The Tablets of the Divine Plan Unveiled

The April 1919 issue of the *Star of the West* carried news that the American Bahá'ís had been waiting for since the war's end: the long-delayed Tablets of the Divine Plan had at last reached the United States, and the National Convention, then in session at the Hotel McAlpin in New York, would be the occasion for their formal unveiling.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá had written the fourteen great Tablets — addressed to the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada, taken together and grouped by region — between March 1916 and March 1917. He had intended them as a charter for the next phase of the American teaching work: a call to send teachers, region by region, to every state in the Union, to every province of Canada, and outward from there to every country of the Western Hemisphere and across the oceans to every part of the world.

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But the Tablets had been written in Haifa during the war years. The Ottoman state had cut the Bahá'í Centre off from correspondence with the West. The Tablets had been laid up unsent until the war ended. Only in the closing months of 1918 had it become possible for messengers to carry the manuscript copies across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

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By April 1919 the Tablets had reached New York. The Convention gathered, the believers assembled, and the documents were read aloud, region by region. The *Star of the West* of April and May 1919 printed the texts in successive instalments, region following region, so that the believers across the country who had not been at the Convention could read them in their own homes and beginning planning their own response.

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> These are the days for sowing the seeds of universal peace.

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The keynote sentence, set early in the *Star's* unveiling sequence, became the keynote of the next decades of American Bahá'í history. The Tablets named the territories: New England; the Atlantic states; the South; the Midwest; the great plains; the mountain west; the Pacific coast; Alaska; Mexico; the Central American republics; the South American republics; the Caribbean; Australia and New Zealand; Africa; the great cities of the East. Every region had been named in writing by the hand of the Master.

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The Convention adjourned. The Tablets went home with the delegates. Within months the first travel-teaching responses were under way: Marian Jack to Alaska; Leonora Holsapple to Brazil; Martha Root, a few years later, to the cities of South America and on around the world. The Divine Plan, in 1919, had been put into their hands. The work of fulfilling it would occupy the rest of the twentieth century.

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