In India alone, over 150,000 new believers have joined the
Baha'i community… 
…we can even bear witness to the marked improvement in the
conditions surrounding the pilgrimages performed by its devoted adherents to
its consecrated shrines at its world center—pilgrimages originally arduous,
perilous, tediously long, often made on foot, at times ending in
disappointment, and confined to a handful of harassed Oriental followers,
gradually attracting, under steadily improving circumstances of security and
comfort, an ever swelling number of new converts converging from the four
corners of the globe, and culminating in the widely publicized yet sadly
frustrated visit of a noble Queen, who, at the very threshold of the city of
her heart’s desire, was compelled, according to her own written testimony, to
divert her steps, and forego the privilege of so priceless a benefit.
We can likewise discern a no less appreciable advance in the
rise of its institutions, whether as administrative centers or places of
worship—institutions, clandestine and subterrene in their earliest beginnings,
emerging imperceptibly into the broad daylight of public recognition, legally
protected, enriched by pious endowments, ennobled at first by the erection of
the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of ‘Ishqábád, the first Bahá’í House of Worship, and more
recently immortalized, through the rise in the heart of the North American
continent of the Mother Temple of the West, the forerunner of a divine, a
slowly maturing civilization.
In reviewing the religious history of the Pacific during the
Baha'i Dispensation we recall that it was only a short time prior to the
Declaration of the Bab that the Teachings of Christ spread throughout these
islands; that the Teachings of Baha'u'llah were first proclaimed there when the
Hand of the Cause Agnes Alexander arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in December
1901; that at the beginning of the World Crusade in 1953 only a handful of
islands had had any contact with the Faith; and that at Ridvan 1959 when the
first regional National Spiritual Assembly of the South Pacific was established
in Suva there were in its area but twelve Local Spiritual Assemblies in nine
island groups. Witness now what has happened in the quarter century since 1959.