we can to help them. It is vitally important that we do so whenever the occasion presents itself, for our actions must say the same thing as our words--but this compassion for our fellows must not be allowed to divert our energies into channels which are ultimately doomed to failure, causing us to neglect the most important and fundamental work of all. There are hundreds of thousands of well-wishers of mankind who devote their lives to works of relief and charity, but a pitiful few to do the work which God Himself most wants done: the spiritual awakening and regeneration of mankind. Our task--building up the Baha’i system...

(From a letter written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice to an individual, 8 December 1967)

“...There are mighty agencies in this world, governments, foundations, institutions of many kinds with tremendous financial resources which are working to improve the material lot of human beings. Anything we Bahá’ís could add to such resources in the way of special funds or contributions would be a negligible drop in the ocean. However, alone among men we have the divinely-given remedy for the real ills of mankind; no one else is doing or can do this most important work, and if we divert our energy and our funds into fields in which others are already doing more than we can hope to do, we shall be delaying the diffusion of the Divine Message which is the most important task of all.

Because of such an attitude, as also because of our refusal to become involved in politics, Bahá’ís are often accused of holding aloof from the ‘real problems’ of their fellow-men. But when we hear this accusation let us not forget that those who make it are usually idealistic materialists to whom material good is the only ‘real’ good, whereas we know that the working of the material world is merely a reflection of spiritual conditions and until the spiritual conditions can be changed there can be no lasting change for the better in material affairs.

We should also remember that most people have no clear concept of the sort of world they wish to build, nor how to go about building it. Even those who are concerned to improve conditions are therefore reduced to combating every apparent evil that takes their attention. Willingness to fight against evils, whether in the form of conditions or embodied in evil men has thus become for most people the touchstone by which they judge a person’s moral worth. Bahá’ís, on the other hand, know the goal they are working towards and know what they must do, step by step, to attain it. Their whole energy is directed towards the building of the good, a good which has such a positive strength that in the face of it the multitude of evils--which are in essence negative--will fade away and be no more. To enter into the quixotic tournament of demolishing one by one the evils in the world is, to a Bahá’í, a vain waste of time and effort. His whole life is directed towards proclaiming the Message of Bahá’u’lláh, reviving the spiritual life of his fellow-men, uniting them in a divinely-created World Order, and then, as that Order grows in strength and influence, he will see the power of that Message transforming the whole of human society and progressively solving the problems and removing the injustices which have so long bedeviled the world.”

(Universal House of Justice, Letter to the National Spiritual Assembly of Italy, November 19, 1974)

1. What is the Great Plan of God ? How does it work?
2. What is the Lesser Peace? Who will it be established by?
3. When will the Lesser Peace be established?
4. What is the metaphor used for the state of the world at the time of the establishment of the Lesser Peace?
5. What is the Minor or Lesser Plan of God? How does it work?
6. What is the Most Great Peace? Who will it be established by?
7. Give two synonymous terms for Most Great Peace.
8. What is the task for the Bahá’ís in relation to the metaphor used in question 4?
9. How do the Bahá’ís perform their task?
10. What is the guarantee that the Bahá’ís will achieve all the goals? Does this mean that Bahá’ís or Bahá’í institutions cannot make mistakes? Bring an example to illustrate your answer.
11. What is the work which “God Himself most wants done”?
12. What is the nature of the work in which hundreds of thousands of well-wishing people have devoted themselves to?
13. When you “regard the world as the human body”, what is synonymous with “relief work”?
14. Who else is there that can join the Bahá’ís in performing their task? Why?
15. What are the differences between symptoms and basic disease?
16. Bahá’ís are sometimes criticized as being aloof from the “real” problems of the world. How would you reply to this criticism?
17. What does the term “quixotic” mean?