The Tablets of the Divine Plan: First Publication in the Star

In the spring of 1919 — though the Tablets themselves had been revealed in 1916 and 1917 in the Holy Land under the strain of the First World War — the *Star of the West* carried, in a series of issues, the first American publication of what came to be known as *the Tablets of the Divine Plan.*

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The Tablets, fourteen in number, had been revealed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the war-strained Holy Land. The Master, with the household, was at that time at the southern edge of the Ottoman war zone. Communications with the outside world were intermittent. The Tablets were composed nevertheless, in the two principal series of 1916 and 1917, addressed not to individuals but to the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada collectively. They survived the war by the small miracle of having been smuggled out, copied, and carried to America by returning travellers.

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The *Star* introduced them to its readership with a long editorial framing. The Tablets were, the editors wrote, *the charter of the American Faith for the coming century.* They named, with the Master's characteristic concreteness, the specific destinations to which the American believers were being asked to carry the Cause: every state of the United States, every province of Canada, the lands of Central and South America, the islands of the Pacific, the distant outposts of the European empires. No region was omitted from the list.

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The Tablets proceeded by sequence. The first series addressed the western states of the United States; the second addressed Canada; the third extended to Mexico and Central America; the fourth to South America; the fifth to the Caribbean; the sixth to Europe; the seventh to Asia; the eighth to Africa; and so on through the geographical inventory of the inhabited world. The instruction was identical in each case: the friends were to send teachers, form local communities, build the institutional life of the Cause, until the Bahá'í teachings had reached every inhabited region of the planet.

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The American friends received the publication with a mixture of awe and incomprehension. The *Star's* editorial of the following month addressed the latter directly: the Tablets, the editors observed, were not a programme to be completed in the next year or the next decade. They were a charter for the next century of the American Faith's work.

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The prediction was sound. The teaching enterprise outlined in the Divine Plan would, in fact, occupy the American believers across the rest of the twentieth century. The Seven-Year Plan, the Ten-Year Crusade, the successive five- year and seven-year plans of the modern era — all would take their direction from the small set of Tablets first fully published in the *Star of the West* in 1919.

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