Article one describes the Covenant's purpose as preventing the schisms that divided earlier religions, and names the line of authority it establishes. That purpose was tested almost immediately, and again decades later in circumstances the Covenant's own text had not anticipated.
Mirza Muhammad Ali, one of Baha'u'llah's own sons, contested his brother Abdu'l-Baha's appointment as sole authorised interpreter soon after Baha'u'llah's death, gathering a following Baha'i writings subsequently name as the first and paradigmatic instance of "Covenant-breaking," the offence article one identifies as the community's gravest. The dispute produced a lasting rupture rather than reconciliation, and Baha'i institutional history treats the episode as validating the Covenant's necessity by demonstrating the very succession dispute it was designed to foreclose.
A second and more structurally serious test came in 1957, when Shoghi Effendi died suddenly without appointing a successor Guardian, having specified in his writings that a Guardian must be a male descendant of Baha'u'llah meeting particular qualifications, a condition none of his surviving relatives was held to meet. Rather than a further schism, the response was managed by the Hands of the Cause of God, senior believers Shoghi Effendi had himself appointed, who acted as collective custodians until the Universal House of Justice was first elected in 1963, a body that has functioned since as the Covenant's supreme authority without a Guardian above it, an outcome the Covenant's drafters had not explicitly provided for and that the community reached by interpreting its existing texts rather than by new revelation.