The First Divine Plan Tablets in Print

In its issue of September 8, 1916 (Volume 7, No. 10), the *Star of the West* printed a set of Tablets from 'Abdu'l-Bahá under the heading *Tablets Revealed by Abdul-Baha to the Bahais throughout the United States and Canada.* They were the first of the letters later known as the Tablets of the Divine Plan to reach the American believers, and they arrived in the middle of the First World War.

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There were five: to the Northeastern States, the Western States, the Dominion of Canada, the Southern States and the Central States. Each called on the friends to carry the Bahá'í teachings through its region. The Tablet to Canada named the provinces one by one, from Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia to Alberta and British Columbia, and went on to Ungava, Keewatin, Mackenzie, Yukon and the Franklin Islands in the Arctic Circle, hoping that the call of the Kingdom might reach the people of those northern islands and of Greenland.

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These five were part of a larger series. 'Abdu'l-Bahá revealed fourteen such Tablets between March 1916 and March 1917. The rest could not be delivered until after the war, and were unveiled in New York in April 1919.

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The issue opened with words from the Tablet to the Western States, under the heading *This is the Time!*:

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> It is recorded in the blessed Gospel: Travel ye throughout the > world and call ye the people to the Kingdom of God! Now this is > the time that you may arise and perform this most great service > and become the cause of the guidance of the innumerable souls.

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In the same passage the Master recalled that during His stay in America He had called for universal peace in every meeting, and had said plainly that Europe had become like an arsenal whose conflagration depended on one spark.

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The editors followed with a short article, *A Trumpet Call to Action.* The Tablets, they wrote, urged the Bahá'ís "to illumine those sections of the United States and Canada that have not yet received the Light." They called for a spontaneous uprising of the whole body of believers. They proposed a teachers' fund, separate from the fund for the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, to which the friends might give "mites as well as dollars," and suggested that the assemblies in each section to which one of the five Tablets had been addressed should together choose teachers and divide the territory among them.

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*A retelling based on the **Star of the West**, Volume 7, No. 10 (September 8, 1916), "Tablets Revealed by Abdul-Baha to the Bahais throughout the United States and Canada." For the fuller account, see the original.*

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