# Portals to Freedom

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Howard Colby Ives, Portals to Freedom, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> Portals to Freedom
> 
> Howard Colby Ives
> 
> Oxford: George Ronald, 1983
> original date
> 
> 1937
> 
> single page
> 
> chapter 1
> 
> To
> SHOGHI EFFENDI
> 
> The Grandson of
> Abdu'l-Bahá
> 
> By Him Appointed
> Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith
> 
> TABLE OF CONTENTS
> PAGE
> 
> Introduction
> 
> 13
> 
> Chapter One
> 
> Retrospect. Spiritual Bankruptcy. A Dawning Hope. The Golden Silence.
> 
> 18
> 
> Chapter Two
> 
> The Glance That Saved the World. A Divine Sincerity. The Masterly Teaching Method.
> 
> 34
> 
> Chapter Three
> 
> True Wealth, Power and Freedom. The Table of Abdu'l-Bahá. Very Great Things. "Are you interested in Renunciation?"
> 
> 50
> 
> Chapter Four
> 
> The Attraction of Perfection. The Boys from the Bowery. A Black Rose and a Black Sweet.
> 
> 60
> 
> Chapter Five
> 
> A Leaf in the Breeze of the Will of God. "My Throne is My Mat." Inscription in "The Seven Valleys."
> 
> 69
> 
> Chapter Six
> 
> The Reality and Essence of Brotherhood. "Cannot You Serve Him Once?" True Brotherhood Due to the Breaths of the Holy Spirit. "O, you should have Seen Him!"
> 
> 80
> 
> Chapter Seven
> 
> An Eternal Bond. The Wedding. The need for Reformation of Laws Pertaining to Divorce. The Laws of Bahá'u'lláh. Four Kinds of Love. The Children of the New Day.
> 
> 92
> 
> Chapter Eight
> 
> "The Most Perfect Gentleman I have ever known." The Master Teacher. The Spiritual Warrior. A Fable. "It behooves You to Manifest Light." The Gift. The First
> Tablet.
> 
> 114
> 
> Chapter Nine
> 
> The American Itinerary. The Power of the Spirit. "Her Highness the Cow." True Greatness. The Divine Teaching Method.
> 
> 132
> 
> Chapter Ten
> 
> The Universe of Bahá'u'lláh. The Evolution of Man. The Glory of Self-Sacrifice.
> 
> 149
> 
> Chapter Eleven
> 
> Instruction in the Way of Life. What is Authority? The Science of the Love of God.
> 
> 167
> 
> Chapter Twelve
> The New World Order. A Divine Civilization. The Kingdom of God on Earth.
> 
> 175
> 
> Chapter Thirteen
> 
> Some Divine Characteristics. The Humility of Servitude. The Station of True Manhood.
> 
> 192
> 
> Chapter Fourteen
> 
> Abdu'l-Bahá's Last Words in America. Seven Distinctive Characteristics of the Teachings. Evidences of the New World Order.
> 
> 211
> 
> Chapter Fifteen
> 
> By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them. Four Tablets.
> 
> 229
> 
> Chapter Sixteen
> 
> Conclusion.
> 
> 250
> 
> Notes
> 
> Illustration
> 
> ABDU'L-BAHÁ, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1912
> 
> Frontispiece
> 
> Portals To Freedom was first published before many of the
> current translations of Bahá'í writings were available. Some of
> the quotations used in this book were taken from earlier renditions of these
> works, as for example, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, The
> Hidden Words and others. Also several quotations were taken from a
> compilation, Bahá'í Scriptures, much of which has been
> retranslated and revised into a newer work called Bahá'í World
> Faith. For an accurate rendition of the Bahá'í Writings,
> these current editions should be used as references.
> 
> INTRODUCTION
> 
> "I ask Thee, O Ruler of Existence and King of Creation, to transmute
> the brass of existence into gold by the elixir of Thy Revelation and Wisdom:
> then reveal unto men by a comprehensive Book that which will enrich them by Thy
> Riches."
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh
> 
> What is that mystery underlying human life which gives to events and
> to persons the power of mutation, of transformation? If one had never before
> seen a seed, nor heard of its latent life, how difficult to believe that only
> the cold earth, the warm sun, the descending showers and the gardener's care
> were needed to cause its miraculous transformation into the growing form, the
> budding beauty, the intoxicating fragrance of the rose!
> 
> Or who can understand the reason why a chance perusal of a book, the presence
> of a friend or the meeting with a stranger often alters a determined course of
> action, profoundly affects our attitude toward life, and, not seldom, so nearly
> reaches the roots of being and the springs of action that never after is life
> quite the same?
> 
> It is as if some super-Luther Burbank had, by that seemingly chance event,
> grafted into the branch of our crab-apple being the bud of the Tree of
> Knowledge, or into the bramble of the wilderness of human thought the rose of
> paradise.
> 
> To this mystery of mysteries the philosophy of the schoolmen offers no adequate
> explanation. We only know that it is a common experience of us all. The effort
> towards the description of this catalysis is the essence of all poetry; the
> abortive attempt to explain it is at the root or all philosophy, while the
> experience of it is the one cause underlying the transformation of human life
> and character. All history is its witness and every saint its justification.
> 
> In offering to the reader this inadequate account of one such experience my
> only excuse is its totality, its all-inclusiveness, its grandeur. It is unique
> not because it is rare, since every contact of man with his fellow men
> demonstrates it, but because of its supremacy over other transforming contacts.
> One might liken it to the difference in effect between touching a cold clod and
> the grasping of a galvanic battery, or the meeting with a debased criminal and
> the meeting with an Abraham Lincoln.
> 
> To those who met Abdu'l-Bahá in the summer of 1912, when He spent eight
> months in this country, such comparisons will seem highly inadequate. While to
> many that meeting did not convey more than a contact with personified dignity,
> beauty, wisdom and selflessness, and so led them, at least, to higher altitudes
> of thought and life, to hundreds of others that meeting was the door to
> undreamed-or worlds; to a new, a boundless, an eternal life.
> 
> We realize the difficulties faced in attempting to bring to the reader a
> quarter of a century later, the atmosphere created by this meeting for those
> who had the eyes to see, the cars to hear and minds to comprehend, even
> slightly, the new and divine world opened before the eager and courageous feet.
> In fact to do so with any degree of accurate completeness is all but
> impossible. To those bred in the Christian tradition one might ask what would
> be the probable effect upon them if they could have been among the audience
> when the Sermon on the Mount was spoken, or if one of them, like John, could
> have reclined upon the breast of the Master. Without daring to suggest that the
> comparison is parallel, my own experience, when brought into close association
> with Abdu'l-Bahá, was so overwhelming, so fraught with sensations
> suggesting an entrance into a new and super-mundane world, that I can think of
> no other comparison more adequate.
> 
> I do not propose in relating these experiences to minimize my own reaction to
> this great experience by presenting it with even the slightest suggestion of
> materialistic or pseudo-scientific explanations. It is my work to report as
> faithfully as possible what I saw and heard and experienced during these
> meetings and conversations. If at times the recounting flavors of a fancy
> bordering on the fantastic I may comfort myself with reflection on the possible
> terms applied to Peter, James and John, the fishermen, when they attempted to
> describe to their fellow laborers the effect which the Master's Presence had
> upon them. What epithets must the former lovers and associates of Mary
> Magdalene have applied to her!
> 
> To me, a man of middle age, a Unitarian Clergyman, a student since youth of
> religions and philosophies, the experience had a disturbing quality somewhat
> cataclysmic. Why should this man be able so to upset all my preconceived
> notions and conceptions of values by His mere presence? Was it that He seemed
> to exude from His very being an atmosphere of love and understanding such as I
> had never dreamed? Was it the resonant voice, modulated to a music which caught
> the heart? Was it the aura of happiness touched at times with a sadness
> implying the bearing of the burden of all the sin and sorrow of the world,
> which always surrounded Him? Was it the commingled majesty and humility of His
> every gesture and word, which was perhaps His most obvious characteristic? How
> can one answer such questions? Those who saw and heard Abdu'l-Bahá
> during those memorable months will share with me the sense of the inadequacy of
> words to communicate the incommunicable.
> 
> At the time I met Abdu'l-Bahá, in the spring of 1912, He was sixty-eight
> years of age. Of these, twelve years had been spent in exile with His spiritual
> as well as physical Father, Bahá'u'lláh, in Baghdád,
> Constantinople and Adrianople. Then forty years, to a day, in the Turkish
> prison-fortress of `Akká, ten miles from Mt. Carmel, on the coast of
> Palestine. Because of their staunch adherence to their faith in
> Bahá'u'lláh as the Manifestation of God, Abdu'l-Bahá with
> about seventy others had sacrificed all that they had, preferring imprisonment
> and inward freedom with Him to outward freedom and spiritual bondage without
> Him. With the overthrow of the tyrannous reign of Abdu'l-Hamid, by the Young
> Turk Party in 1908, this long exile and imprisonment ended and that Voice and
> Presence was free to prove to the world what He had so completely demonstrated,
> that "The only prison is the prison of self."
> 
> To what marvelous inner life of the spirit could be ascribed, I asked myself,
> the fact that this man, born of a long line of Persian nobility; accustomed to
> every luxury until his eighth year; followed by a half-century of exile,
> torture and prison life, could emerge into the modem world of Paris, London and
> New York and dominate every experience with a calm control of circumstance; a
> clarifying exposure of superficialities; a joyous love for all humanity which
> never condemned but with forgiveness brought shame?
> 
> It is with the hope that, to a degree, the following pages may approach an
> answer to this question that they are offered to the reader.
> 
> single page
> 
> chapter 1
> 
> METADATA
> 
> Views38473 views since posted 1999; last edit 2025-08-13 15:09 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../ives_portals_freedom;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
> ISBN
> O-85398-O13-6
> Language
> English
> Permission
> author and publisher
> History
> Formatted 1999 by Jonah Winters; Proofread 1999 by Michelle Reid.
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> Shortlink: bahai-library.com/243
> Citation: ris/243
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> — *Portals to Freedom (Used by permission of the curator)*