I am so in love with the Guardian

this is the most amazing post. I already have three books I am reading and love but don't have time to finish them and now I have a new desire to read Shoghi Effendi and all the books that informed him!




06:55 pm - searching for a source... (Taken from Livejournal ljbahai group)


On page 168 of The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, Shoghi Effendi writes:Amidst the shadows which are increasingly gathering about us we can faintly discern the glimmerings of Bahá'u'lláh's unearthly sovereignty appearing fitfully on the horizon of history. To us, the "generation of the half-light," living at a time which may be designated as the period of the incubation of the World Commonwealth envisaged by Bahá'u'lláh, has been assigned a task whose high privilege we can never sufficiently appreciate, and the arduousness of 169 which we can as yet but dimly recognize. We may well believe, we who are called upon to experience the operation of the dark forces destined to unloose a flood of agonizing afflictions, that the darkest hour that must precede the dawn of the Golden Age of our Faith has not yet struck. Deep as is the gloom that already encircles the world, the afflictive ordeals which that world is to suffer are still in preparation, nor can their blackness be as yet imagined. We stand on the threshold of an age whose convulsions proclaim alike the death-pangs of the old order and the birth-pangs of the new. Through the generating influence of the Faith announced by Bahá'u'lláh this New World Order may be said to have been conceived. We can, at the present moment, experience its stirrings in the womb of a travailing age -- an age waiting for the appointed hour at which it can cast its burden and yield its fairest fruit.


I'm curious about the "generation of the half-light" quote (though I've posted its larger setting because the rest of the paragraph makes a great quote on its own). He is quoting, I would assume, either Bahá'u'lláh or `Abdu'l-Bahá on this term, but I can't find any other context for it on Ocean, and so was wondering if anyone knew where it was first used. Any light shed on this is greatly appreciated!


Comment:


I ran the phrase through Google and there was mention on talisman that it's from H.G. Wells' "The Shape of Things to Come". Here's the message which talks about the source - it's near the bottom of the page (search for the phrase in the page).


I don't know for sure if it was indeed marked in Shoghi Effendi's copy of the book, but the phrase is certainly in "The Shape of Things to Come", in Chapter 2, in context of the birth of the Modern State. Interestingly, even H.G. Wells appears to be quoting the phrase (he uses quotation marks for it): (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45th/chapter2.html)


He again mentions the conceptual metaphor of half light in Chapter 29.(the e-book for The Shape of Things to Come is HERE.)I'm guessing that H.G. Wells is either quoting William Archer who wrote "The Great Analysis - a plea for a rational world order", or Maxwell Brown's "Modern State Prophets Before the Great War" (the latter seems almost non-existent in Google-land).


That's some light shed, now I'm curious about the books that Shoghi Effendi read.