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’)