In ‘God Passes By’ the Guardian makes a review of certain worldwide events from 1844 to 1944

I shall endeavor to review, in their proper perspective and despite the comparatively brief space of time which separates us from them, the events which the revolution of a hundred years, unique alike in glory and tribulation, has unrolled before our eyes. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

The Guardian’s purpose in writing God Passes By

It is my purpose, on the occasion of an anniversary of such profound significance, to attempt in the succeeding pages a survey of the outstanding events of the century that has seen this Spirit burst forth upon the world, as well as the initial stages of its subsequent incarnation in a System that must evolve into an Order designed to embrace the whole of mankind, and capable of fulfilling the high destiny that awaits man on this planet. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

The “evidences of the travail of an age that has sustained the impact of His [Baha’u’llah’s] Revelation, that has ignored His summons”

• In the convulsions of contemporary society,
• in the frenzied, world-wide ebullitions of men’s thoughts,
• in the fierce antagonisms inflaming races, creeds and classes,
• in the shipwreck of nations,
• in the downfall of kings,
• in the dismemberment of empires,
• in the extinction of dynasties,
• in the collapse of ecclesiastical hierarchies,
• in the deterioration of time-honored institutions,
• in the dissolution of ties, secular as well as religious, that had for so long held together the members of the human race—all manifesting themselves with ever-increasing gravity since the outbreak of the first World War that immediately preceded the opening years of the Formative Age of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh—

in these we can readily recognize the evidences of the travail of an age that has sustained the impact of His Revelation, that has ignored His summons, and is now laboring to be delivered of its burden, as a direct consequence of the impulse communicated to it by the generative, the purifying, the transmuting influence of His Spirit. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

The “spirit” which is ““vibrating in the innermost realities of all created things”

To what agency, if not to the irresistible diffusion of that world-shaking, world-energizing, world-redeeming spirit, which the Báb has affirmed is “vibrating in the innermost realities of all created things” can the origins of this portentous crisis, incomprehensible to man, and admittedly unprecedented in the annals of the human race, be attributed? 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

The “emergence of His [Baha’u’llah’s] embryonic World Order…has ‘deranged the equilibrium of the world and revolutionized mankind’s ordered life’”

To what else can the observant eye or the unprejudiced mind, acquainted with the signs and portents heralding the birth, and accompanying the rise, of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh ascribe this dire, this planetary upheaval, with its attendant destruction, misery and fear, if not to the emergence of His embryonic World Order, which, as He Himself has unequivocally proclaimed, has “deranged the equilibrium of the world and revolutionized mankind’s ordered life”? 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

“a fermentation in the general life of mankind”

Itself [the Faith] undergoing a period of incubation during its primitive age, it has, through the emergence of its slowly-crystallizing system, induced a fermentation in the general life of mankind designed to shake the very foundations of a disordered society, to purify its life-blood, to reorientate and reconstruct its institutions, and shape its final destiny. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

“a tumult in human society such as no mind can fathom”

Already in the space of less than a century the operation of the mysterious processes generated by its [The Báb+Baha’u’llah] creative spirit has provoked a tumult in human society such as no mind can fathom. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

The magnitude of Baha’u’llah’s “shadow” on “successive Prophets destined to be raised up after Him”

The brightness of the millennial glory which it must shed in the fullness of time dazzles our eyes. The magnitude of the shadow which its Author will continue to cast on successive Prophets destined to be raised up after Him eludes our calculation. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

1844: The “culmination of a universal prophetic cycle”

The weight of the potentialities with which this Faith, possessing no peer or equal in the world’s spiritual history, and marking the culmination of a universal prophetic cycle, has been endowed, staggers our imagination. 

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)

1844: “the inception of the Bábí Dispensation, …the inauguration of the Bahá’í Era, …the commencement of the Bahá’í Cycle, and… the birth of ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá”

On the 23rd of May of this auspicious year the Bahá’í world will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. It will commemorate at once

• the hundreth anniversary of the inception of the Bábí Dispensation, of
• the inauguration of the Bahá’í Era, of
• the commencement of the Bahá’í Cycle, and of
• the birth of ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá.

- Shoghi Effendi  (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)