hope

In *The Promised Day Is Come* (1941), with Europe in flames and the world at war for the second time in a generation, Shoghi Effendi diagnosed the upheavals of the twentieth century as a single judgment-and-redemption: a tempest unprecedented in its violence, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequence.

In a Tablet preserved in *Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas* (1909), the Master writes to friends under the pressure of opposition and persecution: the storms they were enduring would in time be remembered as the necessary precursor of a *divine spring* — the same logic by which winter precedes the verdant fields and orchards.