# The Mission of Baha'u'llah: And Other Literary Pieces

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: George Townshend, The Mission of Baha'u'llah: And Other Literary Pieces, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> THE MISSION OF
> BAHÁ’U’LLÁH
> and other literary pieces
> 
> by
> GEORGE TOWNSHEND
> 
> GEORGE RONALD
> Oxford
> Copyright by George Townshend 1952
> 
> Printed in England by
> Samuel Sidders & Son Ltd., 115, Salusbury Road, London, N.W.6.
> Preface
> THOUGH THE LITERARY pieces that make up this volume are varied in type,
> they have their definite balance and unity. They are intended to expand the
> personal and devotional aspect of the Bahá’í Faith not less than the historical.
> The Genius of Ireland is the name-essay of a book now out of print. The
> essay entitled The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh has appeared as the Introduction to
> God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi (1944). ‘Nabíl’s History of the Báb’ was
> published in the American magazine World Order: ‘Queen Marie and the
> Bahá’í Faith’ and ‘The Wellspring of Happiness’ in the biennial The Bahá’í
> World. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged. The poems and
> devotional pieces appeared (with one or two exceptions) in The Altar on the
> Hearth (1926). They are printed here as being in fact a response to the first
> stirrings of that new spiritual life which Bahá’u’lláh breathes in those who turn to
> Him, and are in a small way a true record of the devotional approach made by a
> Christian home to the realisation of the Day of God and the acknowledgement of
> Bahá’u’lláh as its Lord.
> The poem addressed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, which follows immediately, was
> accepted by Him in 1920.
> George Townshend
> *
> Ripley,
> Dundrum,
> Co. Dublin,
> Eire.
> 
> Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois. 1974.
> World Order Magazine, New York.
> Bahá’í World, vol. VIII, 1936–1938 (Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois), pp. 769, 771–
> 5.
> *
> ‘Ripley’ is/was most likely near the start of Mount Anville Road, Dundrum.
> To
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
> HAIL to Thee, Scion of Glory, Whose utterance poureth abroad
> The joy of the heavenly knowledge and the light of the greatest
> of days!
> Poet of mysteries chanting in rapture the beauty of God,
> Unto Thee be thanksgiving’ and praise!
> Child of the darkness that wandered in gloom but dreamed of
> the light,
> Lo! I have seen Thy splendour ablaze in the heavens afar
> Showering gladness and glory and shattering the shadows of
> night,
> And seen no other star.
> Thy words are to me as fragrances borne from the garden of
> heaven,
> Beams of a lamp that is hid in the height of a holier world,
> Arrows of fire that pierce and destroy with the might of the Levin
> Into our midnight hurled.
> Sword of the Father! none other can rend the dark veil from
> my eyes,
> None other can beat from my limbs with the shearing blade of
> God’s might
> The sins I am fettered withal and give me the power to rise
> And come forth to the fullness of light.
> 
> Lo! Thou hast breathed on my sorrow the sweetness of faith and
> of hope,
> Thou hast chanted high paeans of joy that my heart’s echoes ever
> repeat
> And the path to the knowledge of God begins to glimmer and ope
> Before my faltering feet.
> Weak and unworthy my praise. Yet, as from its throbbing throat
> Some lone bird pours its song to the flaming infinite sky,
> So unto Thee in the zenith I lift from a depth remote
> This broken human cry.
> Contents
> Preface.. ................................................................................................... .   3
> To ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.. ................................................................................... .           4
> Part I
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh.. .................................................................. . 9
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb.. ..................................................................... . 19
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character.. ................................. . 46
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith.. .................................... . 56
> The call to God: A meditation.. .............................................................. . 66
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.. .................................................................. . 77
> The wellspring of happiness.. ................................................................. . 88
> The genius of Ireland.. ............................................................................ . 104
> Part II
> To Bahá’u’lláh.. ...................................................................................... . 121
> Contents                                                       7
> .                                                                                                                    122
> 
> Part III
> Meditations, devotions and poems
> For a seeker.. ........................................................................................... . 122
> To assailing doubts.. ............................................................................... . 129
> A vision of God’s triumph.. .................................................................... . 131
> A vision of the day of judgment.. ........................................................... . 132
> For Ireland.. ............................................................................................. . 134
> For mother and father.............................................................................. . 135
> A little child shall lead them.. ................................................................. . 150
> Envoy.. .................................................................................................... . 153
> Part I
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> HERE is a history of our times written on an unfamiliar theme—a history
> filled with love and happiness and vision and strength, telling of triumphs gained
> and wider triumphs yet to come: and whatever it holds of darkest tragedy it
> leaves mankind at its close not facing a grim inhospitable future but marching out
> from the shadows on the high road of an inevitable destiny towards the opened
> gates of the Promised City of Eternal Peace.
> These hundred years as we have known them have been distinguished by
> human achievements and marvels unparalleled in any annals, and also by
> unparalleled disillusion and loss. But this history tells of wonders greater,
> mightier, more beneficent, wrought in the same period: and its tidings instead of
> tears and sorrow are of long forgotten Joy and vanished Power descended from
> heaven once more into the world of action and the lives of mortal men. It tells of
> things divine: of the birth of a new World Faith in our midst—a Faith which
> comes in succession to all the World Faiths of the past, acknowledging all,
> fulfilling all, carrying the common purpose of all to its consummation: and
> bearing to the Christians, “the People of the Gospel”, a special summons to rise
> and help speed its propagation through the whole earth.
> The narrative centres round one majestic lonely Figure, and its animating
> motive is the infinite transcendent love He bears for all mankind and the
> answering love which He draws forth from the hearts of the faithful.
> The theme on its human side is that of Love and Struggle and Death. It tells
> of men and women like ourselves, adventuring all they had and all they were for
> sheer love’s sake, of desolated homes, of breaking hearts, of bereavement and
> exile and suffering and indomitable purpose.
> 
> Originally published as the Introduction to Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By. Bahá’í Publishing
> Trust, Wilmette, Illinois. 1944.
> 10                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> For long it seemed as if the world were too unhappy, too content with trivial
> pursuits to be able to accept in practice a Revelation so spiritual, so universal.
> Time and again the violent extirpation of the Faith at the hands of tyranny
> seemed assured. Many there were in high places in diverse lands who knew of
> the Faith, who were informed of the cruel wrongs inflicted on its votaries and
> heard their protests and appeals for justice. But there was none who heeded or
> who helped.
> Strange and pitiful that an eager, inquiring Age which discovered so much of
> truth should have left the spiritual realm unexplored and should have missed the
> most important truth of all.
> No Prophet has ever come into the world with greater proofs of His identity
> than Bahá’u’lláh: nor in the first century of its activity has any older Faith
> achieved so much or spread so far across the globe as this.
> The mightiest proof of a Prophet has ever been found in Himself and in the
> efficacy of His word. Bahá’u’lláh rekindled the fires of faith and of happiness in
> the hearts of men. His knowledge was innate and spontaneous, not acquired in
> any school. None could gainsay or resist His wisdom and even His worst
> enemies admitted His greatness. All human perfections were embodied in Him.
> His strength was infinite. Trials and sufferings increased His firmness and
> power. As a divine physician He diagnosed the malady of the Age and
> prescribed the remedy. His teachings were universal and conferred illumination
> on all mankind. His power has been poured forth more abundantly since His
> death. In His prescience He stood alone and events have proved and are still
> proving its accuracy.
> A second proof which every Prophet has brought with him has been the
> witness of the past: the evidence of Ancient Prophecy.
> The fulfilment in this Day of the prophecies contained in the Qur’án and in
> Muslim tradition has not prevented Islám from persecuting the Bahá’í Faith but it
> has been startling and notorious.
> The fulfilment of the prophecies of Christ and of the Bible has been over a
> period of a hundred years or more matter of common
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh                         11
> knowledge and remark in the West. But the full extent of that fulfilment is only
> seen in Bahá’u’lláh. The proclamation of His Faith was made in 1844, the year
> when the strict exclusion of the Jews from their own land enforced by the
> Muslims for some twelve centuries was at last relaxed by the Edict of Toleration
> and “the times of the Gentiles” were “fulfilled”. The Advent has been long
> delayed and has fallen in a time of oppression and iniquity, of religious unreality
> and disbelief, when love for God and man had grown cold, when men were
> 3                                             4
> immersed in material business and pleasure. The Prophet came like a thief in
> the night and was here in our midst while people were wrapped in deep spiritual
> slumber. He tried and tested souls, separated the spiritual from the unspiritual,
> true from false believers, the sheep from the goats; and the people taken
> unawares were caught as in a snare and knew not their danger till the retributive
> justice of God closed in upon them. Yet the appearance of the Faith and the
> rapidity and direction of its extension was as the lightning which flashes from the
> East to the West. Christianity in contrast to the Revelation of Muḥammad had
> spread from the East to the West and has been predominantly a Western Faith.
> The Bahá’í Faith likewise has moved westward but with even greater speed and
> momentum than Christianity.
> 
> From the beginning of the Era, from the days of the Herald of the Faith, the
> Báb, the chronicles show a conscious sympathy of Christians with the New
> Teaching, which was in marked contrast with the attitude of their Muslim
> neighbours. The earliest instance of this, perhaps, is the kindly tribute of Dr.
> Cormick, an English physician resident in Ṭihrán, to the Báb whom he attended
> in prison when suffering from the effects of torture, and his record of the
> prevalent opinion that the teaching of the Báb resembled Christianity. The first
> Western historian of the Movement, Count Gobineau, a French diplomat, wrote
> (1865) with enthusiasm of the Báb’s saintliness, of the loftiness of His ideals, of
> His charm, His eloquence, and of the astonishing power of His words over both
> friend and foe: Ernest Renan in Les Apôtres 1866), Lord Curzon in Persia,
> Professor Browne of Cambridge
> 
> Luke 21:4.
> Matthew 12:48.
> Matthew 24:38.
> Matthew 24:43.
> Luke 21:35.
> Matthew 24:27.
> 12                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> in several works, and many Christian men of letters of later date have written in a
> similar strain.
> But among the many instances of this instinctive sympathy, the most
> spectacular is that which marked the execution of the Báb in the market square of
> Tabríz on July 9th, 1850. The officer in charge of the firing party was a
> Christian. He approached the Báb and prayed Him that on this account and
> because he had no enmity towards Him in his heart he might be spared the guilt
> of perpetrating so heinous a crime. The Báb replied that if his prayer were
> sincere God was able to fulfil his desire. The remarkable miracle by which this
> prayer was granted, and the martyrdom of the Báb carried out by another
> regiment under a Muslim officer, is a part of history.
> The Christian West, though far from the scene of the Prophet’s ministry, felt
> and responded practically to the divine World Impulse decades before the East.
> Poets, major and minor, Shelley and Wordsworth and many another, sang of a
> new Dawn. A new missionary effort spread the Christian Gospel through the
> earth: spiritual men and women sought to revive reality in religion: reformers
> arose to redress long-standing evils; novelists used their art for a social purpose.
> How different all this from the action of the corrupt, fanatical, persecuting East!
> The Báb Himself identified His teaching in spirit and purpose with that of
> Christ which was a preparation for His own: and He quoted some of Christ’s
> instructions to His disciples as part of His own ordination address to the “Letters
> of the Living”.
> Bahá’u’lláh from the beginning seems to have realised the special capacity of
> the progressive and enterprising West. He took the most vigorous steps possible
> to bring the Truth of the Age to the knowledge of the West and its leaders.
> Debarred from delivering His message to Europe in person, He wrote from a
> Turkish prison a general Tablet to the Christians, and another Tablet to the
> Sovereigns and leading men of the world but especially to the rulers of
> Christendom: and He also addressed five personal Tablets, one to the Czar,
> another to the Pope, another to Queen Victoria and two to Napoleon III. In these,
> in ringing tones of power and majesty such as would become the
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh                           13
> King of Kings imposing commands upon His vassals, He declared this Age the
> Supreme Day of God and Himself the Lord of Lords, the Father who had come in
> His most great glory. All that had been mentioned in the Gospel had been
> fulfilled. Jesus had announced this Light and His signs had been spread in the
> West, that His followers might in this Day set their faces towards Bahá’u’lláh.
> These letters are indeed pronouncements of a far-sighted Providence: and the
> catastrophe of the West which has occurred since they were written gives to them
> now a tragic and a terrible interest. They are of some length but their drift may
> be generally indicated in a few paragraphs.
> In His Tablet to Queen Victoria He commends Her Majesty for ending the
> slave trade and for “entrusting the reins of counsel into the hands of the
> representatives of the people.” But they who entered the Assembly should do so
> in a spirit of prayer to God and of trusteeship for the best interests of all mankind.
> The human race was one whole and should be regarded as the human body which
> though created perfect had become afflicted with grave disorders. It lay at the
> mercy of rulers so drunk with pride that they could not see their own best
> advantage, much less recognise this mighty Revelation. The one real remedy for
> the world’s ills was the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one
> common Faith. This could be brought to pass only through the Divine Physician.
> He called on the Queen to ensure peace, to be just and considerate to her subjects,
> to avoid excessive taxation, to effect an international union for the reduction of
> armaments and the joint resistance of all nations to any aggressor Power.
> His Tablet to the Pope contains an impassioned, loving appeal to Christians
> that they will recognise this, the Promised Day of God, that they will come forth
> into its light and acclaim their Lord, and enter the Kingdom in His name. They
> were created for the light and He likes not to see them in the darkness. Christ
> purified the world with Love and with the Spirit that in this Day it might be able
> to receive Life at the hands of the Merciful. This is the coming of the Father of
> whom Isaiah spoke: the teaching
> 14                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> which He now reveals is that which Christ withheld when He said, “other things I
> have to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.” He bids the Pontiff take the
> Cup of Life and drink therefrom and “offer it then to such as turn towards it
> amongst the peoples of all Faiths.”
> The Tablet to Alexander II is in answer to a prayer addressed by the Czar to
> His Lord and in recognition of a kindness shown to Bahá’u’lláh when in prison
> and in chains by an ambassador of the Czar. He impresses on the Czar the
> supreme greatness of this Manifestation, tells him how the Prophet has subjected
> Himself to a thousand calamities for the salvation of the world and, having
> brought life to men, is threatened by them with death. He bids him expose this
> injustice, and in love for God and God’s kingdom offer himself as a ransom in
> God’s path: no harm will come to him but a reward in this world and the next.
> Great, great the blessing in store for the king who gives his heart to his Lord.
> In His two Tablets to Napoleon III, Bahá’u’lláh impresses on the Emperor the
> oneness of mankind whose many maladies will not be cured unless the nations,
> abandoning the pursuit of their several interests, agree together and unite in
> common obedience to the plan of God. The human race should be as one body
> and one soul. A far higher degree of faith than the world has ever reached before
> is demanded by God of every man in this Era. All are commanded to teach the
> truth and to work for God’s cause: but no one will produce good results in this
> service unless he first purify and ennoble his own character.
> Bahá’u’lláh bids the clergy give up their seclusion, mingle in the life of the
> people and marry. God is calling men to Him in this Age, and any theology
> which takes its own theses as a standard of truth and turns away from Him is
> deprived of value and efficacy.
> He has come to regenerate and unite all mankind in very deed and truth and
> He will gather them at the one table of His bounty. Let the Emperor call on His
> name and declare His truth to the people.
> Grave warnings and open or implicit threats if the kings do not acknowledge
> the Manifestation and obey His commands are contained in all these Tablets,
> especially in this to Napoleon III. The
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh                         15
> collective Tablet addressed to all the kings is, however, stern and minatory
> beyond the rest. Bahá’u’lláh warns the rulers that if they do not treat the poor
> amongst them as a trust from God; if they do not observe the strictest justice; if
> they do not compose their differences, heal the dissensions that estrange them
> and reduce their armaments, and follow the other counsels now given them by the
> Prophet, “Divine chastisement shall assail you from every direction and the
> sentence of His justice shall be pronounced against you. On that day ye shall
> have no power to resist Him and shall recognise your own impotence. Have
> mercy on yourselves and on those beneath you.”
> Christ long centuries before had wept over the city whose children had
> ignored His visitation and refused His protection. Now at His second coming the
> same event recurred. But they who brought down the wrath of God on
> themselves were not the members of a nation but of an entire world.
> Before He passed away Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed: “The hour is approaching
> when the most great convulsion will have appeared.” And again, “The time for
> the destruction of the world and its people hath arrived.”
> More than forty years after the dispatch of these Tablets ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the
> son of the Prophet and the appointed Exemplar of His Faith, being freed at last
> from prison by the Young Turks, made a three years’ tour of Europe and
> America. Saddened by many things He saw, and knowing the doom to which the
> heedlessness of the nations was hurrying them, He was sparing of denunciation,
> reproach or criticism; instead, with words of cheer and undiscriminating love He
> summoned His hearers to high, heroic action. He spoke much of the spiritual and
> social goal set by God for this enlightened Age: “The Most Great Peace.” He
> Himself in His joy, in His serenity, in His love for all, in His wisdom, His
> strength and resolution and utter submissiveness to God, seemed the incarnation
> of the Spirit of that Peace. His very presence brought receptive souls into touch
> with a state of being of which they might have heard but which none of them had
> ever known. Through many months of missionary work He explained the moral
> and spiritual conditions which would make possible the
> 16                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Most Great Peace, and developed in many addresses the practical means by
> which it could be approached. In the United States, at Wilmette on the shores of
> Lake Michigan, He laid the foundation stone of the first Bahá’í Temple of the
> West, round which are to be grouped buildings devoted to social, humanitarian,
> educational and scientific purposes, the whole to be dedicated as one scheme to
> the glory of God and the service of man. He also saw in America the first
> beginnings of the building of the Administrative Order of Bahá’u’lláh.
> But the general response of the public was not sufficient to stem the tides
> flowing towards war. Before He left the United States, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá foretold the
> outbreak of hostilities in two years’ time.
> When at last peace was made, He declared that the League of Nations as
> constituted could not prevent war; and before He passed away in 1921 He
> announced to His followers the outbreak of another war fiercer than the last.
> To many, at the opening of the second Bahá’í century, mankind seems to be
> drifting in a helmless barque upon a stormy and uncharted sea. But to the
> Bahá’ís another vision is revealed. The barriers by which men blocked their path
> to progress are torn down. Human pride is abased, human wisdom stultified.
> The anarchy of nationalism and the insufficiency of secularism are thoroughly
> exposed.
> Slowly the veil lifts from the future. Along whatever road thoughtful men
> look out they see before them some guiding truth, some leading principle, which
> Bahá’u’lláh gave long ago and which men rejected. The sum and essence of the
> best hopes of the best minds to-day is garnered in such a simple statement as that
> of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s “Twelve Points”:
> 1.   Unfettered search after truth.
> 2.   The oneness of mankind.
> 3.   Religion a cause of love and harmony.
> 4.   Religion hand in hand with science.
> 5.   Universal peace.
> 6.   An international language.
> 7.   Education for all.
> 8.   Equal opportunities for both sexes.
> The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh                         17
> 9. Justice for all.
> 10. Work for all.
> 11. Abolition of extremes of poverty and wealth.
> 12. The Holy Spirit to be the prime motive power in life.
> The immense, complex, baffling task of unifying all peoples is set forth in its
> complete and inmost simplicity by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in seven pregnant phrases:
> 1.   Unity in the political realm.
> 2.   Unity of thought in world undertakings.
> 3.   Unity of freedom.
> 4.   Unity in religion.
> 5.   Unity of nations.
> 6.   Unity of races.
> 7.   Unity of language.
> Already the Bahá’ís have begun in deed and in fact to build the instrument
> destined to be the model and the nucleus of the Most Great Peace. The
> Administrative Order is as simple as it is profoundly conceived, and it can only
> be conducted by those whose lives are animated by love and fear of God. It is a
> system in which such opposites as unity and universality, the practical and the
> spiritual, the rights of the individual and the rights of society, are perfectly
> balanced not through arranging a compromise but through the revelation of an
> inner harmony. Those who have the experience of operating the Order testify
> that it seems to them like a human body which is made to express the soul within.
> On the lake shore at Wilmette stands the completed Temple of Praise, a sign
> of the Spirit of the Most Great Peace and of the Splendour of God that has come
> down to dwell among men. The walls of the Temple are transparent, made of an
> open tracery cut as in sculptured stone, and lined with glass. All imaginable
> symbols of light are woven together into the pattern, the lights of the sun and the
> moon and the constellations, the lights of the spiritual heavens unfolded by the
> great Revealers of to-day and yesterday, the Cross in various forms, the Crescent
> and the nine pointed Star (emblem of the Bahá’í Faith). No darkness invades the
> Temple at any time; by day it is lighted by the sun whose rays flood in from
> every side through the exquisitely perforated walls,
> 18                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> and by night it is artificially illuminated and its ornamented shape is etched with
> light against the dark. From whatever side the visitor approaches, the aspiring
> form of the Temple appears as the spirit of adoration; and seen from the air above
> it has the likeness of a Nine-Pointed Star come down from heaven to find its
> resting place on the earth.
> But for the leading of the peoples into the Promised Land, for the
> spiritualising of mankind, for the attainment of the Most Great Peace the world
> awaits the arising of those whom the King of Kings has summoned to the task—
> the Christians and the Churches of the West.
> Verily Christ said ‘Come that I may make you fishers of men’ and to-day We say
> ‘Come, that We may make you quickeners of the world’ … Lo! This is the Day of
> Grace! Come ye that I may make you kings of the realm of My Kingdom. If ye
> obey Me you will see that which We have promised you, and I will make you the
> friends of My Soul in the realm of My Greatness and the Companions of My
> Beauty in the heaven of My Might for ever.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb
> HERE ONCE AGAIN in human history is the Light shining in a darkness that
> comprehendeth it not! Here once again is Faith re-arisen upon the world,
> bringing a New Day, shedding a new glory, calling men from sleep to a new life.
> Here once again is Religion that men had thought sunk for ever in
> impotence—religion in its freshness, its purity and its power, religion reborn with
> all the magic of that ancient sweetness and beauty with which it was clothed in
> Holy Writ of old—religion warming men’s hearts with a new compassion and
> loving-kindness, melting all estrangements, uniting many wills in a common
> devotion, a common sympathy, giving to life a new completeness, transcending
> sorrow and pain and death!
> We of the western world may be unable to trace in human affairs about us the
> providence of God, may not see His path opening before our feet, may not be
> aware of His activity and presence in our midst, we may be divided one against
> another, may be full of fears, devoid of love, laden with deepening doubt.
> But here are men and women, boys and girls who through faith reborn
> became possessed of a knowledge to which we are strangers, entered into an
> experience which we hardly believe to exist, whose eyes were opened to the
> Light from heaven, who had ears to hear the voice of God, and being changed
> from their old selves, transformed into new creatures, translated to a new degree
> of life, were by divine grace endowed with a courage, an energy, a blissfulness
> which has no likeness on the earth and which no earthly privation can impair.
> They had none of these things through which we of the West give expression
> to our religion: they had no systems of theology and ethics, no traditions,
> dogmas, creeds, institutions. Love and obedience and joy (love for God and His
> prophet, the joy of obeying the divine summons, even to the extent of sacrificing
> for
> 
> 20                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> love’s sake all they had and all they were)—these and these only were the marks
> of their religion.
> All we have heard or read of the birth of a World Religion among men—of
> the Advent of a Divine Teacher, of the simple beginnings of His work, of the
> charm of His personality, of the love that He awakens in His followers, of His
> courage and authority, and His ability to overcome the whole world by the lonely
> power of His word—all this is here again; and the facts and the details and the
> circumstances of His coming are transcribed into the pages of this chronicle. He
> calls on men to leave the idols and the torpors of the past, to awake and to greet
> the Dayspring from on High; to join the legions of light and partake with him in
> the approaching world-triumph of God. Thousands upon thousands flocked to
> His banner, young and old, high and low, learned and unlearned, men and
> women, boys and girls. Thrilled with a new-born faith, animated with a magical
> love they acclaimed His prophethood and without reserve offered themselves as
> criers of the New Advent, torch-bearers of the New Revelation. When the envy
> of the mosque and the court stirred up far and wide against them the latent fire of
> Muslim fanaticism, they found in the strain that was put upon them a means of
> showing forth before men what power of soul God gives in their extremity to
> those who love Him utterly before all else.
> With eager courage they challenged every form of persecution—ostracism,
> impoverishment, privation, beating, torture. Transported with a divine hope,
> sustained by an unshakeable resolution they counted suffering for God’s sake a
> supreme blessing, and measured the greatness of their spiritual privilege by the
> anguish of their bodily pain. They welcomed martyrdom and endured its
> cruellest pangs with a serenity that moved their executioners to wonder and that
> bore immortal witness to the truth of the Faith for which they died. They knew
> no fear, no doubt; weariness could not relax their resolution, nor cloud their
> confidence.
> Throughout the entire length of the action of this narrative, in the darkest hour
> of tragedy and of defeat, there sounds the call of assured victory, of triumph and
> of celestial joy. No human circumstance, however desperate, can chill or depress
> the ardour
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                                21
> of the faithful. No physical privation, no hunger, no pain, no bereavement, no
> sorrow nor the violent hand of death can blot from their vision the sweetness of
> the Beloved’s face or weaken the heart-beats of their impassioned adoration.
> Here is no disquisition on the nature of Faith, no analysis of its elements.
> Here rather is Faith itself, Faith put to the proof, Faith in action, Faith naked,
> unarmed, alone, standing at bay against a thousand foes and remaining ever
> serene, unwavering, indomitable. Here is trust in God which impels not only the
> old but the young, to cast away their pleasures, their hopes, their careers, the joys
> of friendships and of home since thereby they can the better serve the will of Him
> Whom they love better than all mortal things. Eager, earnest, ardent, they find in
> the sacrifice they offer to their Beloved a sweeter, dearer happiness than
> otherwise is within the reach of created man.
> Here once more is the Messenger of God, God’s image mirrored in an allperfect Love, God’s power poured forth among men stirring them to a new
> spirituality, opening to them new reaches of consciousness. Here in very deed
> and in a form and fashion that none can gainsay or disown, is the vindication of
> the reality of religion, the proof of its present power in this modem world. Here
> is the re-affirmation of the dignity of human nature and of the infinite greatness
> of the purpose of human life.
> Not in the dream of a saint, nor the vision of a seer nor the imagination of a
> poet is this given, but in the prose of a chronicler who sets forth in detail the
> course of actual historical events in a contemporary record that bears its own
> mark of truthfulness and is corroborated by extraneous evidence from a hundred
> sources.
> The author, known to history as Nabíl, was himself a believer, a Persian, a
> follower of the Báb and afterwards of Him for Whose advent the Báb made ready
> the way. From the summer of 1849, at the time of the siege of Fort Ṭabarsí, he
> shared as an avowed believer in the dangers and adventures of his companions,
> and escaping with his life, he accumulated memories and made friendships which
> were to serve him well later in the compilation of material for this work. In the
> course of his narrative, he tells
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl’s Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá’í Revelation, tr. Shoghi
> Effendi. Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois. 1932.
> 22                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> how as a boy, while he tended his master’s sheep upon the Persian hills, he would
> dream of a religion more real than that in which he had been brought up and of a
> spirituality more pure than that of the ecclesiastics who were his appointed
> teachers.
> When in the summer of 1847, at the age of fifteen, he heard of the Revelation
> of the Báb, he felt intuitively, at once, that here his dreams had come true and he
> had of a surety found the religion for which in the lonely thoughts of his heart he
> had so eagerly longed.
> He made inquiries, he pursued his investigations, he pondered over what he
> learned, he felt that contagion of felicity which marked the Bábís; and after two
> years, convinced of the truth of the Báb’s Prophethood, he openly espoused the
> Faith and spent the rest of his life in the hazards and vicissitudes of its service.
> He was possessed of a vigorous and ready pen; and his ardour and constancy
> as a believer brought him the best of opportunities for composing such a recital of
> the deeds of the Bábí pioneers as this. No detached observer or scholar, however
> inquisitive or industrious, could be in so favourable a position as this trusted Bábí
> for collecting detailed and intimate information concerning the early believers
> and their doings. He stood close to the heart and centre of the Movement; he
> presented it with sympathy and understanding, and he gave his work a vividly
> dramatic quality by reflecting so clearly the spiritual experience of his heroes and
> by reproducing with power their feelings, their motives and their aspirations. He
> shared their enthusiasm and their high purpose in full measure; and his narration
> is sustained throughout by that profound impassioned love which gave to the
> crusade in those days its rushing irresistible force.
> How wonderful the intuition that could reveal to him a truth utterly hidden
> from the learning and the culture of the great world in his day! How wonderful
> the steadfastness that could preserve him in his faith through a thousand
> adversities and sustain him through the long toils of preparing this invaluable
> compilation. He has his reward. This love-inspired tribute to the heroes he
> honoured before all on earth stands an immortal monument to his own illustrious
> memory, and in after ages will draw to him an
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                              23
> unfailing stream of grateful thoughts from the believers of many generations.
> The volume of Nabíl’s work now published in an English rendering recites
> the activities of the Báb during His ministry and pursues the fortunes of his
> followers for two years after His martyrdom. It covers a period of some eight
> years, and closes with the final expulsion of the Faith from the land of its origin.
> The narrative is intensely human, vivid, realistic. It presents a panorama of the
> entire movement in a series of pictures, incidents, episodes, some sketched in
> brief, some expanded in much detail, but all set forth in a style clear, graphic,
> powerful, glowing with the radiant fire of the author’s unfailing enthusiasm.
> The date chosen by the Báb for making known His status as a World Prophet
> and for inaugurating His Ministry was May 23rd, 1844. The declaration was
> made in His house in Shíráz to Mullá Ḥusayn, who became the first of His
> Apostles, or His “Letters of the Living Word”, with the particular designation of
> the “Bábu’l-Báb”, or the Gate of the Gate.
> The full account which Mullá Ḥusayn gave of this momentous interview to
> Mírzá Aḥmad-i-Qazvíní, the martyr, has been preserved by Nabíl, and it contains
> the following description of the immediate impression made by the Báb upon the
> first believer:
> This Revelation so suddenly and impetuously thrust upon me came as a
> thunderbolt which for a time seemed to have benumbed my faculties. I was
> blinded by its dazzling splendour and overwhelmed by its crushing force.
> Excitement, joy, awe and wonder stirred the depths of my soul. Predominant
> among these emotions was a sense of gladness and strength which seemed to have
> transfigured me. How feeble and impotent, how dejected and timid I had felt
> previously! Then I could neither write nor walk, so tremulous were my hands and
> feet. Now, however, the knowledge of His Revelation had galvanised my being. I
> felt possessed of such courage and power that were the world, all its people and its
> potentates to rise against me, I would alone and undaunted withstand their
> 24                               The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> onslaught. The universe seemed but a handful of dust in my grasp. I seemed to be
> the voice of Gabriel personified, railing unto all mankind:
> ‘Awake, for lo! the morning Light has broken. Arise, for His Cause is made
> manifest. The portal of His grace is open wide; enter therein, O ye people of the
> world! For He, who is your promised One, is come!’
> The call of Mullá Ḥusayn was the opening of the Báb’s campaign.
> As mysteriously Mullá Ḥusayn had been drawn into the presence of the Báb,
> so the other disciples came to Him, spontaneously and of their own accord,
> within a few days of His Declaration. After brief instruction, He sent them out
> far and wide to bear His Message to various parts of the land. Each was to send
> back to Him the names of all the converts who definitely identified themselves
> with the New Faith: these the Báb would classify and record.
> To Ḥusayn He gave a special mission; and as soon as He was assured of its
> success, He set forth on October 10th, 1844, with Quddús, the greatest of all the
> believers, on the distant and difficult mission He had reserved for Himself. He
> struck at the strategic centre of the Muhammadan Faith, and went on the
> pilgrimage to Mecca and to Medina, to reveal the Cause of God in those sacred
> spots and to rekindle there, in the spiritual heart of Islám, the Ancient Fire which
> had so completely disappeared from among men.
> He chose, as the recipients of His Message, two individuals whom He knew
> to be spiritually capable of appreciating it: Mírzá Muḥíṭ-i-Kirmání and the Sherif
> *
> of Mecca. Both were men of distinction and influence. If they had the courage
> to follow the leading of their intuitions and to accept the Revelation, others would
> follow and the progress of the Cause would be rapid and wide.
> Unfortunately for themselves and for their country, neither one nor the other
> of them proved willing to answer the divine summons. One evaded it, the other
> ignored it.
> Bitterly disappointed, the Báb returned in June, 1845, to
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, p. 65.
> 
> *
> Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Mu‘ín ibn ‘Awn (1767–1858), was Sharíf and Imára (Emir) of Mecca
> from 1827–1836, 1840–1851 (the Báb was in Mecca December 1844.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                         25
> Persia. Already in many parts of the land the tidings of the New Faith had been
> spread by these eager apostles, and had been warmly welcomed by the people.
> Sundry officers of church and state were quick to suspect that this movement
> boded them no good and they took alarm from the first. When the Báb went to
> Shíráz and began there to propagate His Cause with immediate and marvellous
> success, the Governor of the Province, moved with envy, ordered his arrest, cast
> him into prison, and determined on his death. The Báb, however, was finally
> released and permitted to go to Iṣfahán. Here again He instantly won the hearts
> of the people. Thousands resorted to him to hear His Message. The priests were
> stung by jealousy and seventy of them in solemn conclave condemned Him to
> death for heresy. A friend, however, the Mu‘tamadu’d-Dawla, had interested
> Muḥammad Sháh in the Báb’s Revelation, and by the Sháh’s order the Báb was
> taken under escort to interview his Majesty in Ṭihrán. Shortly before He reached
> the capital, He received from the Sháh a letter, written under the influence of the
> Grand Vizier Ḥájí Mírzá Áqásí, in which the promised interview was indefinitely
> postponed, and the Báb was relegated to a lonely fortress in the wild mountains
> of northern Persia.
> Now a deepening darkness rapidly gathered round the fading fortunes of the
> Prophet. After nine months’ incarceration in Máh-Kú where His personality, as
> by magic, won over the people of the neighbourhood, His jailers, and the warden
> of the castle, He was transferred by His enemies, in April, 1848, to a still more
> rigorous imprisonment in Chihríq.
> At the same time, the persecution of the Bábís throughout the country was
> intensified and attacks upon their persons and their property grew more general
> and more violent. In October of that year, a number of believers in Mázindarán
> seeking refuge from their assailants, withdrew to a disused fort, where they stood
> at bay for months before their enemies, who were supported by the regular army
> of the Sháh. In May, 1849, being promised that persecution would cease, they
> gave themselves up and were at once seized and done to death by their perfidious
> foes. Nine of the Báb’s apostles, including Mullá Ḥusayn and Quddús, with
> 26                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> numbers of other distinguished Bábís, perished in this massacre.
> In March of the following year occurred the death of the Seven Martyrs of
> Ṭihrán, an episode which has become notorious on account of the prominence of
> the sufferers, their high character and the publicity of their execution.
> Two months later, in Nayríz, a large party of Bábís retreating before their
> tormentors were surrounded by their enemies and after a stout resistance were
> destroyed, in circumstances like those of their fellow-believers in Mázindarán.
> Their leader was Siyyid Yaḥyáy-i-Dárábí, known as Vaḥíd, one of the principal
> dignitaries of the Persian church, and the most learned of all the Báb’s followers.
> At the same time in Zanján, a similar investment of Bábí refugees occurred,
> but on a much larger scale. As many as seventeen regiments of the regular army,
> together with artillery, were employed on this occasion against the Bábís who
> were led by another brilliant divine of Islám, known among the Bábís as Ḥujjat.
> The Grand Vizier Ḥájí Áqásí, who had become the arch enemy of the Cause,
> now concluded that the spirit of the Bábís could not be broken nor the reform
> movement quelled so long as its Author remained alive. He determined therefore
> to put the Báb Himself to death. Dispensing with the formalities of any legal
> process, he, by use of the weight of his official position, had the Báb removed
> from Chihríq to Tabríz and there summarily condemned to death without trial.
> The sentence was carried out in the public square of the city, on July 9th,
> 1850. A curious circumstance delayed for a few minutes the actual execution.
> The Báb, with a follower who was to die with Him, was suspended by a rope to a
> wall, and the firing squad of 750 rifles delivered a volley at close range. The
> heavy smoke obscured completely the wall and those who hung upon it. When it
> cleared away, the two condemned men were found to have escaped injury. The
> rope which bound them had been cut, and the Báb’s companion was seen to be
> standing on the ground unhurt. The Báb had disappeared and was discovered in
> His prison, whither He had returned to finish a conversation which
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                         27
> had been interrupted when his jailors came to lead Him out to execution.
> The members of the firing party, terror-stricken at such a prodigy, refused to
> lift their rifles again against the person of the Prophet, and the authorities were
> obliged to summon another regiment to consummate their crime.
> The news of their Lord’s martyrdom soon reached the Bábís standing at bay
> in Zanján. They were stunned and horrified but not disheartened. Outnumbered,
> they held out to the last limit of their strength; and when by force and guile their
> resistance at last was crushed, hundreds of Bábís, men, women and children
> passed through the red gates of martyrdom to the Great Beyond, and then
> rejoined their beloved Master, who had travelled by the same road so short a time
> before.
> By the early autumn of 1850, the reactionaries had, as it seemed, cowed the
> main body of the believers and had destroyed every Bábí that had shown any
> capacity for leadership, except two only: Bahá’u’lláh who had espoused the
> Cause from the first, and Ṭáhirih, the one woman-member of the nineteen
> apostles.
> Through the efforts of these two, and especially the activity of Bahá’u’lláh,
> the Faith continued to make headway, until in August, 1852, an attack by a
> deranged Bábí on the person of the Sháh gave the authorities a pretext for a
> general slaughter of believers throughout the country, with the express aim of
> exterminating the Faith. Ṭáhirih was martyred. Bahá’u’lláh with His dependents
> was exiled for life.
> At this point, when all was at its darkest, and when to all except a few
> illumined spirits the light of the Cause of God seemed to be quenched for ever,
> the first volume of Nabil’s Narrative closes.
> 
> Faith in God and in His Prophet is the great ideal of the entire action—the
> sure touchstone to distinguish good from evil, truth from untruth. Righteousness
> is extolled by the Báb and the highest standard of conduct demanded by Him of
> His followers, but the purpose of Nabíl was no more to deal in the principles and
> practice of ethics than to set forth a new theological system.
> 28                               The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> His purpose was to show how Faith had come back into the world and had
> transformed those in whose hearts its flame was kindled. If his story is epic in
> the elevation and sublimity of its subject matter, it is in its mood lyrical—a lyric
> of Faith and of the love that Faith awakes. In the central foreground stands the
> figure of the Báb. No space is given to sketching the historical, the social or
> political background. There is almost no setting to the incidents, the minimum of
> description, no account of the general circumstances of the time. All the figures
> in the story, and they are to be counted by hundreds, are grouped around the Báb.
> Those who choose to turn towards him are seen irradiated by the glory of their
> Lord; the intenser their Faith the more brilliant the light in which they are bathed.
> Those who turn away from Him lie in the horror of a darkness which deepens
> with the gradations of their unbelief. If Nabíl did not set himself to write a
> formally ordered history he produced a work which has the vital and informing
> unity that belong to a composition having a single hero, a single theme and one
> all-pervading dominant emotion. Everywhere in his book Nabíl sets forth Faith
> as the first of virtues, the first step of man upon the highroad to the presence of
> God.
> Deploring the failure of one of Shaykh Aḥmad’s disciples to recognise the
> real dignity of a Prophet of God, he comments:
> His faith was weighed in the balance, and was found wanting, inasmuch as he
> failed to recognise that He Who must needs be made manifest is endowed with
> that sovereign power which no man dare question. His is the right ‘to command
> whatsoever He willeth and to decree that which He pleaseth.’ Whoever hesitates,
> whoever, though it be for the twinkling of an eye or less, questions His authority,
> is deprived of His grace and is accounted of the fallen.
> Mullá Ḥusayn himself, the Gate of the Gate, hardly showed the requisite
> measure of submissiveness. He proposed to apply a test by which He would put
> the Báb to the proof. “Had you not been my guest,” said the Báb to him
> afterwards, “your position would indeed have been a grievous one. The allencompassing grace of God has saved you. It is for God to test His servants and
> not for
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, p. 15.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                        29
> His servants to judge Him in accordance with their deficient standards.”
> He told the first of his apostles whom He sent out: “Your faith must be as
> immovable as the rock, must weather every storm and survive every calamity
> ….”
> In his address to the others He said: “The very members of your body must
> bear witness to the loftiness of your purpose, the integrity of your life, the reality
> of your faith, and the exalted character of your devotion …. Heed not your
> weaknesses and frailty; fix your gaze upon the invincible power of the Lord, your
> God, the Almighty …. Arise in his Name, put your trust wholly in Him, and be
> assured of ultimate victory.”
> The apostles of the Báb spontaneously through the vigour of their own
> intuition recognised and adhered to Him. He Himself when in Mecca standing
> within the most sacred shrine of Islám approached the famous divine Mírzá
> Muḥíṭ-í-Kirmání, and put his faith to the test with a definite categorical demand
> …. “Verily I declare,” He said, “none besides me in this day whether in the East
> or in the West can claim to be the Gate that leads men to the knowledge of God:
> My proof is none other than that proof whereby the truth of the prophet
> Muḥammad was established. Ask me whatsoever you please: now at this very
> moment I pledge myself to reveal such verses as can demonstrate the truth of my
> mission. You must choose either to submit yourself unreservedly to my Cause or
> to repudiate it entirely. You have no other alternative. If you choose to reject my
> message, I will not let go your hand until you pledge your word to declare
> publicly your repudiation of the truth which I have proclaimed. Thus shall he
> who speaks the truth be made known, and he that speaks falsely shall be
> condemned to eternal misery and shame. Then shall the Way of Truth be
> revealed and made manifest to all men.”
> The great churchman was broadminded enough to perceive the truth of the
> Báb’s pronouncement; else the Báb would not have approached him in that
> manner. He did not dare to deny it. But neither on the other hand did he dare to
> face the consequences of the public admission which the Báb demanded. He
> procrastinated. He pretended acceptance and promised submission;
> 
> The Báb in The Dawn-Breakers, pp. 59–60.
> idem, p. 87.
> idem, p. 92.
> idem, pp. 134–5.
> 30                                The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> then broke his word and fled. “I shall never depart from Medina,” he assured the
> Báb, “whatever may betide, until I have fulfilled my covenant with you.” As the
> mote which is driven before the gale he, unable to withstand the sweeping
> majesty of the Revelation proclaimed by the Báb, fled in terror from before His
> face. He tarried awhile in Medina and, faithless to his pledge and disregardful of
> the admonitions of his conscience, left for Karbilá.
> Some years later the Muḥíṭ, still tormented in conscience, attempted to
> approach Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb being dead.
> “Tell him,” was Bahá’u’lláh’s reply, “that in the days of my retirement in the
> mountains of Sulaymániyyih, I in a certain ode which I composed set forth the
> essential requirements from every wayfarer who treads the path of search in his
> quest of truth. Share with him this verse from that ode: ‘If thine aim be to cherish
> thy life, ‘approach not our court, but if sacrifice be thy heart’s desire, come and let
> others come with thee. For such is the way of faith, if in thy heart thou seekest
> reunion with Bahá; shouldst thou refuse to read this path, why trouble us?
> Begone!’ If he be willing, he will openly and unreservedly hasten to meet me; if
> not I refuse to see him.”
> Once again, the Muḥíṭ’s courage failed. He refused to face the consequences
> of a confession of faith, withdrew and died an unbeliever.
> In prison, on the night before His martyrdom, the Báb subjected his three
> devoted companions to a test of the most extreme severity. He was in a strange
> elation of spirits. The sadness that for long had weighed him down on account of
> the death of so many of his followers had vanished. The joy of His approaching
> sacrifice, the sense of the certain triumph of God’s Cause, had dissipated every
> sorrow. Turning to His disciples He expressed regret that He was to die at the
> hand of an enemy instead of the hand of a friend. “Would that one of you,” He
> said, “might now arise and with his own hands end my life.” They shrank at the
> thought of taking a life so dear, so precious. Then one of them sprang to his feet
> and said that whatever the Báb commanded he would do. His companions
> interposed; and the Báb because he had shown himself ready to obey to the
> uttermost, chose him to
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh in The Dawn-Breakers, pp. 137–8.
> The Báb in The Dawn-Breakers, p. 507.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                               31
> share on the morrow the crown of martyrdom with his Lord. On the next
> morning, at the place of execution, he was tied in such a position that his head
> reposed on the breast of the Báb, and by the violence of the fusillade the two
> bodies were “shattered and blended into one mass of mingled flesh and bone.”
> 
> The New Revelation was oftentimes accepted not so much through
> intellectual submission to an argument as through the inspiration of a spiritual
> experience.
> The Báb and His followers invited and welcomed scrutiny and careful
> examination of His teachings; lectures by Bábís were frequently given and the
> faithful were always ready to meet anyone in intellectual controversy. In some
> important cases (as in that of the illustrious Vaḥíd and of Nabíl himself)
> investigation played a great part in conversion. But logical conviction was
> always supported or anticipated by a strong intuitive impulse. In very many
> cases the divine illumination was seemingly perceived by the force of sheer
> insight.
> In his account of the call of the Eighteen Apostles Nabíl writes:
> Each of the twelve companions of Mullá ‘Alí in his turn and in his own unaided
> efforts, sought and found his Beloved. Some in sleep, others in waking, a few
> whilst in prayer, and still others in their moments of contemplation experienced
> the light of this Divine Revelation and were led to recognise the power of its
> glory.
> The conversion of Ismu’lláhu’l-Aṣdaq, a distinguished Bábí of Iṣfahán,
> through a vision of the Báb (an experience not unparalleled in this chronicle) is
> quoted in his own words.
> Hearing Mullá Ḥusayn had come to Iṣfahán he sought him out and met him at
> night in the home of Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Aliy-i-Nahrí.
> I asked Mullá Ḥusayn to divulge the name of him who claimed to be the Promised
> Manifestation. He replied, ‘To inquire about that name and to divulge it are alike
> forbidden.’ ‘Would it then be possible,’ I asked, ‘for me, even as the Letters of the
> Living, to seek independently the grace of the All Merciful and through prayer to
> discover his identity?’ ‘The Door of his Grace,’ he
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, p. 69.
> 32                               The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> replied, ‘is never closed before the face of him who seeks to find him.’ I
> immediately retired from his presence, and requested his host to allow me the
> privacy of a room in his house where alone and undisturbed I could commune with
> God. In the midst of my contemplation, I suddenly remembered the face of a
> youth whom I had often observed while in Karbilá, standing in an attitude of
> prayer, with his face bathed in tears, at the entrance of the shrine of the Imám
> Ḥusayn. That same countenance now reappeared before mine eyes. In my vision I
> seemed to behold that same face, those same features, expressive of such joy as I
> could never describe. He smiled as he gazed at me. I went towards him, ready to
> throw myself at his feet. I was bending towards the ground, when lo! that radiant
> figure vanished from before me. Overpowered with joy and gladness I ran out to
> meet Mullá Ḥusayn who, with transport received me and assured me that I had at
> last attained the object of my desire.
> 
> Of the call of Quddús, the last and greatest of the apostles, he writes: “The
> next day in the evening hour as the Báb followed by Mullá Ḥusayn was returning
> to His home there appeared a youth dishevelled and travel-stained …. Fixing his
> gaze upon the Báb, he said to Mullá Ḥusayn: ‘Why seek you to hide Him from
> me? I can recognise Him by His gait. I confidently testify that none beside Him
> whether in the East or in the West can claim to be the Truth ….’”
> The narrative continues.
> ‘Marvel not,’ observed the Báb, ‘at his strange behaviour. We have in the world
> of spirit been communing with that youth. We know him already. We indeed
> awaited his coming ….’
> Of the inclusion of Ṭáhirih, the one woman among the apostles, Nabíl records
> that “… we have seen how instinctively she had been led to discover the
> Revelation of the Báb and how spontaneously she had acknowledged its truth.
> Unwarned and uninvited, she perceived the dawning light of the promised
> Revelation breaking upon the city of Shíráz, and was prompted to pen her
> message and to plead her fidelity to him who was the revealer of that light.”
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, pp. 100–1.
> idem, p. 69–70.
> idem, p. 70.
> idem, p. 269.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                     33
> The Message which the Bábís proclaimed was primarily one of faith. “Raise
> the cry,” said the Báb to Mullá Ḥusayn, as He sent him out on his first missionary
> journey; “Awake, awake! for lo! the Gate of God is open, and the morning Light
> is shedding its radiance upon all mankind. The Promised One is made manifest;
> prepare the way for Him, O people of the earth! Deprive not yourselves of its
> redeeming grace, nor close your eyes to its effulgent glory.”
> 
> The appeal which the Message made was felt to be quite extraordinary and to
> partake of the nature of Pentecostal fire. Nabíl expresses this very definitely in
> his account of the progress of the Bábí movement in the province of Khurásán.
> “There blazed forth,” he writes, “in the heart of Khurásán a flame of such
> consuming intensity that the most formidable obstacles standing in the way of the
> ultimate recognition of the cause melted away and vanished. That fire caused
> such a conflagration in the hearts of men that the effects of its quickening power
> were felt in the most outlying provinces of Persia.”
> Their hearts aflame with this divinely kindled fire, the Bábís feared no
> danger, were daunted by no terror, and yielded under no adversity. They endured
> without a murmur manifold sorrows and sufferings. Indeed they counted it a
> high and precious privilege to go through tribulation of their Faith’s sake, and
> looked forward to persecution with joy.
> “Ever since the beginning of this holy enterprise, upon which I have
> embarked,” cried Mullá Ḥusayn, “I have vowed to seal with my life blood my
> own destiny. For his sake I have welcomed immersion in an ocean of tribulation.
> I yearn not for the things of this world. I crave only the good pleasure of my
> beloved. Not until I shed my blood for his name will the fire that glows within
> me be quenched.”
> Those chiefly responsible for the attacks on the Bábís were the officials of the
> state-church who owed their privilege and power to the ignorance and
> superstition of the people and were quick to see that the onrush of this crusading
> reformation movement would sweep them and all their depravities away for ever
> unless it
> 
> Báb in The Dawn-Breakers, p. 85.
> The Dawn-Breakers, p. 268.
> idem, p. 67.
> 34                               The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> was instantly and remorselessly strangled. They used their influence to rouse
> their fanatical followers in the name of orthodoxy against the innovators. A
> supine and apathetic government made no effort to quell disorder or to prevent
> violence. On the contrary, the officials of the state were inclined not only to
> wink at but even to take part in the riots, the plunderings and the massacres. The
> Bábís had no protection, no redress, no assurance or hope of justice. Before them
> lay the clear prospect of ostracism, of spoliation and probably of torture and
> death.
> As one of the Bábís who were driven to say in Zanján in answer to the
> denunciations of the Amír-Túmán: “God knows that we are and will ever remain
> loyal and law-abiding subjects of our sovereign, with no other desire than to
> advance the true interests of his government and people. We have been
> grievously misrepresented by our ill-wishers.             No one of the Sháh’s
> representatives was inclined to protect or befriend us; no one was found to plead
> our cause before him. We repeatedly appealed to him, but he ignored our
> entreaty and was deaf to our call. Our enemies, emboldened by the indifference
> which characterised the attitude of the ruling authorities, assailed us from every
> side, plundered our property, violated the honour of our wives and daughters, and
> captured our children. Undefended by our government and encompassed by our
> foes we felt constrained to arise and defend our lives.”
> Nothing that the armies of corruption could do acted as a deterrent to the
> Bábís. Faith had quickened in their hearts so impetuous and unquenchable a
> flame of heavenly love that earthly danger and suffering held no terrors for them.
> As love prompted them, as their master bade them, they went forward on their
> crusading way, proclaiming their belief, calling aloud the Glad Tidings,
> summoning all men to give heed and not to remain blind to the light of so
> glorious a Day. The foreknowledge of destruction heightened their enthusiasm
> and intensified their activity.
> Vaḥíd from the day he gave his adhesion to the cause, yearned to lay down
> his life for his Lord’s sake, and testified to his joy
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, pp. 565–6.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                               35
> when before the siege of Nayríz he saw the longed-for day was approaching.
> Mullá Ḥusayn when he had raised the Black Standard, before the siege of
> Mázindarán commenced, knew what the issue would be, and warned his
> followers in time.
> I together with seventy-two of my beloved companions shall suffer death for the
> sake of the Well-Beloved. Whoso is unable to renounce the world, let him now at
> this very moment depart, for later on he will be unable to escape.
> Ḥujjat shortly before his death, when he had just seen his own wife and child
> killed by the enemy, testified to his own premonitions of suffering for the Báb’s
> sake and to his joy therein.
> “The day whereon I found Thy beloved one, Oh my God,” he cried, “and
> recognised in him the Manifestation of thine Eternal Spirit, I foresaw the woes that
> I should suffer for thee. Great as have been until now my sorrows, they can never
> compare with the agonies that I would willingly suffer in thy name. How can this
> miserable life of mine, the loss of my wife and of my child, and the sacrifice of the
> band of my kindred and companions, compare with the blessings which the
> recognition of thy Manifestation has bestowed on me! Would that a myriad lives
> were mines, would that I possessed the riches of the whole earth and its glory, that
> I might resign them all freely and willingly in thy path.”
> 
> The Báb early in His ministry knew the fate that awaited Him at its end. On
> their return from the pilgrimage to Mecca, He said good-bye to His beloved
> companion Quddús and told him sadly that they would not see each other again
> on earth; that Quddús would soon meet a martyr’s death. But, He said, “on the
> shores of the Great Beyond, in the realm of immortality, the joy of an eternal
> Reunion awaits us … I, too, shall read the path of sacrifice ….”
> Nor was this high, heroic spirit of devotion found only in the leaders, or in the
> men; it was displayed likewise by women, by girls, by children, by all.
> Ṭáhirih, that outstanding star of Persian womanhood, the one
> 
> The Dawn-Breakers, p. 326.
> idem, p. 572.
> The Báb in The Dawn-Breakers. p. 142.
> 36                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> woman-apostle of the Báb, of whom Professor Browne said that if the Bábí cause
> had done nothing else, to have produced such a woman as her in such a time and
> such a country would have made it illustrious—Ṭáhirih, beautiful, exquisite,
> learned, eloquent, showed a courage and enterprise in spite of the disability of her
> sex which made her conspicuous even among the Bábís; when her time of
> martyrdom drew near she met it with rapture and endured a painful death with
> dignity and calm.
> Nabíl records how numbers of girls and boys and aged men in the siege of
> Ṭabarsí or Nayríz or Zanján played their full part with the other Bábís in the
> defence of the asylum to which they had been driven; how mothers would
> encourage their children to suffer and to die rather than repudiate their faith; how
> the protracted resistance of the Bábís at Zanján was due in no small measure to
> the activity of the Bábí women who ministered to the sick and wounded, repaired
> the barricades, sewed garments, baked bread, cheered the faint-hearted and
> restored the faith of the wavering, while even the children showed the same
> enthusiasm as their elders and did what their tender strength permitted to the
> good of the common cause; and when at length the defenders were overwhelmed,
> the women endured with steadfastness the cruelties heaped upon them till they
> found release from their tormentors in a martyr’s death.
> To the believer in the Báb and in Bahá’u’lláh this account of the Heroic Age
> of the Faith is precious and moving beyond words: it inspires, it stimulates, it
> fortifies.
> But also to another class of readers (a class which at present, unfortunately for
> the world, is much larger) this work of Nabíl’s has an extraordinary interest. It
> claims the particular regard and deserves the most patient study of every student
> of religious history and of everyone who believes in the reality of Divine
> Revelation. For here in Nabíl’s work is a direct account of one of those august
> events which occur at rare intervals in the progress of humanity and which are
> fraught always with the most momentous consequences: the birth of a new
> World Religion.
> As the Bábí Faith is distinguished from all earlier religions in this respect, that
> the knowledge of it spread almost instantly from
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                          37
> the East to the West; so this record which Nabíl made of its beginnings, holds in
> the history of comparative religion a position in certain respects altogether
> unique.
> 
> The world (no doubt through its own fault) has to lament that there has been
> preserved so little authentic information as to the rise of the great Religions of
> ancient times, as to the life and death of their Founders, as to the efforts and
> heroisms and fate of their immediate followers. In nothing is the sad truth that
> the world knows nothing of its greatest men more unhappily conspicuous than in
> the meagreness of testimony concerning the Authors of the successive World
> Revelations of the past.
> The eager interest and loving reverence of the faithful have in later years
> made so much of the little information that is available; deficiencies, too, have
> been so well filled in by tradition, by legend or even by myth; and enthusiastic
> scholars have so often assumed an air of certitude about matters which prove on
> scrutiny to be merely conjectural, that there is current a gravely exaggerated idea
> as to our real knowledge of the rise of any of the world religions prior to Islám.
> The personality and the philosophy of Buddha seem to have charmed the
> western world more than that of any other non-Christian prophet. Generous
> tributes to the beauty and sweetness of his character and to the loftiness of his
> spiritual wisdom are to be found in the writings of many a Christian divine, and
> his teachings are accessible to the English public in a variety of popular editions.
> Yet the immensity of Buddhistic literature serves only to set off the paucity of
> contemporary or early written records and does not remove the obscurity which
> hangs about the details of the Prophet’s life or the origin of his teaching. The fact
> that some sceptical scholars have explained Buddha away as a sun-myth and have
> questioned the antiquity of the Buddhist tradition is of no great interest save as
> testifying to the uncertainty which subsists about the whole matter. One of the
> best known English authorities (Mrs. Rhys Davies, Buddhism, pp. 171–19)
> admits that the Pali Canon was not committed to writing till
> 38                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 80 BC (about one hundred and sixty years after the teaching had been introduced
> into Ceylon; and four hundred years after the death of Buddha himself). She
> concludes that the life of Buddha “as an historical fact is at least as well
> demonstrated as that of the founder of any other religion of antiquity” and that
> the story of his life “however draped and embroidered with myth and legend”
> cannot be dismissed as historically untrue without “extravagant recourse to
> forced interpretations and assumptions of improbable happenings.”
> 
> The New Testament has been the guide and inspiration of western religion for
> nineteen centuries; but everybody must wish that extant accounts of the life and
> teaching of Jesus Christ were less brief and fragmentary, and those who cherish
> this wish most warmly are those who love Him best and seek to discern and
> follow His way most earnestly. Of the early teachers of Christianity, the
> confessors and martyrs of the first three centuries of our Era, we know much less
> than about the Founder Himself. Many volumes were in those days written with
> fine art and preserved with zealous care concerning the history of Rome, the
> conquests of Caesar and the like; but the history of the Christian Faith was looked
> on as a wholly inconsiderable matter. The cultivated world of that period had not
> the least conception of the relative importance of the New Revelation. They did
> not trouble to make any note of its development nor in those unruly and
> indiscriminating times did they regard such records as the Christians themselves
> made to be of sufficient interest to be preserved.
> The meagreness of the information we possess about the age of the Christian
> martyrs is lamented by the learned and conservative Mosheim. He writes: “The
> actions and sayings of those holy martyrs from the moment of their imprisonment
> to their last gasp were carefully recorded in order to be read on certain days and
> thus proposed as models to future ages. But few, however, of these ancient acts
> are come down to our times …. From the eighth century downwards several
> Greek and Latin writers endeavoured to make up this loss by compiling with vast
> labour accounts of
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                         39
> the lives and actions of the ancient martyrs. But most of them have given us little
> else than a series of fables adorned with a profusion of rhetorical flowers and
> striking images, as the wiser even among the Romish doctors frankly
> acknowledge. Nor are these records that pass under the name of martyrology
> worthy of superior credit since they bear the most evident marks both of
> ignorance and falsehood. So that upon the whole this part of ecclesiastical
> history for want of ancient and authentic monuments is extremely imperfect and
> necessarily attended with much obscurity.”
> Gibbon remarks in the fifteenth chapter of his history: “the scanty and
> suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark
> cloud that hangs over the first age of the church,” and in a footnote to the
> sixteenth chapter: “In the various compilations of the Augustan history (a part of
> which was composed under the reign of Constantine) there are not six lines that
> relate to the Christians; nor has the diligence of Xiphilin discovered their name in
> the large history of Dion Cassius.”
> Naturally we know more about the great figures of early Islám than about
> those of other religions, for the Faith arose in more recent times, its extension
> was amazingly rapid, and it developed within a very few centuries a culture of a
> most brilliantly intellectual type. But our information concerning Muḥammad’s
> personality and His teaching, about His immediate companions and followers,
> seems to be scanty enough. It has not been sufficiently full or conclusive or
> authentic to prevent an extraordinary variety of interpretation and belief as to
> Muḥammad’s character and actions, and little of it has till very recently been
> accessible to western readers. Gibbon scandalously caricatured the Prophet,
> whom he called “an illiterate barbarian”. The genius of Carlyle moved him in
> 1840 to protest that “our current hypotheses about Mahomet that he was a
> scheming impostor, a Falsehood Incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of
> quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to anyone. The lies
> which well meaning zeal has heaped round this man are disgraceful to ourselves
> only.” But this warning has been little heeded and western scholars may be
> found to describe Muḥam-
> 40                                The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> mad as “a brigand chief,” and the like, even in this present century.
> More than twelve centuries elapsed between the rise of Muḥammad and the
> rise of the Báb whom He foretold; world-conditions in the interval changed and
> progressed, and anyone who investigates the Bábí religion is enabled to learn the
> true facts concerning the Founder and His immediate followers with a degree of
> fullness and accuracy never before possible in human history. No earlier
> Revelation is so well documented as this. It came to mankind at the same time as
> the railway, the telegraph, the telephone. How great the significance of the little
> casual fact that one of the very earliest English references to the Bábí Faith sets
> forth the execution of the Bábís in 1852 as given in the Teheran Gazette of that
> *
> day! The Báb’s crusade was so vigorous, and it was shared by so many eminent
> persons, that it attained the widest publicity in Persia and threatened to shake the
> whole corrupt ecclesiastical system. Though the country was backward and
> weak, yet Britain and Russia had there important imperial interests which brought
> many foreign residents, official and otherwise, to the capital. Some of these were
> sufficiently interested in the Movement to spread the knowledge of it in Europe.
> Western references to the Báb date back as far as 1851, and have been (some on a
> large and some on a small scale) continuous since that time. Some of the more
> important of these references are to be found in Comte de Gobineau’s Les
> Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale, and in Lord Curzon’s Persia
> and the Persian Question.
> Professor Browne, of Cambridge University, gives the names of four Persian
> histories as adverting to the religion, one of them at great length, and has himself
> in such works as A Traveller’s Narrative and Materials for the Study of the Bábí
> Religion, made public a large amount of early information on the progress of the
> Faith. Three volumes of the Báb’s own works have been translated by A. L. M.
> Nicolas and published in France.
> 
> Amid the great and ever-growing library of works on the Báb,
> 
> *
> Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia, 1856.
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                          41
> the Chronicle of Nabíl’s holds a most conspicuous place. While it is informal
> and unofficial; while it is not used by the Bahá’ís to determine any point of
> teaching, yet it is as nearly as may be the Bábís’ own story of the Báb’s crusade.
> It is not in a philosophic sense a history: it is not an ordered exposition of the
> development of the Báb’s Revelation. Nabíl is as much an editor as an author.
> He gathers items of information with care, industry and eager zeal for truth, and
> pieces them together in their proper chronological sequence. For the most part he
> sets forth this or that event as he had it from some believer who had taken part in
> it, or had witnessed it, or had heard of it from an eyewitness. He enjoyed in his
> labours the special help of some of the members of the inmost circle of the Faith,
> including the brother of Bahá’u’lláh and the amanuensis of the Báb. Bahá’u’lláh
> Himself saw a portion of the manuscript of Nabíl and expressed His general
> approval and acceptance of it. It has in the fullest degree the character of a Bábí
> Gospel. If we possessed an authorised and large scale account of the Acts of
> Jesus Christ written by one of the Twelve and preserved in the form in which it
> came from the author’s pen, we would have a Christian Gospel as authentic in its
> sphere as this of Nabíl’s in its. Here with a distinctness and in a detail unequalled
> in any early literature of the world we can examine the manner in which a Great
> Revelation comes among men and can study the phenomena of a dawning Age of
> Faith before any system of theology or of organisation has taken shape and when
> the Prophet shows forth His majesty through the exertion of a quickening
> spiritual power which awakes in the true-hearted an altogether miraculous
> enthusiasm and courage and at the same time stirs the obscurantists and the
> vicious to deeds of hate and fear and cruelty.
> In this respect, the value of Nabíl’s work is enhanced by the fact that its
> composition is itself one of the products of the Prophet’s creative power. The
> spirit which impels the pen of Nabíl is the spirit of the other Bábís. His mental
> attitude as an author is the same as that of the heroes who form his subject. Faith
> in the Báb as the Prophet of God prompted him to undertake this work. Faith
> sustained him to its completion. Faith
> 42                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> invigorates every sentence and word in it. As one reads one is conscious that the
> outlook, the mood, the style of the book reflect the same eager, buoyant,
> irresistible faith as inspires the lofty exploits it records. By a thousand proofs
> Nabíl shows his desire to be fair and just to all; but at the same time he writes as
> an avowed and eager and determined participant in a life and death struggle in
> which neither side gives nor expects quarter, but which must be fought out to an
> end. The temper of the writing resembles that of a battle song in which (even in
> moments of what seem irredeemable defeat) the note of assured triumph
> transcends all other notes.
> 
> The future will be better able than we to set events in their true perspective, to
> appraise the value of the vast amount of historical material which the industry of
> Nabíl has amassed and to judge the significance of these deeds of heroism and
> self-sacrifice.
> Yet there is one respect in which this work has a particular timeliness now,
> which it will not have in the future. We live and long have lived in a twilight
> age, and with deepening fear have watched the darkness close in upon us.
> Religion, organised or not, has more and more lost its control over men’s
> conduct, its hold upon their hearts. Churchmen are as little able as statesmen to
> unravel the perplexities of the situation, to inspire hope for the future, to
> formulate a plan for staying the general disintegration and for reconstructing an
> adequate world order. Believers turn their sad thoughts back to the early days of
> the Christian Faith. They stretch their longing hands far across the intervening
> centuries to ancient Pentecosts—but in vain. They read in the Scriptures of the
> miracles of courage and achievement wrought by the power of divine faith in past
> ages. They turn to the Epistle to the Hebrews and light upon such a tribute to
> Faith as this:
> “And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of
> Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the
> prophets:
> “Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises,
> stopped the mouths of lions.
> “Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword,
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                          43
> out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the
> armies of the aliens.
> “Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not
> accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
> “And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, year moreover of bonds
> and imprisonment:
> “They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the
> sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute,
> afflicted, tormented;
> “(Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in
> mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.” (Hebrew 12:32–38.)
> They wonder at the vision, the exultation, the prevailing power of the faithful
> ones of old who, though they were in their own time little noted and obscure, yet
> for all their apparent weakness could not be gainsaid but went forth in their
> Master’s cause, removed mountains of doubt, uplifted the characters of men and
> of peoples, and amid the ruins of an unhappy and decaying world inspired and
> initiated the building of a new and greater civilisation. Christians to-day long
> bitterly, despairingly, for that ancient Glory. But the chasm seems unbridgeable.
> Between us and the comrades of the Christ a great gulf is fixed which none may
> cross.     Understanding and creative power were theirs.          To us belong
> bewilderment, frustration and despair.
> 
> The theme is victory
> But to read Nabíl is to enter an utterly contrasted world. To peruse this
> chronicle of events not yet a century old, to feel the warm glow of love and faith
> and militant ardour with which the narration is suffused, to observe the character
> of the Báb, in which the sweetest charm and humility are mingled with majesty
> and power, is to pass suddenly into a realm of thought wholly different from that
> in which we of the West so long have lived. As we read, we realise we are
> following here the fortunes of people of our own time, whose outlook on life is
> exactly that which
> 44                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Christians once had but now have lost, exactly that of which we read in our
> Scriptures and for which we repine in vain. Here, indeed, in this record is
> darkness—spiritual darkness such as now gathers in the West, darkness awful
> and immeasurable. But it lies only at the far circumference, at the outer edges of
> the scene, not at the heart of things. It is darkness challenged, darkness routed,
> scattered, put to flight and to eternal shame. The central place is held by light;
> the theme is the victory of light. The darkness serves to set off the light by
> contrast. It cannot reach nor touch the souls of the Bábís. In them there is no
> perplexity nor apprehension. Human pain and failure are for them overpassed
> and lost in a divine attainment. They did not trust human wisdom nor find as we
> have done that it betrayed them. They trusted God wholly and for love’s sake
> gave up all they had and were, that they might serve His Truth.
> Whatever is base, unworthy, ignoble in human nature is not here glorified,
> extolled, palliated, but held up to execration, destined to final defeat and
> complete destruction. Glory and praise and dominion and the certainty of
> triumph belong here to whatever in human nature is most lovable, most noble,
> most sublime.
> Here are men, women and children, a vast, motley, heterogeneous host of
> young and old, learned and unlearned, the rich man and the poor man, the
> aristocrat and the labourer: gathered into one indissoluble body not by any
> outward compulsion or constraint whatever, but of their own free act and eager
> choice. The tie that binds them is spiritual only—simply love for God—and is so
> strong that no enticement or repulsion of the earth can break or loosen it. Neither
> prison nor poverty, hunger nor thirst nor wounds could force them to desert their
> comrades, deny their Lord or abandon His cause: severally, or in multitudes
> together, they would face and welcome death, and give their lives, as their
> Beloved Lord gave His, simply to serve the cause of God among men.
> We need not go back to ancient Scriptures or to distant times, to the early
> history of the Christian Church, to the Epistles to the Hebrews or to the Old
> Testament, to rediscover that faith in God
> Nabíl’s history of the Báb                      45
> which in our extremity seems lost beyond recall. We need not imagine that the
> outpourings of God’s manifest power, the open vision of His Beauty, the ecstasy
> of self-sacrifice in His cause, have passed away forever from the earth.
> All these things are in our midst!
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
> A study of a Christlike character
> “No one, so far as my observation reaches, has lived the perfect life like Abdul
> *
> Baha ….”
> TO LIVE TO-DAY in deed and truth the kind of life that Jesus of Nazareth led
> and bade His followers lead; to love God wholeheartedly, and for God’s sake to
> love all mankind, even one’s slanderers and enemies; to give consistently good
> for evil, blessings for curses, kindness for cruelty and, through a career darkened
> along its entire length by tragic misrepresentation and persecution, to preserve
> one’s courage, one’s sweetness and calm faith in God—to do all this and yet to
> play the man in a world of men, sharing at home and in business the common life
> of humanity, administering when occasion arose affairs large and small and
> handling complex situations with foresight and firmness—to live in such a
> manner throughout a long and arduous life, and when, in the fullness of time,
> death came, to leave to multitudes of mourners a sense of desolation and to be
> remembered and loved by them all as the servant of God—to how many men is
> such an achievement given as it has been given in this age of ours to ‘Abdu’l-
> Bahá?
> To the historian, the psychologist, the student of comparative religion, the
> narrative in all its aspects has much to offer of interest and value. But to the
> would-be Christian of the twentieth century the personal life and character of Sir
> Abbas Effendi (more widely known as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá) make a direct and peculiar
> appeal.
> An ordinary man who has set himself really to follow the precepts of Christ
> finds himself in special difficulties to-day. The very understanding and
> knowledge of the will of Christ, as well
> 
> *
> T. K. Cheyne, The Reconciliation of Races and Religions (London: Adam and Charles Black.
> 1914), p. 161.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character               47
> as the performance of it, seem now less easy to attain than they were for our
> forefathers. The accuracy of the Gospel record not only in phrase and detail, but
> in larger matters likewise is, however unjustifiably, questioned by a number of
> scholars. The record in any case is brief and fragmentary; and the utterances
> attributed to the Christ are not only very few but so terse and epigrammatic that
> their bearing is often uncertain and they admit of diverse interpretations. The
> problems of the contemporary world, too, are so much more complex than those
> of the period in which Christ lived that His words which suited so well the
> conditions of the past are difficult to apply to the present. Those who profess
> themselves the teachers of Christendom speak, as a whole, with such different
> voices and offer such contradictory advice that there is much bewilderment.
> Guidance from both the ancient book and from living example seems,
> therefore, to the man in the street less easy to gain than it was once. And the
> natural weakness of our nature which finds so arduous the moral life demanded
> by Christ is no longer supported by custom and general opinion, but is, on the
> contrary, unhappily enervated by the influence of a self-willed and flippant age.
> In the story of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the Christian comes upon something which he
> ardently desires and which he finds it difficult to obtain elsewhere. There awaits
> him here reassurance that the moral precepts of Christ are to be accepted exactly
> and in their entirety, that they can be lived out as fully under modern conditions
> as under any other, and that the highest spirituality is quite compatible with sound
> commonsense and practical wisdom. Many of the incidents in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s
> life form a practical commentary on the teachings of Christ and dramatise the
> meaning of the ancient words. Being a philosopher as well as a saint, He was
> able to give to many a Christian enquirer explanations of the Gospel-ideal which
> had the simple authority both of His consistent life and of their own
> reasonableness.
> Christ taught that the supreme human achievement is not any particular deed
> nor even any particular condition of mind; but a relation to God. To be
> completely filled—heart, mind, soul—with love for God, such is the great ideal,
> the Great Command-
> 48                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> ment. In ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s character the dominant element was spirituality.
> Whatever was good in His life He attributed not to any separate source of virtue
> in Himself but to the power and beneficence of God. His single aim was
> servitude to God. He rejoiced in being denuded of all earthly possessions and in
> being rich only in His love for God. He surrendered His freedom that He might
> become the bond-servant of God; and was able, at the close of His days, to
> declare that He had spent all His strength upon the Cause of God.
> To Him God was the centre of all existence here on earth and heretofore and
> hereafter. All things were in their degree mirrors of the bounty of God and
> outpourings of His power. Truth was the word of God. Art was the worship of
> God. Life was nearness to God; death remoteness from Him. The knowledge of
> God was the purpose of human existence and the summit of human attainment.
> No learning nor education that did not lead towards this knowledge was worth
> pursuit. Beyond it there was no further glory, and short of it there was nothing
> that could be called success.
> In ‘Abdul-Bahá this love for God was the ground and cause of an equanimity
> which no circumstance could shake and of an inner happiness which no adversity
> affected and which (it is said) in His presence brought to the sad, the lonely or the
> doubting the most precious companionship and healing. He had many griefs but
> they were born of His sympathy and His devotion. He knew many sorrows, but
> they were all those of a lover. Warmly emotional as He was He felt keenly the
> troubles of others, even of persons whom He had not actually met or seen, and to
> His tender and responsive nature the loss of friends and the bereavements of
> which He had to face more than a few brought acute anguish. His heart was
> burdened always with the sense of humanity’s orphanhood, and He would be so
> much distressed by any unkindness or discord among believers that His physical
> health would be affected. Yet He bore His own sufferings, however numerous
> and great, with unbroken strength. For forty years He endured in a Turkish
> prison rigours which would have killed most men in a twelvemonth. Through all
> this time He was, He said, supremely happy, being close to God and in constant
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character          49
> communion with Him. He made light of all His afflictions. Once, when He was
> paraded through the streets in chains, the soldiers, who had become His friends,
> wished to cover up His fetters with the folds of His garments that the populace
> might not see and deride, but ‘Abdu’l-Bahá shook off the covering and jangled
> aloud the bonds which He bore in the service of His Lord. When friends from
> foreign lands visited Him in prison, and seeing the cruelties to which He was
> subjected, commiserated with Him, He disclaimed their sympathy, demanded
> their felicitations and bade them become so firm in their love for God that they,
> too, could endure calamity with a radiant acquiescence. He was not really, He
> said, in prison: for “there is no prison but the prison self”, and since God’s love
> filled His heart He was all the time in heaven.
> From this engrossing love for God came the austere simplicity which marked
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s character. Christ’s manner of life had been simple in the
> extreme. A poor man, poorly clad, often in His wanderings He had no drink but
> the running stream, no bed but the earth, no lamp but the stars. His teaching was
> given in homely phrases and familiar images, and the religion He revealed,
> however difficult to follow, was as plain and open as His life. His very
> simplicity helped to mislead His contemporaries. They could recognise the
> badges of greatness but not greatness itself, and they could not see light though
> they knew its name. He was neither Rabbi nor Shaykh, though He was the
> Messiah. He had neither throne nor sword, though all things in heaven and in
> earth were committed into His charge.
> The life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, too, was simple and severe. Familiar during much
> of His life with cold, hunger and all privation, He chose for Himself in His own
> home the most frugal fare. The room in which He slept (sometimes denying
> Himself even the comfort of a bed!) served Him as a workroom too. His clothing
> was often of the cheapest kind; and He taught His family so to dress that their
> apparel might be “a comfort to the poor and an example to the rich.” The
> household prayers which He held morning and evening were quite informal.
> Partly from a natural modesty but also from a resolve to do
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 121.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Star of the West, vol. X:1, 21 March 1919, p. 16.
> 50                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> nothing that might encourage in others a tendency to formalism, He objected to
> any parade or unnecessary ceremonial, particularly if He were to be concerned in
> it.
> Even if some degree of circumstance and formality were called for, He would
> reduce them to the smallest possible proportions. When, on April 17th, 1921, He
> was to receive from Lord Allenby in the grounds of the Governor’s residence at
> Haifa the honour of knighthood for services rendered to the people of Palestine
> during the Turkish occupation, He evaded the equestrian procession and military
> reception prepared for Him, by slipping unobserved from His house and making
> His way to the rendezvous by some unaccustomed route. When all were in
> perplexity and many thought that He was lost He appeared quietly at the right
> place and at the right time and proceeded in the prescribed manner with the
> essential part of the ceremony.
> Of all material things, as of food, clothing, shelter, He sought and desired for
> Himself the barest sufficiency. But ascetism was not part of His creed nor of His
> teaching. “Others may sleep on soft pillows; mine must be a hard one,” He said
> once in declining a kind friend’s offer of some little comfort for His room. Men
> were to take what God had given them, and to enjoy the good things of nature;
> but with renunciation. Fasting was a symbol, and as such had high value, but in
> itself was no virtue: “God has given you an appetite,” He said; “eat.” Riches He
> thought no blessing; if they had been, Christ would have been rich. The poverty,
> however, which He inculcated was not impecuniousness but the heart’s poverty
> of him who is so rich in love for God that he is destitute of all desire for aught
> else.
> He was the most unassuming of men. He counted himself personally as less
> than others, put Himself below them and served them in every way He could find
> with unaffected humility. He used to entertain at His table visitors from far and
> near; but if the occasion were one of special importance He would rise and wait
> on His guests with His own hands—a practice He recommended to other hosts.
> When His Father was alive and dwelt outside ‘Akká among the mountains,
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá used frequently to visit Him, and
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character              51
> though the way was long He habitually went on foot. His friends asked Him why
> He did not spare Himself so much time and effort and go on horseback. “Over
> these mountains Jesus walked on foot,” He said, “and who am I that I should ride
> where the Lord Christ walked?”
> But this humility did not come from any weakness. It was a proof of His
> strength and a cause of His spiritual power. Once when a child asked Him why
> all the rivers of the earth flowed into the ocean He said: “Because it sets itself
> lower than them all and so draws them to itself.” Pride repels; humility attracts.
> When commenting on Christ’s direction to be as little children, He emphasised
> the fact that the virtues of children are due to weakness, and adults must learn to
> have these virtues through strength. A palsied arm cannot strike an angry blow;
> but the virtue of forbearance belongs to one who can, but will not. His humility
> was not due to any diffidence or other failing. Nor did it imply any selfabasement or self-depreciation. What it meant was the obliteration of the
> personal self. His separate ego had no existence at all save only as an instrument
> of expression for the higher self that was one with God.
> Somebody who knew Him in the West remarked that He was always master
> of the situation, and amid the novel and alien surroundings of such cities as
> London, Chicago and New York He preserved His self-possession and His
> power. On one occasion in America, when He arrived at a house where He was
> to be a guest at luncheon, a coloured man called on Him just before the meal
> hour. Being known to the hostess the caller was admitted, but ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
> observed that, according to the prevailing social custom, there was no intention of
> admitting him to sit at the table with the regular guests. Now race-prejudice is
> what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá could not tolerate: at His own table members of all races and
> religions met on an equality as brothers. He was not going to countenance it
> among His friends in America if He could help it. What was the surprise of the
> hostess and of everyone else present when He was observed clearing a place
> beside Him and calling for knives and forks for the new arrival. Before any
> seemly way of countering his initiative was found, before
> 52                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> anyone had quite realised how it had happened, the lady found herself doing what
> neither she nor any other hostess in her position would have dreamed of doing,
> and entertaining at her table with her white friends a negro. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had
> become the spiritual host. He spread before those who sat with Him the sense of
> the common Fatherhood of God. Such was His radiant power that the
> unconventional challenging meal passed off without unpleasantness or
> embarrassment to any who partook of it.
> When He was travelling in the West it was His custom to take out with Him a
> bag of silver pieces to give to the poor whom He met; and being brought down
> one evening to the Bowery Mission in New York He delivered there one of the
> most compassionate and moving of His addresses. It reads in part as follows:
> Tonight I am very happy for I have come here to meet my friends. I consider you
> my relatives, my companions, and I am your comrade.
> You must be thankful to God that you are poor, for Jesus Christ has said:
> “Blessed are the poor.” He never said “Blessed are the rich.” He said, too, that
> the Kingdom is for the poor …. Therefore, you must be thankful to God that
> although in this world you are indigent, yet the treasures of God are within your
> reach; and although in the material realm you are poor, yet in the Kingdom of
> God you are precious. Jesus Himself was poor. He did not belong to the rich. He
> passed His time in the desert, travelling among the poor, and lived upon the herbs
> of the field. He had no place to lay His head, no home. … yet He chose this
> rather than riches. … it was the poor who first accepted Him, not the rich.
> Therefore, you are the disciples of Jesus Christ; you are His comrades ….
> … Your lives are similar to His life, your attitude is like unto His, you resemble
> Him more than the rich do. Therefore, we will thank God that we have been so
> blest with real riches. And, in conclusion, I ask you to accept ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as
> your servant.
> At the end of the meeting ‘Abdul-Bahá stood at the Bowery entrance to the
> Mission Hall shaking hands with from four to five hundred men and placing
> within each palm a piece of silver. With no less tenderness He answered the need
> of those whose poverty was spiritual. His guards and jailers, servants of a cruel
> and despotic master, were won by His kindness and became His
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, pp. 32–4. [revised]
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character           53
> friends. “What is there about him,” people would say, “that He makes His
> enemies His friends?”
> Towards those who displayed to Him personal ill-will and malice He showed
> forbearance and generosity. Missionary work, He said, is not promoted by being
> overbearing and harsh; bad people are not to be won to God by criticisms and
> rebukes, nor by returning to them evil for evil. On the contrary, the Cause of
> God advances through courtesy and kindness, and the bad are conquered by
> intercession on their behalf and by sincere, unflagging love. “When you meet a
> thought of hate overcome it with a stronger thought of love.”
> Christ’s command to love one’s enemies was not obeyed by assuming love
> nor by acting as though one loved them; for this would be hypocrisy. It was only
> obeyed when genuine love was felt. When asked how it was possible to love
> those who were hostile or personally repugnant, He said that love could be true
> yet indirect. One may love a flower not only for itself but for the sake of
> someone who sent it. One may love a house because of one who dwells in it. A
> letter coming from a friend may be precious though the envelope which held it
> was torn and soiled. So one may love sinners for the sake of the universal Father,
> and may show kindness to them as to children who need training, to sick persons
> who need medicine, to wanderers who need guidance. “Treat ye the sinners, the
> tyrants and the blood-thirsty enemies as the faithful friends and confidants of the
> 2                                                   3
> heart,” He would say. “Consider not their deeds; consider only God.” His
> kindness was persistent and unflagging; He forgave until seventy times seven. A
> neighbour of His in Haifa, a self-righteous Muslim from Afghanistan, who
> regarded ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as an outcast, pursued Him for years with hate and scorn.
> When he met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on the street he would draw aside his robes that he
> might not be contaminated by touching a renegade. He received kindnesses with
> obdurate ill-will. Help in misfortune, food when he was hungry, medicine in
> sickness, the services of a physician, personal visits—all made no impression on
> his hardened heart. But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá did not relax nor despair. For five and
> twenty years He returned continuously good for evil; and then suddenly the
> man’s long hate broke down, his
> 
> “Sincerity and love will conquer hate.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 29.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Star of the West, vol. VIII:11, 27 September 1917, p. 138.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Star of the West, vol. V:9, 20 August 1914. p. 130.
> 54                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> heart warmed, his spirit awoke, and with tears of disillusion and remorse he
> bowed in homage before the goodness that had mastered him.
> Even with enemies much more dangerous and cruel than this poor Afghan,
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá showed the same forbearance and goodwill. He would suffer or
> invite any personal loss or humiliation rather than miss an opportunity of doing a
> kindness to an enemy; He would suffer calamity in order to avoid doing
> something which might be to the spiritual detriment of an ill-wisher. When
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had been liberated, the misrepresentations of a secret enemy
> resulted in His re-imprisonment. He might probably have secured His release by
> a special appeal; but He declined to take this action. He went back to the prison
> and was held there for years, one reason for this non-resistance to evil being that
> the success of His appeal would but deepen the envy and degradation of His
> enemy: “He must know that I will be the first to forgive him.” In this
> submissiveness He acted in the same spirit as His Father in parallel
> circumstances. For during the period when a certain jealous member of their
> entourage was by various means covertly seeking His life, Bahá’u’lláh and all the
> members of His family, including His eldest son, remained (so Professor Cheyne
> records) on cordial relations with him, admitting him as before to their company,
> even though they thus afforded him further opportunities of pursuing his deadly
> designs.
> So confident were all who knew ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that they could count on his
> largeness of mind that even the Sháh of Persia, when in extremity and threatened
> with revolution, stooped to ask the advice of the man he had kept in prison for a
> lifetime, and received an assurance that if he would end despotism and establish a
> constitution he might count on a happy reign, but that if he persisted in his
> present path he would be dethroned. The Sháh neglected the counsel and brought
> down upon himself the fate from which his generous prisoner would have
> shielded him.
> From his foot one may reconstruct Hercules, and from a few words and
> incidents one may reconstruct a character. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was no churchman; yet
> His qualities clarify the Christian
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: A study of a Christlike character               55
> ideal of manhood and help to prove for those who need such proof, how that ideal
> applies to modern as truly as to ancient conditions of life and is no less within the
> reach of active men to-day than it was in simpler times gone by.
> Queen Marie of Rumania
> and the Bahá’í Faith
> AMONG THE BAHÁ’Í treasures in the International Bahá’í Archives at Haifa
> there lies an exquisite and precious brooch, preserved as a memorial of the first
> of the queens of the world who recognised and acknowledged the Revelation of
> Bahá’u’lláh.
> Queen Marie of Rumania did not hesitate about this recognition nor was she
> diffident about giving it expression. She was at the time in bitter need, in
> profound, overwhelming sorrow. The sweetness, the tenderness, the depth of
> sympathy and helpfulness which she found at once in boundless measure in the
> Divine Message made an instantaneous appeal and opened her heart to seek and
> welcome the knowledge of its manifold beauty and truth. She felt the precious,
> warm loving-kindness of the Heavenly Teachers, the perfection of their
> understanding. Her soul was satisfied. Here at last was that for which she had
> hungered. Here was peace, the reality of peace: a breath upon a fevered world
> from that guarded inner shrine where peace has its inviolate home.
> She was in bitter need. Those who were near and dear to her surrounded her
> with love and sympathy and consolations; for they too knew grief and pain and
> felt with one who suffered so acutely as she. But anguish of spirit had awakened
> in her a desire for something other than the sincerest human condolence. She
> faced the mystery of death and love. No word, no touch, however gentle, that
> came only from a knowledge of this fleeting human life could suffice her now.
> Loneliness had broken the hold of earth on her. She longed, as she had never
> longed before, for God.
> And God came.
> Jesus Christ divided those to whom the Divine Message is communicated into
> four classes: those who are too self-absorbed to receive any impression, those
> who are able to receive only a shallow impression, and those who are deeply
> impressed by the truth but are also impressed by things not true, and finally those
> 
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith               57
> who are single-minded in the love and service of truth. It was the unique
> distinction of Queen Marie that, living in a special sphere where the cares of this
> world and the deceitfulness of riches are at their maximum, she accepted and held
> fast to the New Revelation. She was the first to walk in that narrow path in
> which, when it is made broader, all the kings and queens and rulers of the earth
> will follow her.
> The time of an Advent is and ever has been an epoch of the severest test for
> humanity. “Who may abide the day of His coming?” cried the ancient prophet;
> “and who shall stand when He appeareth?” For none is the test so hard as for the
> great and rich.
> “Know ye in truth,” said Bahá’u’lláh, “that wealth is a mighty barrier
> between the seeker and his desire, the lover and his beloved. The rich, but for a
> few, shall in no wise attain the court of His presence nor enter the city of content
> and resignation.” For none among the great and rich is the test so hard as for
> royalty. Alone among those of royal blood, alone among her sister-queens,
> Marie of Rumania recognised the dawning of the Day of Days and acclaimed in
> Bahá’u’lláh the glory of the Father. Therefore this signal privilege has been
> accorded her; and the ornament which she presented as a sign of gratitude to the
> Bahá’í teacher who brought her the Divine Message is honoured with a place
> among the holy relics of the early heroes of the Cause who first upheld among
> man the Banner of the Manifest King of Kings.
> 
> Marie, the eldest daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh, was born in the purple;
> but she had this special distinction that in her veins ran the blood of the only two
> royalties to whom Bahá’u’lláh, when He announced His Advent to the world’s
> rulers, addressed words of commendation. She was on her mother’s side the
> granddaughter of Czar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom, and on her father’s
> side of Queen Victoria; both of whom Bahá’u’lláh addressed in words different
> from the stern or minatory terms used by Him towards the King of Prussia, the
> Emperors of Austria and France, and the Sulṭán of Turkey and the Sháh of Persia.
> 
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Persian No. 53.
> 58                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> She was herself an outstanding and radiant personality, vigorous and daring,
> devoted to idealistic and humanitarian projects. A traveller who in 1909, before
> her accession to the throne, visited her summer home in Sinaia, Rumania, at a
> time when it was unoccupied by her, wrote afterwards in The Bahá’í Magazine:
> We were deeply impressed with the spiritual atmosphere of her living apartment
> furnished largely with her own handiwork, the carving of the furniture, the
> paintings, the beautiful altar, all made by herself and all indicative of a deeply
> spiritual nature. Her books, her thoughts, as one gleaned in a hasty passage
> through her home, were such as to indicate the kind and spiritual ruler she has
> become.
> After her death, an old friend who had known her since they played as girls
> together in Malta in 1888 wrote of her as follows:
> No one who ever had the privilege of personal or intimate acquaintance with
> Queen Marie could fail to be impressed by the greatness of her mind and spirit.
> Her own life story reveals so well her ardent and joyous nature, the depth of
> feeling that accompanied every thought and action …. The world is the poorer for
> the passing of such a noble lady, and a blank, impossible to fill, is left in the lives
> of those who knew her personally. She had passed through and suffered so much,
> even her wonderful health was too sorely tried and we must be thankful in spite of
> the great loss to us all that she is at rest and spared any further suffering. Her spirit
> is surely near us still and we must try to follow her noble example of great
> endurance and courage to face whatever may await us in these troublous times.
> —(Lilian McNeil, World Order, IV,
> 10).
> The first tidings of the Bahá’í Teaching were brought to her in the early days
> of 1926 when her Majesty was in Bucharest and owing to personal sorrow was
> living in retirement. Martha Root, the best known of the pioneers of the Faith of
> Bahá’u’lláh, sent her a short note with a copy of Dr Esslemont’s Bahá’u’lláh and
> the New Era. The Queen accepted the book and was at once so keenly interested
> by its message that she sat up over it into the small hours, and the next morning
> she sent an invitation to Martha
> 
> Queen Marie of Rumania in Star of the West, vol. XVII:3, June 1926, p. 84.
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith               59
> to visit her in the Palace on the following day at twelve o’clock.
> So quick and strong was the impression made through that interview that the
> Queen gave it utterance that same year in many ways; public as well as private.
> She found a ready response to her enthusiasm in the young daughter Ileana,
> afterwards Archduchess Anton, to whom she taught these truths. She wrote to an
> American friend of hers in Paris, “I have found all my yearnings for real religion
> satisfied …. I am now ready to die any day full of hope; but I pray God not to
> take me away yet for I still have a lot of work to do.” (Bahá’í World, VI, 580).
> In May and in September, 1926, The Toronto Daily Star published from her
> pen two glowing tributes to the Bahá’í Faith. “It is a wondrous Message,” she
> wrote, “that Bahá’u’lláh and His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá have given us. They have not
> set it up aggressively, knowing that the germ of eternal truth which lies at its core
> cannot but take root and spread …. I commend it to you all. If ever the name of
> Bahá’u’lláh or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá comes to your attention, do not put Their writings
> from you. Search out Their books and let Their glorious peacebringing, lovecreating words and lessons sink into your hearts as they have into mine.”
> To The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in September the same year she
> contributed an article on the Faith in the course of which she testified expressly to
> her acceptance of the truth of a succession of Revelations, a succession of
> Prophets—“Christ, Muhammad, Bahá’u’lláh,” she wrote; continuing, “those
> voices (of God) sent to us had to become flesh so that with our earthly ears we
> should be able to hear and understand ….”
> These three articles being syndicated were printed in nearly two hundred
> American newspapers, and afterwards appeared in several newspapers in the
> East.
> The Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause gratefully acknowledged these spontaneous
> appreciations. “Moved by an irresistible impulse,” he wrote in the Bahá’í World
> for 1926–8, “I addressed her Majesty in the name of the Bahá’ís of both East and
> West a written expression of our joyous admiration and gratitude for the queenly
> tribute which her Majesty has paid to the beauty and nobility of the Bahá’í
> Teachings ….”
> 
> Shoghi Effendi in The Bahá’í World, vol. VIII, 1926–1928, p. 273.
> 60                                  The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> The following is the letter which he received in reply:
> Bran, August 27th, 1926.
> Dear Sir,
> I was deeply moved on reception of your letter.
> Indeed a great light came to me with the message of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-
> Bahá. It came as all great messages come at an hour of dire grief and inner
> conflict and distress, so the seed sank deeply.
> My youngest daughter finds also great strength and comfort in the teachings of the
> beloved masters.
> We pass on the message from mouth to mouth and all those we give it to see a
> light suddenly lighting before them and much that was obscure and perplexing
> becomes simple, luminous and full of hope as never before.
> That my open letter was balm to those suffering for the Cause is indeed a great
> happiness to me, and I take it as a sign that God accepted my humble tribute.
> The occasion given me to be able to express myself publicly was also His work.
> For indeed it was a chain of circumstances of which each link led me unwittingly
> one step further, till suddenly all was clear before my eyes and I understood why it
> had been.
> Thus does He lead us finally to our ultimate destiny.
> Some of those of my caste wonder at and disapprove my courage to step forward
> pronouncing words not habitual for crowned heads to pronounce, but I advance by
> an inner urge I cannot resist.
> With bowed head I recognise that I, too, am but an instrument in greater Hands,
> and rejoice in the knowledge.
> Little by little the veil is lifting, grief tore it in two. And grief was also a step
> leading me ever nearer truth, therefore do I not cry out against grief!
> May you and those beneath your guidance be blessed and upheld by the sacred
> strength of those gone before you.
> Marie.
> Martha Root also wrote to her Majesty, and in the reply which she received
> were these words: “… The beautiful truth of Bahá’u’lláh is with me always, a
> help and an inspiration. What I wrote was because my heart overflowed with
> gratitude for the revelation you brought me. I am happy if you think I helped. I
> 
> Shoghi Effendi, Appreciations of the Bahá’í Faith, p. 9.
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith                        61
> thought it might bring truth nearer because my words are read by so many ….”
> In the following year (1927) her Majesty gave another audience to Martha
> Root; a third audience in 1928 when with her daughter the Princess Ileana she
> was the guest of the Queen of Yugoslavia in Belgrade; and a fourth in 1929 in the
> Summer Palace at Balchic. She contributed an encomium of the Cause, charged
> with warm feeling and beautifully expressed, to the fourth volume of Bahá’í
> World; and another more brief but not less significant to the fifth volume. “The
> Bahá’í Teaching,” she wrote, “brings peace to the soul and hope to the heart. To
> those in search of assurance the words of the Father are as a fountain in the desert
> after long wandering.”
> It had been for some time her Majesty’s wish and aspiration to visit in person
> the sacred shrines upon Mount Carmel and to meet in person Shoghi Effendi. In
> the year 1931 the opportunity, as it seemed, arrived. Accompanied by her
> youngest daughter her Majesty travelled to the Holy Land and arrived at Haifa
> with the intention of fulfilling her cherished desire. But fate had ruled otherwise.
> Unfriendly influences intervened. She did not reach her goal. In a sad letter to
> Martha Root dated June 28th, 1931, she told of her frustration and of the
> unwelcome pressure to which she had been subjected.
> “Both Ileana and I,” she wrote, “were cruelly disappointed at having been
> prevented going to the holy shrines and meeting Shoghi Effendi; but at that time
> we were going through a cruel crisis and every movement I made was being turned
> against me and being politically exploited in an unkind way. It caused me a good
> deal of suffering and curtailed my liberty most unkindly …. But the beauty of
> truth remains and I cling to it through all the vicissitudes of a life become rather
> sad.”
> Early in 1934 her Majesty again received Martha Root in audience in the
> Controceni Palace in Bucharest and expressed her delight that the Rumanian
> translation of Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era had just been published in Bucharest
> and that her people were to have the blessing of reading this precious Teaching.
> In the course of the interview the Queen told of an incident
> 62                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> which had happened in Hamburg some months earlier when she was en route to
> Iceland. As she was driving down the street a girl tossed into the car a little note,
> and when her Majesty opened it she read the message, “I am so glad to see you in
> Hamburg because you are a Bahá’í.”
> Martha Root’s sixth and final interview took place in February, 1936 in the
> same Palace, and was in some respects the most touching and significant of all.
> Her Majesty spoke of various Bahá’í books, for she used to purchase them as
> they came off the press. She spoke of the depth of the Íqán, and of the wonderful
> radiant force of Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. “Even doubters,”
> she said, “would find a powerful strength in it if they could read it alone and
> would give their souls time to expand.” She told how in London she had met a
> Bahá’í, Lady Blomfield, who had shown her the message that Bahá’u’lláh had
> sent to her grandmother, Queen Victoria. She told, too, of a dear friend of her
> girlhood who lived in ‘Akká, Palestine, and knew Shoghi Effendi and had sent
> from there pictures of ‘Akká and Haifa. This friend (Mrs McNeill) published
> afterwards a letter which the Queen wrote to her at this time:
> “Dear ‘little’ Lilian,” it began, “it was indeed nice to hear from you and to think
> that you are of all things living near Haifa and are, as I am, a follower of the
> Bahá’í Teachings. It interests me that you are living in that special house; the
> Teachers so loved flowers, and being English, I can imagine what a lovely garden
> you have made in that Eastern climate. I was so intensely interested and studied
> each photo intently. It must be a lovely place and those south-eastern landscapes
> and gardens attract me with a sort of homesickness ever since our Malta days.
> And the house you live in, so incredibly attractive and made precious by its
> associations with the Man we all venerate ….”
> Four days after this, the Queen sent for The Bahá’í World, her last public
> tribute to the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. It was in due course reproduced in facsimile
> as a frontispiece to Volume VI, 1936–38, and runs as follows:
> More than ever to-day when the world is facing such a crisis of bewilderment and
> unrest, must we stand firm in Faith seeking
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith                       63
> that which binds together instead of tearing asunder. To those searching for light,
> the Bahá’í Teachings offer a star which will lead them to deeper understanding, to
> assurance, peace and goodwill with all men.—Marie, 1936.
> The end was drawing near. Her health undermined by her many troubles
> began to fail. After some months of illness, in July, 1938, she passed away, and
> leaving this world where for all her royal rank she had known so much of grief
> and tears she entered that Great Beyond of which she had thought so often and so
> deeply.
> Her death and obsequies were attended with all the ceremonial that befits the
> passing of a Queen. But who can tell what was the greeting that awaited her on
> the other side where she learned in an instant how true had been her intuitions of
> the Manifestation of God and where she saw unobscured now by any mortal veil
> the white eternal splendour of the Truth that she, alone among the earth’s queens,
> had risen to acclaim.
> The Guardian of the Cause and the Bahá’ís generally recognised the
> distinction of her spiritual station and the greatness of her service to the Cause.
> In July, 1938, the Guardian on behalf of all the Bahá’ís sent a message of
> condolence to her daughter the Queen of Yugoslavia to which her Majesty
> replied expressing “sincere thanks to all Bahá’í followers.” To the Memorial
> Service held in the Cathedral of Washington, DC, USA, the Bahá’ís of the United
> States and Canada sent a tribute of flowers. The following sentences are from an
> account of that ceremony:
> “On July 25th, 1939, the first anniversary of the death of Queen Marie of
> Rumania, an impressive memorial service was held in her honour at the Cathedral
> of Washington in the national capital of the United States. In Bethlehem Chapel
> on this midsummer afternoon national dignitaries and humble citizens paid loving
> tribute to a royal personage whose name stands out with an especial lustre in the
> history of her time. The spiritual beauty of the service expressed the character of
> this noble Queen—the first member of royalty to embrace the Faith of
> Bahá’u’lláh.
> “Arranged by the Rumanian Minister, Radu Irimescu, the service was conducted
> by the Reverend Doctor Anson Phelps
> 64                              The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Stokes, canon of the Cathedral and former Secretary of Yale University. Among
> the diplomatists present were the British, French and Italian Ambassadors and
> representatives of other European embassies and legations. The Secretary of State,
> Honourable Cordell Hull, headed the American delegation which included
> government officials and representatives of the Army and Navy ….
> “Directly opposite the altar in this intimate chapel stood the imposing floral tribute
> ‘from the Bahá’í Friends of America’—a cross ten feet in height with a ninepointed star at its centre. This emblem was designed by Charles Mason Remey
> and presented in consultation with the National Spiritual Assembly. It was beside
> the Bahá’í tribute that the Rumanian Minister stood at the conclusion of the
> service to greet the audience as they passed out, according to the Continental
> custom on such occasions.
> “Not only did Queen Marie as the Dowager Queen of Rumania attest her faith in
> the Divine Cause through private letters; she claimed the spiritual bounty of
> calling the Teachings to the attention of others.”
> In these dark and troublous times, this Day (or is it not rather this Night?) of
> Judgment, when there is no open vision and when the gift of spirituality is not
> esteemed, the connection of Queen Marie with the Bahá’í Faith may seem to be
> but a small matter, the least episode among the multifarious activities of a
> crowded and brilliant life. But when this sleep in which the world’s soul is
> shrouded ends at last; when men’s spirits awakening behold the glories and the
> bounties and the opportunities that have lain about them, unwelcome and
> unregarded, all these many years, then they will look back upon the past with a
> new and horrified understanding. They will gaze with amazement and
> indignation and pity upon the incorrigible blindness of the mighty ones of Europe
> who, despite the manifold warnings of God, led their people through misery upon
> misery and flung them at last into the ultimate abyss of war. But amidst that
> universal darkness of failure and misrule that fills the palaces and chancelleries of
> the world men will see one solitary light shining in lone splendour and will
> acknowledge the true majesty of that one redeeming soul whose high faith caught
> and reflected far the glory of the breaking Dawn of God.
> In later times, when the prophecies of the Bible are fulfilled
> Queen Marie of Rumania and the Bahá’í Faith                 65
> openly before the eyes of all, when the New Jerusalem is established in the top of
> the mountains and “the nations of them that are saved walk in its light and the
> kings of the earth bring their glory and honour into it”; then men will see
> treasured among the sacred relics of the first champions of the Bahá’í Faith one
> royal ornament, a brooch of silver and diamond, the memorial of the first Queen
> who recognised and acclaimed the Glory of Bahá’u’lláh; and the name and the
> deed of Queen Marie of Rumania will be on the lips of men forever.
> The call to God
> A meditation
> WHEN GOD CAME back into a world which had forgotten Him He sent as
> His Best Beloved, the Báb, in whom the Spirit of Love was manifest with such
> radiance that His disciples knew him as “the Ravisher of Hearts”. Bahá’u’lláh
> Himself in that little volume, The Hidden Words, into which He has distilled the
> essence of all revelations, teaches that before the foundation of the world God
> knew His love for man and therefore created him. He breathed within man “a
> breath of My own spirit”; “engraved on thee Mine image”, and bestowed on him
> endless bounties. One of these gifts, Justice, is “the sign of my loving kindness”
> since through its observance every man can win knowledge for himself.
> The first demand which Justice makes on man is that he shall love his
> Creator. “I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love me
> that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life. … Love me, that
> I may love thee. If thou lovest me not, my love can in no wise reach thee. … My
> claim on thee is great: it cannot be forgotten.” Reunion with God is man’s
> heavenly home. The love of God in man’s Paradise. It is his stronghold, in
> which, if he enter in, he shall be safe and secure—But if he turn away therefrom
> he “shall surely stray and perish.”
> Righteousness has two supports—both spiritual. One is the love of God—
> ”Walk in My statutes for love of Me ….” The other is the fear of God, without
> the restraint of which and the knowledge of the certainty of retribution, the
> selfishness of man could not be held in control. “We have admonished our loved
> ones,” writes Bahá’u’lláh, “to fear God, a fear which is the fountain head of all
> goodly deeds and virtues. … The fear of God … is the chief cause of the
> protection of mankind, and the supreme
> 
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic Nos 19, 3 & 2.
> idem, Nos 4, 5 & 20.
> idem, No. 9.
> idem, No. 38.
> The call to God: A meditation                 67
> instrument for its preservation.”
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá frequently adverted to the close relationship between faith and
> morality. For instance He wrote
> “By Faith is meant, first, conscious knowledge, and second, the practice of
> good deeds. … Although a person of good deeds is acceptable at the Threshold
> of the Almighty, yet it is first ‘to know’ and then ‘to do’.” “The cause of eternal
> glory to man,” He writes, “is faith and certainty and then living (or acting)
> according to the behests of His Majesty the Eternal God.” God requires good
> deeds from one who loves Him. “Neglect not My commandments if thou lovest
> My beauty ….”
> Through Faith and Righteousness, we are taught (and not without them) the
> world may be united. For the virtues are the means by which people are enabled
> to live together in peace and happiness. Generally speaking, whatever tends to
> harmony is right, and whatever promotes discord is wrong. Integrity, loyalty,
> fidelity, kindness, forbearance, mercy, generosity, trustworthiness, equity,
> hospitality, and the like, all tend to social concord, well-being and unity. If the
> scope and field of the virtues be not walled in by prejudices or bigotry, but
> expand without hindrance, then they will find their natural goal in uniting all the
> peoples of the globe. Faith will attract the help of the Holy Spirit without which
> the division forces of earth life cannot be mastered; and faith and the knowledge
> of God will alone be able to end that fierce struggle for existence which ‘Abdul
> Bahá calls “the fountain-head of all calamities and the supreme affliction.”
> For Faith is a “divine elixir” which “transmuteth the souls of men.” When a
> believer turns in faith towards God, a profound change in his being is wrought
> through which he becomes a “new creature”. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá likens this change to
> the ante-natal process whereby spiritual forces surrounding the body of an infant
> as it is formed before birth gradually permeate it according to the degree of its
> receptivity. Similarly a believer’s faith draws about him the everlasting bounties
> of God which he by degrees appropriates into his being according to the measure
> of his capacity and of the spiritual preparation he has made. Man’s natural
> condition is that of an animal: until he is born again from this and detached
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, pp. 135 & 27. [revised]
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vol. 3, p. 549.
> idem, p. 667.
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic No. 39.
> Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, p. 302.
> Bahá’u’lláh, The Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 156.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í World Faith, p. 324.
> See Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vol. 1, p. 157.
> 68                                  The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> from the world of nature he remains essentially an animal, “and it is the
> teachings of God which convert this animal into a human soul.”
> The soul is an intermediary between the spiritual world and the material
> world. In its higher aspect it looks up toward the Kingdom of Glory, in its other
> aspect it looks downward, toward the lower sphere where darkness and ignorance
> have their home. If spiritual light be poured down upon this lower phase of the
> soul and if the soul be able to receive it, then the truth is made clear and
> falsehood is of short duration. But if such light does not come or is not accepted,
> then darkness gathers about the soul from all directions, it is cut off from the
> spiritual world and remains in the lowest depths.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá used the picture of the “Waxing of the Moon” to illustrate the
> gradualness of this heavenward conversion and detachment from the world. The
> believer when first he turns to God and receives his light is like the crescent
> moon which is illumined on its sunward side but has the face it turns to earth still
> in shadow. When the moon is full, and, turning to the sun’s light the same face it
> turns to earth, is illumined throughout its whole circumference so that no shadow
> anywhere remains, it becomes a type of the spiritually mature soul. The reality
> of this severance is shown by a remark attributed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—”The Holy
> Spirit moves my limbs.”
> The results of spirituality, the full meaning of reunion with God, are not,
> however, made known to man fully till the Hereafter. “Sorrow not if, in these
> days and on this earthly plane, things contrary to your wishes have been
> ordained and manifested by God, for days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight are
> assuredly in store for you. Worlds, holy and spiritually glorious, will be unveiled
> to your eyes.”
> The purpose of earth life is to acquire the qualities that will be needed in those
> other worlds: as “the knowledge and the love of God; faith, sanctity, spirituality,
> eternal life.”
> To a “pure, kindly and radiant heart” is promised “a sovereignty ancient,
> imperishable and everlasting.” Could man behold that
> 
> Tablet to the Hague in Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, p. 303.
> See Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vol. 3, p. 661.
> See Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vol. 1, pp. 108–9.
> idem, vol. 3, p. 601.
> Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 329.
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic No. 1
> The call to God: A meditation                      69
> immortal sovereignty, he would “strive to pass from this fleeting world!”
> But the journey to God is not easy to accomplish. God is a jealous God. “Ye
> shall be hindered from loving Me and souls shall be perturbed as they make
> mention of Me. For minds cannot grasp Me nor hearts contain Me.” Man must
> face a conflict in his own soul: “If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself; and if
> thou seekest My pleasure regard not thine own …. There is no peace for thee
> save by renouncing thyself and turning unto Me ….”
> Only through the energy of his own volition may the hidden powers of his
> being be developed. Again and again man is called on “to make an effort”. He is
> reminded that the greater his endeavour to cleanse and refine the mirror of his
> heart, the more faithful will be the reflection in it of the glory of the names and
> attributes of God, and that as a result of the exertion of his own spiritual faculties,
> he will be able to “attain the courts of everlasting fellowship.”
> At the present time the way to God is particularly hard to find. For it is the
> Day of Judgment. Mankind has been “taken unawares”, as Christ foretold it
> would be. God can only be known through His Messenger; and now there is a
> New Era, a New Advent, a New Messenger. Old forms and names do not avail
> now. Souls are being tested by their readiness to acknowledge the New
> Manifestation of God—as the Mosaists were tested by the advent of Christ. Men
> are being divided by God: some are taken, others left. All behold the light; only
> the spiritual see its source. All men recognise a transition; only the spiritual
> understand its meaning.
> But no soul, no Age is tested beyond its powers. To those who seek to turn to
> God, inspiration adequate to every demand is given. Great as have been the
> bounties poured forth from heaven in past Advents, those of to-day are greater
> far. Both in the Gospel and the Apocalypse the overwhelming weight of this
> Second Coming and the victory of the righteous over the infidel have been
> foretold. A power above the ken of men and angels, we are assured, now
> enforces men’s obedience to the will of God.
> 
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Persian No. 41.
> idem, Arabic No. 66.
> idem, Nos 7 & 8
> Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 262.
> 70                                  The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> The teachings on the spiritual life are such as beseem the age of man’s
> maturity, when every soul is required to investigate the truth for himself. They
> are given in plain terms, not in “proverbs”. They are authentic, being the written
> word of Bahá’u’lláh or ‘Abdul Bahá. They are not of doubtful interpretation.
> They are voluminous and comprehensive, offering diverse approaches to
> knowledge and being adapted to diverse temperaments. Owing to the labour of
> various translators and predominantly to that of the Guardian, many of these
> teachings are accessible in English.
> The earliest and perhaps (it is said) the greatest of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelations
> on the Search for God is a little mystical treatise: “The Seven Valleys”. The
> thought is subtle and profound; the idiom is oriental; but yet the book has a
> beauty, a charm and a rapture which have made it the dearest treasure of many a
> believer. It is the love-story of one who being separated from his beloved seeks
> far and long, eagerly, patiently, despite all hardships and through all vicissitudes
> for the one and only object of his desire; and at last attains his goal in a union
> which will know no separation or end—“For when the true lover and devoted
> friend reacheth the presence of the Beloved, the radiant beauty of the Loved One
> and the fire of the lover’s heart will kindle a blaze and burn away all veils and
> wrappings. Yea, all that he hath, from marrow to skin, will be set aflame, so that
> nothing will remain save the Friend.”
> The story is one of a journey. But though we read of ‘valleys’, ‘cities’,
> ‘heights’, ‘fields’, ‘gardens’, yet it is made clear the changes of scenery are
> inward changes of emotion, of sensibility and the like. The traveller passes from
> ignorance to knowledge, from illusion to discernment; love deepens, is cleansed,
> intensified, uplifted; wisdom yields to greater wisdom; joy trembles and is lost to
> make way for finer joy. The “Seven Valleys” are seven experiences or groups of
> experiences which all must pass through who would travel this way to the end.
> The story is lyric rather than dramatic. Though it is (like Bunyan’s
> masterpiece) an allegory of a pilgrimage to a Celestial City, there are no lions,
> nor giants in the way here, no Doubting Castle, no Vanity Fair. The enemies of
> the traveller dwell within his heart. Evil is a negation, an imperfection. Nor is
> the journey
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh, The Seven Valleys in Call of the Divine Beloved, p. 14.
> The call to God: A meditation                  71
> lonely: the Beloved’s presence is felt from the beginning, the Messenger of Love
> is the pilgrim’s guide throughout: The moving impulse of the journey is not
> solely the traveller’s own; the voice of his Beloved calls ever in his heart “seek
> thou no shelter save in the Sheba of the well-beloved”, and he is drawn onwards
> to the happy ending by a power not his own.
> How far away these valleys from the earth we know to-day! How far these
> aims, this search from the pursuits and projects of men and peoples now. Yet we
> are given to understand that only by adopting “The Hidden Words” as the
> standard of right living and “The Seven Valleys” as a guide to human conduct
> will society be empowered to inaugurate the Most Great Peace.
> The Obligatory Prayers are given to help a Believer in this search. They are
> not concerned with the objects so familiar at this time—as the expansion of the
> cause, the giving of the message, the unifying and pacification of the peoples.
> No. They are designed to be used daily by Bahá’í of all degrees for generations
> and centuries to come. They are about that which Bahá’u’lláh wishes to be the
> essence and constant centre of Bahá’í devotion and thought. Comprehensive and
> complex they may be: but their subject is one and simple. It is the knowledge
> and the love of God.
> The Short Prayer states the whole matter in a word: “Thou has created me to
> know Thee and to worship Thee.”
> The Medium Prayer is more particular. It specifies in two verses the fact of
> the Manifestation. The first verse presents this in its transcendent aspect,
> proclaiming God’s Advent and His Sovereignty. The second acknowledges His
> omnipresence and unity, gives the substance of His Revelation and remembers
> the champions of the Faith.
> The Long Prayer develops the theme still more fully and deeply. It seeks the
> vision of God’s Beauty, an approach to His presence, an eternity of progress in
> His knowledge. The main phases of the thought seem to be Self-Surrender,
> Confirmation, Adoration and Thanksgiving, Penitence, and Trust in forgiveness
> and redemption through the special graces of this Dispensation. While this Long
> Prayer has one definite, elevated subject,
> 
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Persian No. 1.
> 72                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> believers have found that they can apply it, or major parts of it, to a special crisis
> or a special act in their own lives and can thus the better understand the Prayer
> and spiritualise their problems.
> How marked and how significant, on the one side the correspondence and on
> the other the contrast that exist between this prayer of the New Age and the
> Lord’s Prayer which Christians have been repeating for nineteen centuries. Here
> is reflected the continuity of the work of Christ and Bahá’u’lláh and the Oneness
> of their common purpose. Here, too (in an hour when many fear Christ has
> thrown away His teaching on an unworthy race), is a testimony to the ultimate
> success of His glorious ministry and sacrifice.
> The first petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are for the coming of the Kingdom of
> God on earth.
> The Obligatory Prayers imply and declare that the Kingdom has come: for
> instance “the All-Possessing is come. Earth and heaven, glory and dominion are
> God’s …” and “He who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery … through
> whom the letters ‘B’ and ‘E’ have been joined and knit together …” (that is,
> mankind’s true existence begins in the New Era).
> The Lord’s Prayer remembers a prophecy and a promise; and centres men’s
> attention on a triumphant future on earth. The Obligatory Prayers contain no
> prophecy and aim at an inward spiritual attainment.
> Christ’s Prayer is social in form. It is suited to spiritual children, being very
> simple and largely practical. In the words “as we forgive those who trespass
> against us” it adverts to the virtue of personal mercy to which Christ gave special
> prominence.
> The Prayer of Bahá’u’lláh is personal and mystical, advanced in character and
> suited to a maturer race. It carries the idea of communion and unity far, invoking
> in the Long Prayer all the Prophets of the Ages, interceding for the past heroes of
> the Faith, and joining the worshipper’s testimony to this Era and its Prophet with
> the testimony of those in the highest heaven and of the Tongue of Grandeur itself
> as well as with that of all creation.
> Besides these and similar prayers, the Guardian has given us in the volume
> Prayers and Meditations a number of other prayers
> The call to God: A meditation                  73
> of a different origin—prayers made by Bahá’u’lláh for His own use, acts of
> communion between the Prophet Himself and the Most High.
> To these a special mystery attaches, as He Himself affirms (p. 282), and they
> are bequeathed to us by His particular grace. They offer us a new approach to the
> knowledge of God, and constitute perhaps the highest point we can attain in our
> mystical contemplation of the Prophet’s ministry.
> Some of these pieces are ascriptions to the power, the exaltation and the
> munificence of God. Others deal with His creative and redemptive work. Others
> belong to dramatic moments in His struggle against the evil forces of His
> environment. The range of thought and emotion which we find in them far
> outreaches ordinary human experience. On the one hand it soars to unimagined
> heights of adoration and triumph and joy. On the other, it plumbs depths of such
> anguish as only the truest love could know. But whatever the subject or the
> occasion of these prayers they all are one continuing diverse song of selfsurrender and praise and thanksgiving to God. From every page—now in phrase
> or in sentence or paragraph or sometimes in a whole long prayer of glowing and
> sustained emotion—pour forth tributes of adoration magnifying the eternal
> Beauty of Him whose love gives sustenance to the universe and who with one
> least drop from the infinite ocean of his Mercy now redeems and beatifies
> mankind.
> Love for God inspires every thought and deed. “In Thy path, and to attain
> Thy pleasure, I have scorned rest, joy, delight. … I have wakened every morning
> to the light of Thy praise and Thy remembrance, and reached every evening
> inhaling the fragrance of Thy mercy. … The fire of Thy love that burneth
> continually within me hath so inflamed me that whoever among Thy creatures
> approacheth me, and inclineth his inner ear towards me, cannot fail to hear its
> raging within each of my veins.” “Nothing whatsoever can withhold me from
> remembering Thee, though all the tribulations of earth were to assault me from
> every direction. All the limbs and members of my body proclaim their readiness
> to be torn asunder in Thy path and for the sake of Thy pleasure, and they yearn to
> be scattered in the dust before
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, pp. 103–4 & 269–7o.
> 74                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Thee. O would that they who serve Thee could taste what I have tasted of the
> sweetness of Thy love.” Upborne by this love He counts toil in God’s cause to
> be “blissful repose, every anguish a fountain of gladness.”
> He testifies to the Majesty of the Station held by Him; to the profound and
> subtle changes in this created world, through which this New Age, the Age of
> God, was brought into being (p. 295); to the supremacy and triumph of the
> Revelation (p. 275) and to the eclipse of man’s wisdom and the collapse of his
> power and of his knowledge before the manifest glory and dominion of the Most
> High. (p. 53.) He gives a picture, unprecedented and unparalleled, of that
> spiritual illumined world which He is building, the world ordained by God of old
> which now is to be realised—a world so incomparable to ours that though we
> read the divine description of it, our aspirations can form as yet no image of its
> unity, its felicity or its attainments.
> One and all, these prayers have for their immediate background and occasion
> the events of his life and ministry. Dates are not given, nor circumstances. But
> the prayers evidently cover many dynamic years of intense and extraordinarily
> varied personal activity—the period during which He regathered the stricken
> Bábís, reanimated their faith, laid broad and deep in men’s hearts the foundations
> of the Bahá’í Cause, and in spite of successive and accumulating difficulties, in
> spite of the oppression of priests and tyrants, the machinations of traitors and the
> lethargy of the public, in spite of sorrows, sufferings and frustrations beyond
> number, declared His Mission, proclaimed it to the Kings of the World and went
> down to His last long imprisonment in the city of Acca.
> The splendour of His power, His constancy, His spirituality, shines out
> against the unremitting darkness of His earthly lot. For ever His human self
> complains and expostulates with Him under the weight of ceaseless affliction:
> “My blood at all times addresseth Me saying: ‘O Thou who art the Image of the
> Most Merciful! How long will it be ere Thou riddest me of the captivity of this
> world …?’ … To this I make reply: ‘Be thou patient …. The things thou desirest
> can last but an hour. As to me, however, I quaff continually
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, pp. 151–2.
> idem, p. 136.
> idem, pp. 58, 184, etc.
> The call to God: A meditation                               75
> in the path of God the cup of His decree, and wish not that the ruling of His will
> should cease to operate …. Seek thou my wish and forsake thine own.’” (p. 11)
> His abasement causes His friends to weaken and His enemies to rejoice. Yet He
> has Himself chosen this suffering (p. 278) and wishes life could be prolonged that
> He might suffer more for love of God. His afflictions increase His love and His
> redeeming power. (pp. 146–7) He gives no sign of personal resentment: quite
> the contrary. (p. 307) But He prays for the vindication of the Faithful and the
> punishment of those who oppose God and His Truth. “Well-beloved is Thy mercy
> unto the sincere among Thy servants, and well-beseeming Thy chastisement of
> the infidels …. Abase Thou, O my Lord, Thine enemies, and lay hold on them
> with Thy power and might, and let them be stricken with the blast of Thy wrath.”
> (pp. 141, 121.)
> Here in this devotional record may be traced the spiritual creation and the first
> ideal beginnings of the New Age and its glories. Here is fought and won in the
> heart and soul of the Prophet that battle which established for us the Victory of
> God on earth. Here is invoked that wrath of an outraged Deity which now
> overwhelms mankind in its cleansing fires.
> As one contemplates the awfulness of the tragedy unfolded in these pages: as
> one ponders over this intimate revelation of the impassioned love, the wrongs, the
> sufferings of Him by Whose stripes we are healed and who for our redemption
> endured the abominations of the world: the Call to God sounds with a new
> appeal, and one hears with a new realisation and a new resolve the summons of
> the All-Victorious.
> Hear Me, ye mortal birds! In the Rose Garden of changeless splendour a Flower
> hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and
> before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and
> wither. Arise, therefore, and, with the whole enthusiasm of your hearts, … of your
> will, and the concentrated efforts of your entire being, strive to attain the paradise
> of His presence, and endeavour to inhale the fragrance of the incorruptible
> Flower, to breathe the sweet savours of holiness, and to attain a portion of this
> perfume of celestial glory. Whoso followeth this counsel will break his chains
> 76                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> asunder, will taste the abandonment of enraptured love, will attain unto his heart’s
> desire, and will surrender his soul into the hands of his Beloved. Bursting through
> his cage, he will, even as the bird of the Spirit, wing his way to his holy and
> everlasting nest.320–1
> Night hath succeeded day, and day hath succeeded night, and the hours and
> moments of your lives have come and gone, and yet none of you hath, for one
> instant, consented to detach himself from that which perisheth. Bestir yourselves,
> that the brief moments that are still yours may not be dissipated and lost. Even as
> the swiftness of lightning your days shall pass, and your bodies shall be laid to rest
> beneath a canopy of dust. What can ye then achieve? How can ye atone for your
> past failure?
> The everlasting Candle shineth in its naked glory. Behold how it hath consumed
> every mortal veil. O ye moth-like lovers of His light! Brave every danger, and
> consecrate your souls to its consuming flame. O ye that thirst after Him! Strip
> yourselves of every earthly affection, and hasten to embrace your Beloved. With a
> zest that none can equal make haste to attain unto Him. The Flower, thus far
> hidden-from the sight of men, is unveiled to your eyes. In the open radiance of His
> glory He standeth before you. His voice summoneth all the holy and sanctified
> beings to come and be united with Him. Happy is he that turneth thereunto; well
> is it with him that hath attained, and gazed on the light of so wondrous a
> countenance.
> 
> Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 320–2.
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
> *
> THESE TABLETS ARE A fountain of heavenly love and joy, of wisdom and
> power. In every volume, the ceaseless, boundless Love of God pours forth like
> wine into a thousand different vessels: changing its form, taking the shape of
> many occasions, filling exactly many needs, but never changing the exquisiteness
> of its beauty. Love, spontaneous and unstinted, floods every utterance of
> thought. There is no check, no limit. The days when these letters were written
> were early days, the days of the first meetings of Lovers and Beloved, the days of
> God’s welcome to the first believers of the western world.
> “This is the time of happiness; it is the day of cheerfulness and exhilaration.”
> He writes. “… with a heart overflowing with the love of God, pray to God with
> all joy, and thank thou God for this guidance this high gift. “Should ye realize in
> what a state this Tablet is written, assuredly ye will soar heavenward with joy
> and exultations ….” (pp. 320, 182 & 440) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the time of writing
> these letters was in prison. He was misrepresented, humiliated, frustrated; His
> life was in danger; difficulties had to be met every hour. Yet no personal distress
> affects for a moment in the least degree His inward peace of heart or weakens the
> delight of His fellowship with those who begin to share His love for God.
> Whatever sorrow there be in these pages is not for Himself but is through the
> intensity of His sympathy with the griefs of those to whom He writes. His heart
> “is filled with the love of God, is free and isolated from all save God, is illumined
> and overflowing with the bounties of the Kingdom of al-Abhá.” (p. 713.) “Verily,
> I am the servant of Bahá’, the slave of Bahá’, the captive of Bahá’. I have no
> grade but to this and I do not possess anything for myself.” (p. 603.)
> A power from on high animates Him: the Holy Spirit moves His limbs, His
> pen. To suffer for God’s sake, to drink the cup of
> 
> *
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vols I–III (1909, 1915 and 1916). Some new
> translations are found in Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá.
> 78                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> sacrifice is His “utmost hope, the joy of my heart, the consolation of my soul and
> my final desire.” (p. 715)
> Again and again He rejects commiseration offered on account of His
> calamities and afflictions. “These are not calamities, but bounties; they are not
> afflictions, but gifts; not hardships, but tranquillity; not trouble, but mercy—and
> we thank God for this great favour.” (p. 128.) He asserts His independence of all
> His enemies can do to harm Him.
> “I am free,” he writes, “although I should remain in prison. All fortresses and
> castles cannot confine me, and the dungeon cannot bring me under the narrow
> bondage of the world. The spirit is ever soaring, even if the body be in the
> depths. … Therefore, neither the prison is a cause of sorrow, nor freedom from it
> a source of joy.” (p. 151)
> These letters fill hundreds of printed pages. Each correspondent is addressed
> by some special spiritual title chosen by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for him or for her,
> personally, as, “O thou who art turning to the divine Kingdom”, “O thou candle
> of the Love of God”, “O thou servant of God”, “O thou opened rose in the garden
> of al-Abhá”, “O thou who art awakened to the Cause of God”, “O thou
> worshipper of Truth”, “O thou servant of humanity”, “O thou who art yearning
> for the Glad-tidings of God”.
> He deals with diverse problems; answers countless questions about the past
> and the present, about Revelation, about Christianity, about social life, the life of
> the home, about marriage and children. He sets forth the cause of God and its
> administration. He exposes the error and the evil of the times. He comforts,
> counsels, commands, urges; He chants praises of God and of His faithful ones.
> Whatever the subject, whatever the occasion, whatever the need, the same divine
> might of His creative love calls into action the awakening spirit of the people of
> the West. His heart, He writes (p. 6o), overflows with gladness and exultation as
> He reads the letters of the beloved of God whose eyes are enlightened by God,
> whose hearts and consciences are purified by knowledge and love of God and
> who have found peace of soul through the commemoration of God.
> He remembers them at all times, prays for them every morn
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá                          79
> and eve. (p. 113) “Do not think that ye are forgotten for one moment!” (p. 593).
> “Trust thou in the love of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, for verily, nothing equals it.” (p. 201.)
> If for any reason letters do not reach Him He misses them and life and
> conscience do not find happiness and joy. (p. 375) Yet important and dearly
> cherished as letters are He is in close and living touch with the faithful in spite of
> distance, in spite of interruption in correspondence. Time and place do not
> control the Spirit nor the inwardness of spiritual realities: geographical
> remoteness from a heavenly centre will not obscure the vision of its glory.
> “When the Spirit is breathed in the East, its signs immediately appear in the West
> and it hath a spiritual dominion which penetrates the pillars of the world.” (p.
> 289) If the friends be firm in the cause of God and in His service, spiritual letters
> come down to them from the Kingdom of ‘Abhá. Their descent is according to
> an eternal law; their movement is like that of wave following wave and they bear
> tidings of the unity of God. The love of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for His faithful friends is
> itself another and a special messenger between them. If a human heart be truly
> sensitive to the call of God, then there is stretched between its centre and the
> centre of the Kingdom a connection through which the spirit sends its messages.
> Every faithful loving heart is endued with this means of communion. (pp. 287,
> 628)
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is spiritually present with the faithful at their meetings and is
> their protector, “who spreads His wings (over) above them.” (p. 9o)
> In phrase after phrase, passage after passage challenging, vigorous, profound,
> He tells of the transcendent unimagined imperishable splendour of the ‘Abhá
> Kingdom they are entering. (p. 289)
> “O maidservant of God! Every star hath a setting, but the star of knowledge
> of God in the divine heaven; every light shall darken save the light of the
> guidance of God; every dignity shall vanish away save the glory under the
> shadow of the Word of God.” (p. 129) He calls on the beloved (pp. 411–2) to
> seize the opportunity God’s mercy offers them—“Truly I say unto you, this is a
> gift which neither the dominion of the world, nor the riches of treasuries,
> 80                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> nor the glory of the distinguished men of the world, can equal in this glorious
> century and new age; inasmuch as crowns are transient, while this is eternal and
> never ending.”
> “In the world of existence nothing hath any result, even if it be dominion over
> the East and West. But that which hath an immortal result is servitude in the
> Holy Threshold, service rendered to the Kingdom of God and guiding all in the
> earth.” (p. 424) “O beloved of God! Know ye that the world is like unto a
> mirage which the thirsty one thinks to be water; its water is a vapor; its mercy a
> difficulty; its repose hardship and ordeal; leave it to its people and turn unto the
> Kingdom of your Lord the Merciful.” (p. 407)
> He pours His blessing upon them. “Blessed ye are, O ye stars who are
> beaming with the light of the love of God! Blessed ye are, O ye lamps lighted
> with the fire of the love of God! Blessed ye are, O ye who are attracted to the
> Kingdom of God! Glad-tidings be unto you, O you who are severed from aught
> else save God! … Glad-tidings be unto you through the gift of the Covenant …!
> Be rejoiced …; be gladdened …; dilate your breasts …, and console your eyes by
> witnessing the bounties of the Supreme Concourse.” (p. 30)
> “The cup of knowledge is overflowing; blessed are they who partake in
> draughts! … The gates of Heaven are open; blessed are they who see! The hosts
> of angels are standing in battle order; what a joy to those who gain the victory!
> The trumpet of life is sounding; how good it is to those who are awake!” (p. 620)
> He calls on them again and again to realise the supreme privilege which is
> vouchsafed them by the mercy of God, and to pour forth every kind of praise to
> Him for ever from grateful, happy, radiant hearts. (pp. 182, 259, 413, 594, etc.)
> There is a note of warning, too: “The time is short, and the Divine Courser
> moves swiftly on ….” (p. 406) To those who complain the path to the Kingdom is
> hard, obstacles many, difficulties severe; who are perplexed, burdened,
> discouraged, He says such trials are to be expected. Earthly aims are not won
> without effort and perseverance, and obstacles to these great spiritual attainments
> naturally are greater still.
> Through steadfastness in overcoming these trials, the soul of the believer is
> brought nearer to God and at last reaches the condition of knowledge and
> assurance. As Nature, having borne with
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá                         81
> patience the lightning and thunderbolts and storms of winters, is afterwards
> rewarded with the season of blossoms, flowers and fruits; so in the Kingdom of
> heaven the storms of trials give a constant heart the means of earning the good
> pleasure of God and the prizes of the Kingdom.
> How extreme in times long past were the troubles of the lovers of Christ. Yet
> their courage was proof, and their reward was eternal life and everlasting Glory.
> If tests are severe, it is that they may expose the weakness of those who are
> unworthy, and enable every true hearted soul to “shine forth from the horizon of
> the Most Great Guidance ….” (p. 470) To any such soul tests, however violent,
> are a gift from God, the Exalted, and He hastens towards them with joy and
> gladness, for they will cleanse him of those imperfections that keep him removed
> from his Beloved. (p. 722)
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá bids the faithful not to be grieved at the divine trials: but to
> turn to God, to bow before His will in lowliness, to pray to Him, to be content
> under all conditions, to be thankful to Him in the midst of affliction.
> They are to know that in this age the greatest of all titles, the highest of all
> praise is given for resolution and firmness because the tests and trials are of the
> greatest intensity.
> The mastery of life and its trials belongs only to believers and comes only
> from turning to God. When asked about problems of human relationships or the
> life of the home He affirms that one must at all times be free from merely
> personal desires and warmed with devotion to God. One must love all people
> and one’s own family with a ray of the infinite Godward love—personal love is
> not enough.
> To one whose home was a place of strain He wrote: “It behooveth thee to
> sever thyself from all desires save thy Lord, the Supreme, expecting no help or
> aid from anyone in the universe, not even from thy father or children. Resign
> thyself to God! … Be patient …, endure every difficulty and hardship with a
> dilated heart, attracted spirit and eloquent tongue in remembrance of the
> Merciful.” (pp. 97–8) To another He wrote explaining: “When thou beholdest
> with the eye of Truth then thou wilt realize that in this
> 82                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> world neither known or unknown, neither kind father or beloved son, mother or
> sister, help us. No persons assist except the Benevolent Almighty.
> “When thou knowest Him, thou art independent from all else. When thou art
> attached to His love, then thou art detached from every kith and kin.” (p. 671)
> Only when the heart has broken the lure of a limited love can it be attuned to the
> perfect love, the perfect joy that will satisfy it for ever.
> “Know that in every home when God is praised and prayed to, and His
> Kingdom proclaimed, that home is a garden of God and a paradise of His
> happiness.” (p. 69)
> He writes of the importance of marriage and of its responsibilities (e.g., pp.
> 609, 627) and shows (p. 605) that true marriage is accessible only to the
> spiritually minded, and that the real bond between husband and wife is none other
> than the Word of God.
> He suggests that the naming of a child should be made a religious and social
> occasion: that friends should be invited to the home and that before the name is
> given suitable prayers should be said; after which the company should enjoy
> some light repast together. He calls for obedience and kindness from children to
> their parents (p. 551); and on the other hand, in the strongest manner, stresses the
> obligation laid by God in this Dispensation on parents to bring up their children
> in the knowledge and fear of God. “Should they neglect this matter, they shall,
> be held responsible and worthy of reproach in the presence of the stern Lord.
> This is a sin unpardonable ….” (p. 579)
> For those who seek comfort in the anguish of a fresh bereavement He lifts a
> little the veil that hides from them that eternal world in which love knows no
> separation. He bids them remember this parting is limited to the body, its length
> will be counted in days and over the Spirit death has no dominion at all. Reunion
> and everlasting consolation are near. “… know that thy pure son shall be with
> thee in the Kingdom of God and thou shalt witness his smiling face, illumined
> brow, handsome spirit and real happiness. Accordingly, thou wilt then be
> comforted and thank God for His favor upon thee.” (p. 86)
> To the faithful or as he names them “the people of adoration,” He writes
> “death is an ark of deliverance ….” (p. 444) Could these
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá                     83
> mourners but see in heaven now the faithful souls they lament, wonder and joy
> would check their tears. He comforts a mourning mother (p. 405) “O Bird of the
> Rose-Garden of Fidelity! Be of no cheerless heart; have no wing nor feather
> broken; sigh not, neither do thou wail nor sit chilled in a corner. The little girl
> lamented is in the divine Rose-Garden in the highest happiness, delight,
> cheerfulness and gratification. Why then art thou grieved, sorrowing with a
> bleeding heart? This is the day of rejoicing and the hour of ecstasy! This is the
> season of the dead arising from the graves and gathering together! And this is
> the promised time for the attainment of plenteous grace.
> “Be calm, be strong, be grateful, and become a lamp full of light, that the
> darkness of sorrows be annihilated, and that the sun of everlasting joy arise from
> the dawning-place of heart and soul, shining brightly.
> “Upon thee be the Glory of the Most-Glorious!” (p. 405)
> To a physician seeking counsel, He writes: “Whenever thou presentest thyself
> at the bed of a patient turn thy face towards the Lord of the Kingdom and
> supplicate assistance from the Holy Spirit and heal the ailments of the sick one.”
> (p. 688)
> Answering an enquiry about the nature of the sympathetic nervous system He
> explains that the powers of the sympathetic nerve are not exclusively spiritual nor
> exclusively physical, but are between the two and connected with both. The
> operation of the nerve is normal when its relations with the spiritual and the
> physical systems are perfect. “When the material and the divine world are
> rightly co-related, when the hearts become heavenly and the aspirations grow
> pure and divine, perfect connection shall take place. Then shall this power
> produce a perfect manifestation. Physical and spiritual diseases will then receive
> absolute healing.
> “The exposition is brief. Ponder and thou shalt understand the meaning.” (p.
> 309)
> All life in reality opens on heaven, and all experience lies in the path of God.
> To those who consult Him about the study and practice of letters, music, painting,
> science and the like, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that these pursuits are one and all to
> *
> be inspired by the sense of worship. “Art is worship,” as He once said. He
> affirms that a spiritual motive in the artist will quicken his progress and heighten
> his proficiency. A believer will find his art a natural
> 
> *
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 93.
> 84                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> medium of communicating the Divine Message; if his work has itself a spiritual
> quality it will awaken the spiritual susceptibilities of the beholder while his social
> intercourse with fellow-artists will tend to guide their thoughts to appreciation of
> the Divine Beauty. (pp. 449–50)
> At the present time all divine power poured from heaven on humanity has its
> focus in Bahá’u’lláh, and reaches mankind through His mediation alone. As in
> our solar system the source of all physical light is the sun, and every light directly
> or indirectly is derived from it, so in the spiritual realm every Age has its Messiah
> and truth is attained by men only through Him. (p. 595) “Whatever question thou
> hast in thy heart,” writes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “turn thou thy heart toward the kingdom
> of Abhá and entreat at the Threshold of the Almighty and reflect upon that
> problem, then unquestionably the light of truth shall dawn and the reality of that
> problem will become evident and clear to thee. For the teachings of His
> Highness Bahá’u’lláh are the keys to all the doors.” (p. 692)
> In the past, He points out, there were great philosophers who upheld the ideal
> of the oneness of humanity; but at that time the support and inspiration of heaven
> were not forthcoming so that their endeavours bore no fruit. To-day there are
> many souls in the world who spread thoughts of peace and reconciliation and
> long to establish the unity of the human race. But they likewise are without the
> dynamic power to carry their ideal into effect. This power belongs only to the
> instructions and exhortations of Bahá’u’lláh whose summons to world-unity is
> supported by the word of God and by all the resources of the Kingdom of the
> Most High. “Therefore, O thou lover of the oneness of the world of humanity!
> spread thou as much as thou canst the instructions and teachings of His Highness
> Bahá’u’lláh ….” (p. 691)
> There is indeed need of a thousand teachers, He writes, each one severed from
> the world, attracted by the Holy Spirit, radiant with the joy of the Kingdom,
> seeking no reward or recompense. “… strive with life and heart and guide the
> people to the Kingdom of God, lead them to the straight pathway, inform them of
> the greatness and magnitude of this Cause and give them the glad-tidings ….” (p.
> 360)
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá                          85
> The world of humanity to-day is like a sick and feeble man; the teachers are
> wise physicians. The remedies which they are to apply are two. The first to be
> given is that of guidance, that the people “may turn unto God, hearken unto the
> divine commandments and go forth with hearing ear and seeing eye.” (p. 36)
> When this remedy has had its effect, then the people are “to be trained in the
> conduct, morals and deeds of the Supreme Concourse, encouraged and inspired
> with the gifts of the Kingdom of Abhá.” (pp. 36–7) Their hearts are to be cleansed
> of all ill-will and to be strengthened in all the attributes of love and union so that
> East and West may be joined in one, and universal peace be established. In the
> pursuit of their task, teachers are not to spare themselves nor to seek rest. They
> are to make the utmost endeavour to bring the Glad Tidings to the ears of
> mankind and are to accept every calamity and affliction in their love for God and
> their reliance on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. (p. 38) They are to drink from the eternal chalice
> of the love of God, to enjoy its ecstasy and in the radiance of the beauty of ‘Abhá
> be all aglow with zeal, delight and eager energy. They all are to work together in
> perfect unanimity and singleness of purpose. “… ye must in perfect purity attain
> spiritual unity and agreement to a degree that ye may express one spirit and one
> life.” (p. 23)
> It was to this end, to unite the hearts of the beloved of God, that Bahá’u’lláh
> endured all difficulties and all ordeals (p. 247); and the aim of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s
> devotion and service is the same; “that union and affection may be created
> among the beloved of God, nay, in the whole of the human world.” (p. 421)
> Nothing can exceed the emphasis and earnestness with which in these Tablets
> he appeals for concord and unity among believers. This is the vital instrument
> through which is to be achieved the master-objective of the Bahá’í Movement,
> namely the transforming of the earth into a paradise, the wide world into one
> home, the nations of East and West into one household. “Not until this (union) is
> realized will the affairs advance by any means whatever!” (p. 125) Therefore,
> even in those early days of the Faith when believers were very few in the West,
> He begins the work of organisation, urges co-operation and gatherings among the
> friends, the forming of committees for promoting the Cause and of what were at
> that
> 86                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> time called Boards of Consultation. “… the greatest means for the union and
> harmony of all is Spiritual Meetings. This matter is very important ….” (p. 125)
> Such meetings will be magnets drawing down divine strength.
> “Blessed are ye,” He writes to one group, “for organizing the assembly of
> unity!” (p. 272) As these meetings begin to materialise, He insists that the
> highest degree of union and harmony must exist between them. The spiritual
> meeting of consultation in New York must be in the fullest accord with that in
> Chicago, and when a similar meeting “may be also organized in Washington…,
> these two meetings (of Chicago and New York) must be also in unity and
> harmony with that meeting.” (p. 124)
> He watches over the constitution of these bodies, instructs that each shall have
> its clearly marked purpose and fit into the general scheme as an integral part of
> the whole, and that no spirit of exclusiveness shall be aroused such as has
> happened in earlier Dispensations when arrangements which “were, in the
> beginning, a means for harmony, they became in the end a cause of trouble.” (p.
> 394)
> He institutes, too, the great observance of the Faith, the yearly fast from
> March 2nd–20th; “the nineteen-day fast is a duty to be observed by all” (p. 57)—
> and the “Feast of Remembrance or Meeting of Faithfulness” as it was then called.
> (fn, p. 421)
> “This Feast,” He writes, “was established by His Highness the Báb, to occur
> once in nineteen days. Likewise the Blessed Perfection hath commanded,
> encouraged and reiterated it. Therefore, it hath the utmost importance.
> Undoubtedly you must give the greatest attention to its establishment and raise it
> to the highest point of importance, so that it may become continual and
> constant.” (p. 468)
> He then gives directions as to the keeping of the Feast; and concludes—“If the
> Feast is arranged in this manner and in the way mentioned, that supper is the
> ‘Lord’s supper’, for the result is the same result and the effect is the same effect.”
> (p. 469)
> These Tablets, published in America and written chiefly to American
> believers, form a sister—and complementary—volume to that which contains
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s American addresses and bears the title The Promulgation of
> Universal Peace. Taken
> The letters of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá                        87
> together they form, as it were, a complete circle of Divine and practical
> instruction for the times.
> The Addresses constitute the profoundest and most comprehensive textbook
> on modern problems. They reveal what true modernism is, dealing with the
> larger aspects of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh, with questions of the relations and the
> history of religions and of peoples, with science and philosophy, with the
> principles of world order and with definite plans for its establishment. The
> Tablets, on the other hand, are directed for the most part to individuals, often to
> individuals who look to Him with ardent belief and adoring love. They reveal
> clearly and emphatically the essential nature of His own special station as the
> bondservant of Bahá’u’lláh and the Centre of the Covenant. They are heart to
> heart talks on the personal hopes and aspirations of His correspondents, their
> personal trials and difficulties, their personal duties and obligations to God and
> His Faith. The writer’s attitude is that of a host greeting an honoured and loved
> guest, a father welcoming a dear son home from a long and perilous journey: it is
> that of a divine messenger who brings to those struggling in the uncertain turmoil
> of earthly life a foretaste of the sweetness and fragrance and harmony and peace
> of Paradise and of the eternal glory and power that will be the reward of victory.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stated that these Tablets have an importance which will not be
> appreciated for many long years to come. But perhaps their message of the
> impassioned all-embracing love of God will never be more sadly needed than it is
> now, nor more precious than it is to us as we battle on through the heart of the
> storm and the darkness and the ruin of the Night of Judgment and Retribution.
> The wellspring of happiness
> Part I
> HAPPINESS IS OUR birthright: it is ours to take, to hold, to possess in
> perpetuity. If it seem hidden from us it is not hidden by distance but by nearness.
> We do not have to go questing for it through the wide earth nor through the
> immensity of the heavens. It is in our midst. It is closer to us than breathing. It
> is buried in our own heart’s-deep, deep in the heart’s inmost recesses; and there it
> dwells waiting to be recognised, to be discovered.
> Everyone can be happy and ought to be. God expects it and enjoins it. Every
> Revelation comes as Glad Tidings, bidding man be glad and giving him cause to
> be. Every Prophet has found men wandering in sadness and misery and has
> rebuked them for it. He has called them away from the things that produce
> unhappiness, from anxiety and worry and cupidity, from fear of the future, from
> anticipation of evil, from lack of hope and faith. He has opened to them a way of
> escape, promised them deliverance from evil, and the attainment, by God’s grace,
> of a happiness that will satisfy and endure. Now in our time the Prophet of the
> New Age into which we are entering, Bahá’u’lláh, gives once again the ancient
> glad tidings—tidings of a happiness poured forth from heaven on all men
> everywhere in even greater abundance, yes, in far, far greater abundance than
> ever in the history of the past—a happiness the bright and eager intensity of
> which can only be measured, if at all, by the bitterness of our need and by the
> extremity of our humiliation and our suffering. Exultation and victory ring in
> every sentence of His proclamation of the All-Glorious Advent of God. The
> ancient promise, He cries, is fulfilled.
> God’s mercy and generosity have overcome at last the apathy and dullness of
> His creatures. His Name has conquered the earth. He has exposed to man’s
> knowledge the futility and the stupidity
> 
> The wellspring of happiness                     89
> of strife. The long power of delusion is broken. The reign of violence and
> misery is doomed. The time has come for man to attain a new understanding,
> new ideals, a new life which will deliver him permanently from the glooms and
> superstitions of ignorance and will make possible that serene divine happiness
> which he was created to enjoy. The earth (throughout its entire length and
> breadth) ought now to be filled with songs of praise and thanksgiving; and the
> only reason it is not so is that the opacity of man’s pride has shut out from his
> knowledge the light of the joy of heaven that is beating upon him.
> ‘Abdul-Bahá taught that one of the nine marks by which the True Messenger
> of God was to be identified was His being “a joy-bringer and the herald of the
> kingdom of happiness ….” Bahá’u’lláh in the midst of dire afflictions showed
> forth a spirit of serenity and acceptance radiating in others that deep steadfast joy
> that filled His own heart. He taught men to think of God as a God of Bliss—as
> one “by whose name the sea of joy moveth and the fragrance of happiness is
> wafted!” He bade men if they wished for happiness to pray for it to God.
> “I ask Thee to show me, from the wonders of Thy Favor, that which shall
> brighten my eyes and gladden my heart.” “From the fragrant breezes of Thy joy
> §
> let a breath pass over me ….”
> He bade men receive His message as a summons to happiness. “O son of
> Spirit! With the joyful tidings of light I hail thee: rejoice! … The spirit of
> holiness beareth unto thee joyful tidings of reunion; wherefore dost thou grieve?
> … O son of man! Rejoice in the gladness of thine heart, that thou mayest be
> worthy to meet Me and to mirror forth My beauty.”
> ‘Abdul-Bahá brought to the world the message of the New Revelation as Glad
> Tidings. “If,” He would say, “we are not happy and joyous at this season, for
> ”5
> what other season shall we wait and for what other time shall we look? A man
> ought to be happy because if he were not he could not be in the frame of mind to
> receive the bounties poured forth from on high.
> When He gave a direction to the English Bahá’ís for the keeping of the day of
> the Báb, “the day of the dawning of the Morning of Guidance”, His words were:
> “Be happy! Be happy! Be full of
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Star of the West, VI:15, 12 December 1915, p. 117.
> Bahá’u’lláh in Bahá’í Scriptures, no, 270, p. 186.
> ibid.
> §
> Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, p. 258.
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Nos 33, 34 & 36.
> Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, vol. 3, p. 641.
> 90                                The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> joy!” On another occasion, He said, “The people must be so attracted to you
> that they will exclaim, ‘What happiness exists among you!’ and will see in your
> faces the lights of the Kingdom; then in wonderment they will turn to you and
> seek the cause of your happiness.”
> When asked to describe how true believers ought to live, His first direction
> was that they should cause no one any unhappiness; and He closed His adjuration
> with a kindred thought—“Be a cause of healing for every sick one, a comforter
> for every sorrowful one, a pleasant water for every thirsty one, a star to every
> horizon, a light for every lamp, a herald to every one who yearns for the
> Kingdom of God.”
> In the days of persecution in Persia, so great a spirit of happiness pervaded the
> Bahá’ís that it was said one could not take tea with them without wishing to join
> their society; and so strong was their personal influence that their enemies
> believed them to be possessed of some unholy magic by which they won the
> hearts of men to believe in the new doctrine. We have for so long sought
> happiness by secular or even pagan ways that although these are leading us to a
> dead end, we find it hard to admit that we have been travelling altogether in the
> wrong direction. Religion (for all the honours we instinctively pay it) has in the
> hands of traditionalists and formalists proved itself so impotent, a cause of so
> much division and discord, that when once again for the first time in hundreds
> and hundreds of years a Divine Prophet stands in our midst and in the name of
> God offers deliverance and peace of heart and blessedness we can hardly believe
> our eyes or our ears.
> We refuse to recognise that a clue to the most precious of all lost secrets has
> been put into our hands and that the mystery of a perfect love has been opened to
> us. The very lavishness and immensity of the gift bewilders us, almost stupefies
> us; as though a beggar had asked a crust and was given a kingdom. The
> timeliness of the gift still further enhances its value and magnifies our
> astonishment.
> Religion has become more and more discredited. Its results have not seemed
> at all worth its disciplines. Its views on life have grown antiquated and do not fit
> nor illumine modern conditions
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 127.
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 218.
> The wellspring of happiness                           91
> of society. Those who appeared as the protagonists of religion have not stood out
> as models of happiness or broad sympathies: they have not been able to give
> men any clear guidance in the moral mazes of modem existence nor to impart
> comfort or strength in the frustrations that beset our efforts at stablising the social
> order.
> Men have found many excuses for letting their faith grow cold and their
> religious sense become atrophied by disuse. Ordinary everyday human life has
> become so varied, so rich, so full of change and of movement and of novelty that
> it seems to be quite full and satisfying in itself and to stand in no need of religion.
> Men find full employment and room for intense and engrossing activities in
> purely secular and mundane interests. Never have they acquired so much to
> gratify their pride; never have they been so equipped to refine and elaborate their
> pleasures. They sought happiness altogether in the material things that lay to
> their hand.
> And to a large extent—they found it!
> God is kind and generous. He has made it easier for man to be happy than to
> be unhappy. He has scattered some kind or other of pleasantness for us
> everywhere. No one can miss it all! Songs of celestial delight, fragrances from
> the Gardens of Paradise, rays of some beatific Beauty are borne to earth on all the
> winds of heaven and cause some echo, however brief, some reflection, dim or
> faint; or find some home in the hearts of men wherein to rest. We sharpened our
> intellects, cast away our superstitions and obscurations of the past, unearthed the
> secrets of nature, appropriated her powers and extended our control over the
> world about us in a manner in which our ancestors, even a century ago, would
> never have imagined to be possible. Never had so complex and so forceful a
> civilisation been reared upon the face of the earth. And if we were compelled to
> feel there was something incomplete and insecure about it all; if we realised the
> tiger and the ape in us had not been outgrown, and if we saw that in spite of
> ourselves we were sinking back to the primitive ways of the jungle; nevertheless,
> no earlier generation of men had found so much in the world to amuse and divert
> and flatter and gratify them, or to
> 92                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> prove so clearly their supremacy over all the lower forms of creation. If all
> civilised beings were not supermen they were assuredly superanimals and had at
> command a thousand kinds of intellectual entertainment which were peculiarly
> human and their own. Men explored the resources of humanism and bathed their
> souls and their sense in its delights. Intellectuals discounted that part of our
> tradition which is derived from Israel and emphasised more and more that which
> has come down to us from Greece. They turned, not their hearts only, but their
> minds, too, from their religious inheritance to an inheritance that was definitely
> not religious but artistic and literary. The Greeks carved statues of their gods
> which remain to this day models of taste and skill and are the envy and
> admiration of the world: but these gods were assuredly not made to be
> worshipped. The Greeks reared the Parthenon and countless temples, which are
> in their kind masterpieces as perfect as their works of sculpture. But these
> temples do not suggest the unseen world; they do not carry with them an air of
> mystery, of awe, of exultation. Contrast them with a Christian cathedral—with
> that sense of distance, with that sublimity and aspiration which the soaring lines
> of Gothic awake in the spectator’s soul—and the limitation of the Greek architect
> at once is betrayed. A Greek temple with its flat lines is of the earth, earthy: “A
> table on four legs: a dull thing!”, as William Morris is said to have exclaimed of
> the Parthenon: and he was no belittler of the beauty of the past.
> No one would disparage the glory that was Greece nor yet the splendour that
> was Rome. All the encomiums passed upon them recently by scholars are no
> doubt as just as they are enthusiastic. But the most significant thing about the
> revival of Greek influence is that its champions attribute that revival to the fact
> that the Greek world was non-religious and purely humanistic and that its affinity
> which connects our age with theirs lies in the common limitations of both. In
> neither does the spiritual seek to find expression. Revelation was unknown to the
> Greeks and is unacceptable to the modern: hence they say in our outlook on life
> we are akin.
> One of the greatest authorities on Greek humanism, Professor
> The wellspring of happiness                         93
> R. W. Livingstone, a brilliant and charming writer, puts the point quite clearly in
> his book Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us (p. 247). “Let us sum up,” he says,
> “the reasons of our approximation to Greece. First is Greek humanism … The
> Greek set himself to answer the question how with no revelation from God to
> guide him … man should live. It has been a tendency in our own age either to
> deny that heaven has revealed to us in any way how we ought to behave or to
> find such a revelation in human nature itself. In either case we are thrown back
> on ourselves and obliged to seek our guide there. That is why the influence of
> Greece has grown so much. The Greeks are the only people who have conceived
> the problem similarly; their answer the only one that has yet been made.”
> That is very clear. But who will affirm that the masterpieces inspired by the
> Christian religion are less splendid than those of Greek humanism? Who will
> deny that Christian literature and art, in all its branches, the work of men as
> various as Michael Angelo and Milton, and Dante and da Vinci, has a beauty and
> a power and a richness and a majesty even superior to that of Greeks—and to
> what is this due but manifestly and confessedly to a spiritual revelation?
> Whatever masterpieces of humanistic art and craftsmanship the Greeks may
> have left us, did they bequeath to posterity any secret of happiness—of a
> happiness that really satisfies, leaving no hunger, a happiness that endures
> producing no satiety and not ending at the last in something that is not happiness?
> And those academicians who drank deeply of the fountain of Greek wisdom,
> have they been able to save us from this self-stultification of intellectualism?
> Is there to be found in Greek literature or art anything comparable to that
> high, noble, courageous, invincible joy that vibrates in a book which formally is
> by no means a Greeklike masterpiece of artistic skill or genius—the New
> Testament?
> It was the Greeks who handed down to us the story of the Skeleton at the
> Feast and told how before the banquet closed a servant would bring a skeleton
> and bid the guests “eat, drink and be merry for to-morrow you die.” It was the
> Greeks who said no
> 94                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> man should be called happy till his death, and they certainly did not promise him
> much happiness beyond it. Not to live long, they thought, was best; those whom
> the gods loved died young. The most wonderful and famous of their literary
> works gave no message of glory and hope and triumph, but were tragedies,
> written frequently around themes of a sombre, terrifying and even gruesome cast.
> Scholars have remarked that an undertone of sadness seemed to run through
> the great literature of Greece. The reason is that it is humanistic—and nothing
> more. For when humanism thinks deeply, it thinks sadly. Our English
> Renaissance was not so secular as was the culture of ancient Greece: far from it.
> England was a Christian country with a Christian tradition and the Authorised
> Version was produced at the same time as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.
> But the accent of its Renaissance was on the human not the spiritual side, and
> Shakespeare in this was a true exponent of it. Broad as his sympathies were, if
> there be any character he could not have understood nor have put sympathetically
> into a drama, it is such a one as Shelley. You will find many notes in
> Shakespeare’s singing; but not the note of the poetry of Blake. Shakespeare’s
> world was far from being as Revelationless as that of ancient Greece; but the
> mystical aspect of things is not brought into his picture.
> He, too, when he thought deeply, thought sadly. His greatest works are not
> his comedies, brilliant as these are. Even in these there is a shadow: not only in
> The Merchant of Venice but even in the gayest of all, Twelfth Night and As You
> Like It, and still more in The Tempest. (Poor Prospero: at the end he must bury
> his art—not carry it on to happier fulfilment!) But his greatest works were his
> tragedies and his fame rests on them.
> How mighty and vigorous, how confident, adventurous, and triumphant was
> the England of those days, the England of Queen Elizabeth! Yet that eager and
> self-sufficient age did not through its most eloquent spokesmen speak the fullest
> happiness. Could any illustration show more conclusively the inadequacy of
> humanism to meet the needs of humanity?
> However gay, delightful, praiseworthy, the happiness that
> The wellspring of happiness                         95
> humanism fathers, it must in the nature of things be qualified. It cannot be
> complete. Humanism can only bid us make the best of things—to look on the
> bright side and take the rough with the smooth. But sorrow and suffering cannot
> be ignored or evaded. They will insistently intrude themselves. It is not the stoic
> who has overcome the world and is able to bequeath his joy to others when he is
> gone. No, sorrow and suffering must be faced and included within the scheme of
> happiness: there is no device by which they can be left on the outside of life and
> induced to remain there! And if this alternation of shadow and light, this
> chequered and inconstant happiness be the best that life can give; if our wellbeing be the sport of circumstance and the plaything of fate, then, indeed, one can
> hardly escape from pessimism. The birds of the air who neither have to sow nor
> reap are happier than we!
> It is religion which teaches us that pessimism is utterly wrong; that pessimism
> is the product of a circumscribed and limited experience. It is religion which for
> the first time opens up to man’s vision the height and depth, the range and the
> reality of God’s munificence to His creatures.
> God has created man other sources of pleasure and happiness which lie
> beyond those of reason and the senses; He has created solaces, delights, raptures
> which arise out of the activity of higher powers, higher faculties, and belong to
> man’s moral nature, to the inmost and most real sphere of his being. The sphere
> of conscience, of the sense of right and wrong, of spiritual perception, has been
> affirmed by God and is felt instinctively by man to be of greater value and
> dignity, to be farther from earth and nearer to heaven, than the realm of
> sensibility or ratiocination; and the content, the tranquility, the happiness, the
> ecstasy that attach to it (like, too, its pains) are more deeply set and more vital
> than those which derive from the lower ranges of man’s consciousness. The
> common everyday experience of every mortal being bears witness to this truth;
> and the long, glorious story of those who in every age have laboured to advance
> civilisation, to promote moral progress, to establish the practice of true religion,
> is rich in proofs of it.
> 96                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Part II
> Of a surety God is Joy! This is the creed, the experience, the message of
> religion. Not only high poets through their intuition, but the seers, the saints, the
> prophets, one and all, have recognised this all-explanatory, this all-animating
> truth. The hopes and dreams of suffering, longing mankind have been as a mirror
> reflecting a great reality. There is—there is a Being whose name is Bliss—
> changeless, throned above vicissitude and all shadow, without beginning or
> ending, the Eternal One, the Master of all Life, radiant, beautiful, beloved!
> Had they not known this Being, the Founders of the Religions could never
> have thought or spoken or endeavoured as they did: they would have had no
> message of comfort to give to sorrowing mankind and they could not have
> promised that all tears would be wiped away and only happiness would remain.
> Christ Himself possessed inalienably this joy; and the immortal prospect which
> He held before those who died in the faith was that of sharing in eternity the joy
> of God. One of His express gifts to His disciples on earth was joy. “These things
> I have spoken unto you that my joy may be within you and your joy complete.”
> He said that the joy of the true believer was so great that for joy he would sell all
> he had to gain the object of his love! And He assured His disciples that nothing
> would ever take this joy away from them. The disciples are described as being
> filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. Paul described the Kingdom of God as “joy
> in the Holy Ghost”, and bade those to whom he wrote to “Rejoice in the Lord”,
> and “evermore to give thanks”. The New Testament, not only in the Gospels, but
> from the Acts to the Apocalypse, is alive with the spirit of a pervading and
> inviolable joy.
> Not in the New Testament only but in the higher reaches of the Old
> Testament the same song of happiness is heard: “Rejoice in the Lord, O ye
> righteous: for praise is comely for the righteous.” “I will greatly rejoice in the
> Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God.”
> The wellspring of happiness                         97
> Had not the early Christians been animated with an invincible confidence and
> an amazing power of attraction, they could never have overcome indifference and
> persecution and won the hearts of the world to submission to Christ.
> One striking proof of this spirit meets one in the early works of Christian art.
> This art was largely a sepulchral art, found in the catacombs or associated with
> death and often with martyrdom; and it was produced in time of tribulation and
> struggle. Yet images of sorrow and suffering are systematically excluded from it,
> nor is there in it any expression of bitterness or complaint. Pictures such as that
> of Daniel unharmed among the lions or the three children unscathed amid the
> flames, are the sole indication of the dreadful persecutions raging at the time.
> There are few representations of martyrdom, and none (as it seems) till a late
> date. Instead, one finds emblems of beauty and happiness—pictures of the
> miracles of mercy, sweet emblems of immortality, and even joyous images
> borrowed from the mythology of the pagans.
> Centuries passed away before this brave and tender note ceased to be
> dominant in Christian art and another and very different mood took its place.
> In distant India, long before the time of Christ, the Gita had borne witness to
> their Eternal Joy and had opened to men the way to realise it.
> “For persons free from desire or hatred, for the persons who have controlled
> their mind and who have realised the Self everywhere is found the bliss of
> Brahman.”
> And again, “To persons who have known the Self, the bliss of Brahman lies
> everywhere.”
> Buddha uttered statements similar to those of Christ on His possession and
> His gift of happiness. He said of Himself that He “lived in the pure land of
> eternal bliss even while he was still in the body and he preached the laws of
> religion to you and the whole world that you and your brethren may attain the
> same peace and the same happiness.”
> He set forth five meditations through the use of which the devotee might
> reach the land of bliss, the first of love, the second
> 98                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> of pity, “the third of joy in which you think of the prosperity of others and rejoice
> with their rejoicings.”
> Buddha taught insistently that misery and fear were caused by error, and that
> knowledge of truth conferred a complete and undying joy even here on earth.
> “There is misery in the world of birth and death: there is much misery and
> pain. But greater than all the misery is the bliss of truth …. Blessed is he who
> has become an embodiment of truth and loving kindness. He conquers though he
> may be wounded; he is glorious and happy, although he may suffer ….”
> “This is the sign that a man follows the right path: Uprightness is his delight
> and he sees danger in the least of the things which he should avoid. He trains
> himself in the commands of morality, he encompasseth himself with holiness in
> word and deed … mindful and self-possessed, he is altogether happy.” And
> again: “A brother who with firm determination walks in the noble path is sure to
> come forth in the light, sure to reach up to the higher wisdom, sure to attain to
> the highest bliss of enlightenment.”
> But all the Founders of Religion have taught that the way to truth and the joy
> of truth is narrow and difficult. The Divine Being who is the Soul of Bliss is hard
> to find, hard to attain to. Objects of earthly ambition are not gained without
> perseverance and labour: how much more effort will then be needed to achieve
> this blissful union which is the most precious and the final goal of all human
> endeavour! This divine joy is closely hidden, jealously concealed from the
> casual observation of man—but it is not hidden by distance. On the contrary, it
> lies close at hand and if it cannot be seen, this is because it is so very near. Not
> only is it, as the poet said of God, “nearer to us than breathing, closer than hands
> and feet” (that would be wonderful enough); but it is nearer to us than we are to
> ourselves. There is in human nature always a possibility that a man’s superstition
> or self-illusion will hang a veil between himself and his heart so that he will be in
> blank ignorance of that which lies at the centre of his own being.
> “Thus have their superstitions become veils between them and their own
> *
> hearts and kept them from the path of God, the Exalted, the Great.”
> 
> *
> Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Aḥmad in Bahá’í Prayers, p. 210.
> The wellspring of happiness                       99
> The psychological make-up of a man may be likened to a figure consisting of
> three or four concentric circles, the outer representing his body and the senses,
> the next representing the mental realm, the next the moral realm, and the
> innermost circle standing for the realm of the spiritual which is the essential part
> of man, the heart of his heart, and soul of his soul. It is possible for a man to live
> and move and spend his whole existence in the outer fringes of his being, to shut
> away from his experience the finer activities of thought and feeling and to have
> his nobler and most vital faculties misused. He may occupy his time in this or
> that pursuit yet never effect an entry into the sphere of conscience, of faith, or of
> spirit.
> Such men, said Christ, are dead. Though they walk about and work and wield
> earthly influence, though they govern a province or preside at a Sanhedrin, they
> are only rational animals, men in an embryonic stage, unfit to be dignified by the
> title “man” in the fullness of its meaning. Such men cannot be happy. Their
> minds are operating in a sphere where a stable and satisfying happiness is not to
> be had. They are unconscious of that finer and inner realm of being in which
> happiness is to be sought and found. Not to such men but to His disciples did
> Jesus leave His peace and His joy.
> This communion with God through which a man finds Bliss is a communion
> of love, a meeting of like with like.
> “I have breathed within thee a breath of my own Spirit, that thou mayest be
> *
> My lover.”
> When the veils of illusion which hide a man’s own heart from himself are
> drawn aside, when after purgation he comes to himself and attains selfknowledge and sees himself as he truly is, then at the same moment and by the
> same act of knowledge he beholds there in his own heart His Father who has
> patiently awaited His son’s return.
> Only through this act of self-completion, through this conclusion of the
> journey which begins in the kingdom of the senses and leads inward through the
> kingdom of the moral to end in that of the spiritual, does real happiness become
> possible. Now
> 
> *
> The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic No. 19.
> 100                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> for the first time a man’s whole being can be integrated, and a harmony of all his
> faculties be established. Through his union with the Divine Spirit he has found
> the secret of the unifying of his own being. He who is the Breath of Joy becomes
> the animating principle of his existence. Man knows the Peace of God.
> This union with God is the only happiness which the Prophets one and all
> affirm as worthy of the name. It does not belong to the accidents of life and is in
> no degree the product of imagination or illusion. It is independent of all
> contingencies. It rests on direct perception, on immediate union between the
> creature and his Creator. It is shared with God in its essence and is therefore
> imperishable and secure. The world did not give it and the world cannot take it
> away. Afflictions may add to its strength and intensity, as winds will blow a
> glowing fire to a flame; but they cannot violate it. It does not deny the other and
> lesser pleasures which God in His generosity has bestowed upon His creatures. It
> does not subsist on their mortification. It is compatible with them all. It does not
> demand asceticism. The ministry of Jesus began with a marriage feast and His
> enemies accused Him of being a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber. The Great
> Ones of the Bahá’í Revelation lived, so far as conditions permitted, normal
> human lives. As sons and brothers, as husbands and fathers, and friends and men
> of business and affairs, they set examples which men may look to as they follow
> the ordinary course of social life. Bahá’u’lláh expressly discouraged ascetic
> habits: “Take what has been ordained for you,” He said. He permitted men by
> definite injunction to enjoy the comforts and comelinesses and even the luxuries
> of life so long as these did not wean their hearts from servitude to God and the
> informing spirit of sacrifice. The ordinary pleasures of life, material and
> intellectual, are to be taken as they come, neither being sought nor avoided but
> left to fall into their appropriate places.
> There is only one peace of mind, one joy, one happiness which in itself
> deserves to be an object of contemplation and desire. The Great Prophets are not
> content merely to bear witness to the reality of this, or to describe its nature.
> They do more; they bear it into the world as a gift; they bring it within men’s
> reach, urge
> 
> Bahá’u’lláh in Bahá’í World Faith, p. 435.
> The wellspring of happiness                 101
> and encourage them to seek for it till they find it. The imperative which they lay
> on men: “Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven ….”
> is not a mere counsel of perfection, not (God forbid) an unkind command to seek
> a goal which men cannot attain (—will God mock His creatures?). It is a promise
> of success. “Seek and ye shall find: knock and it shall be opened to you”; which
> is as if He said, “You have only to strive and you will attain.”
> “The heavens of thy mercy and the oceans of thy bounty are so vast that thou
> hast never disappointed those who begged of thee nor refused those who willed to
> *
> come to thee!”
> The poet does much when he testifies that God is Joy and when he, with
> inspired vision, paints scenes of elysian beatitude that await the aspiring soul of
> man. The High-Prophet does yet more. He opens not a vision, but the truth
> itself. He brings the truth down into the world among men. He imparts to those
> ready to receive it, the power to know the truth and become one with it.
> Tragically every Prophet in religious history has found only a very few
> persons ready to accept Him and faithfully to follow out His directions. Neither
> in His life-time, nor in the life-time of the religion which He founds, though this
> be centuries long, are there many disciples who will really put His
> commandments to the test, will persevere in whole-hearted and exact obedience
> and continue in spite of discouragements in the way He has marked out till they
> reach the goal. Spiritual lassitude, moral compromise, the substitution of the
> formal for the essential, have been the rule in the history of all religions. In
> consequence the general effect of the teaching of the Prophets has only been a
> fraction of what it might have been. The possibilities of religion, as affirmed by
> those to whom the religions owe their origin, have never been developed. The
> proportion of informed and determined followers to the total population was
> never considerable enough to produce large historic results. There never have
> been many who sought their happiness in the spiritual sphere and found that road
> to inward bliss which their Prophet had trodden and had left open wide for them
> to walk in. The efforts of men and nations, even too often of churches, have been
> bent in other directions and
> 
> *
> Bahá’u’lláh in Star of the West, VIII:4, 17 May 1917, p. 48.
> 102                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> their energies have been spent on less immaterial objects. In consequence,
> human history all the world over has been darkened with troubles and
> vicissitudes that need never have been, and has never been blessed with the hope,
> the vision, the sense of proportion, or with anything better than the least
> suggestion of the well being and happiness which the Prophet had brought within
> human reach.
> Not only the facts of history but the recorded forecasts of the Prophets in their
> lifetime bear witness to this. Moses and Jesus both foresaw the failures and the
> sufferings of their followers. No Scripture seems to show such premonitions of
> future disasters and calamities or contains so many and such grave warnings of
> faithlessness and of tribulation to come as the Gospel. But even in our own Age
> Bahá’u’lláh Himself warned men of dire retribution at hand:
> “O ye peoples of the world! Know verily, that an unforeseen calamity is
> following you, and that grievous retribution awaiteth you. Think not the deeds ye
> have committed have been blotted from My sight.” But if the great world never
> yet has grasped or perceived its blessings and if the Prophets have foreseen and
> foretold these ineptitudes and failures, the Prophets with one consent from the
> first to the last, from the mythic times of Adam to the present ere have assured
> mankind in no uncertain tones that this frustration and misery would not last
> forever. The day would come when the religious and social conviction of
> mankind would be changed, when the reality of spiritual happiness would be
> appreciated, if not by the whole human race, at least by great and prevailing
> multitudes and when it would become the possession not of a very, very few, but
> of very many.
> From the beginning, the date of this Event has been fixed by the providence
> of the Creator. From the beginning, the certainty of its future advent has been
> foretold to man in every Revelation. A symbolic reference to it is recorded in the
> first chapter of the Bible, when the seventh or final day of creation is shown as
> different from all the earlier days, as distinctively the Day of completeness and of
> divine rest, the Day of God. Only one Prophet—among all the Prophets has not
> foretold this future
> 
> Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 209–10.
> The wellspring of happiness                        103
> Day of Fulfilment and Happiness: Bahá’u’lláh. His pronouncement is more
> triumphant and happy, far more than that of any who preceded Him—for His
> Glad Tidings is that the Promised Day of Happiness has come! God has come in
> the plenitude of His power and the Lord of Bliss has established His kingdom on
> earth. At last God’s love for His creatures has prevailed over man’s resistance.
> God’s Name has conquered the earth. Man is to lift his eyes from mundane
> levels and to look up towards heavenly places. His consciousness is to expand.
> The fires of love are to be kindled in his heart and spiritual impulses are to stir
> and move his soul. He is to become aware of the spiritual realms that have lain
> unexplored in the recesses of his own heart and mind. He is to turn his eyes
> within, upon himself, and to find God Himself standing there powerful, mighty,
> supreme—the Lord of Joy.
> To-day is the end of man’s long journey. The prodigal after his wanderings
> and his humiliations has come to himself. He knows at last what he is; and
> whence he came. He has returned to the Father who has left His own Home and
> come to meet the beloved on the way. It is the Day of Reunion; the Day of God’s
> fulfilment, the Day of Joy. And that Blissful Being with whom man is now
> joined again, is found not to have absented Himself from man, not to have hidden
> Himself, in the heights nor in the depths, but to have been at hand, radiant and
> glorious in the recesses of man’s own spiritual being.
> The genius of Ireland
> ONCE, AND ONLY ONCE, and for One only has Ireland taken the part of a
> leader among the peoples of Europe. Save for this one historical achievement,
> she has stood outside the main currents of development in the West, and has
> mingled little in European affairs. During the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries,
> and later, she played an illustrious part in the propagation of Christianity in
> Europe, and won for herself the undying title of the Island of Saints and Scholars.
> From the distant Age until recent times, she has been overwhelmed by invaders
> whom her rich lands attracted, and has had to endure the suppression of much
> that was most precious in her peculiar individuality. Now, when another Age of
> moral darkness has fallen upon mankind, she is coming at last to her own and has
> begun to give expression to her most noble gifts: and now, by the kind
> providence of God, another opportunity is offered her of doing again for mankind
> the high service she did once in centuries long gone by.
> That service was intellectual and spiritual. It made Irish history during the
> sixth, seventh and eighth centuries a conspicuous part of religious European
> history. It won for her that title of the Island of Saints and Scholars, which
> remains to prove that Ireland was not always in that sad spiritual plight in which
> she seems to be to-day.
> The chief features of that age of light are well known. From many parts of
> Europe students thronged into Ireland to sit at the feet of Irish Professors and
> Divines, and Irish teachers travelled over sea and land to bring the gift of
> heavenly and of earthly knowledge to yet unilluminated regions of Britain and
> the Continent.
> The three patron saints of Ireland, St. Patrick, St. Bridget and Columcille,
> founded schools at Armagh, Kildare and in Iona. Hundreds followed their
> example. Shrines of devotion and of
> 
> The genius of Ireland                           105
> learning were established in every part of the island. St. Finnian, travelling in
> Britain and seeing the ignorance of the people, planned their conversion, and
> returning to Ireland founded at Clonard that famous school whose students during
> his lifetime numbered three thousand. Moville, Bangor, Lismore, Cork, Ross,
> Glendalough, Innisfallen, were seats of noted colleges. Districts now looked on
> in Ireland as remote were then educational centres whose circumference might
> reach as far as France or Italy. The lonely island of Aran Mor, in the days of its
> great teacher, St. Enda, was the resort of all the best minds in Ireland. The school
> at Clonfert was planted by St. Brendan the Voyager, whose reputed travels, under
> the title of Navigatio Brendani, were known throughout mediaeval Europe; it was
> the seat of St. Fursa (whose account of his Visions excited so wide an interest at
> one time that it has been held they offered suggestions even to the author of the
> Divine Comedy), and of the illustrious St. Cummian, some of whose writings are
> still extant, and who wins the admiration of the modern scholar by his intellectual
> humility and by the vastness of his learning. Clonmacnoise, now a desolate ruin
> in a lonely countryside, was founded by St. Kieran, and his cell soon became the
> centre of a veritable city of students. Iniscaltra became so famous for its school
> and monastery that an old record recounts how on one day there entered the
> mouth of the Shannon seven ships, full of students from foreign parts, bound for
> that little island on Lough Derg.
> Aspirants, eager to gain and to bring back to their own darker homes the light
> of Western wisdom, came from all and sundry regions of Europe. Dagobert, a
> king of France, Aldfrid, king of Northumbria, St. Willibrord, a Saxon noble,
> afterwards Archbishop of Utrecht, Agilbert, a Frank, and afterwards Bishop of
> Paris, were among those educated at Irish schools. The Venerable Bede mentions
> that crowds of Anglo-Saxons went over to study in Ireland, where he reports they
> were kindly received and, without payment, were provided with books and with
> instruction. Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury, records that, while Canterbury
> School was not over-full, the English swarmed like bees to the schools in Ireland.
> Visitors came too, it is said, from Gaul,
> 106                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Germany, Italy, and even from Egypt.
> Nor was this intellectual traffic one-sided. Irish saints and scholars went out
> from their homeland diffusing their knowledge and leaving behind them in
> Europe traces which remain to this day. St. Columbanus and St. Gall, of the
> school at Bangor on Belfast Lough evangelised parts of Burgundy, Lombardy,
> and Switzerland. Dungal, from the same school, was a friend of Charlemagne
> and was the founder of the University of Padua. St. Aidan, of Galway, at the
> invitation of Oswald, King of Northumberland, went over to help in the
> conversion of the king’s subjects to Christianity, and founded the monastery of
> Lindisfarne. He was the first in the line of Bishops to take their title from
> Durham. His successor was Saint Finan of Tipperary, whose efforts (with those
> of two other Irishmen, Cedd and Diuma) carried the Gospel far down into Central
> England. Fergil, or Virgilius, became Archbishop of Salisbury. St. Fursa worked
> for six years as missionary in East Anglia, and then went over to France, where
> he earned a wide reputation for virtue and learning. St. Finbar of Connacht aided
> in the conversion of Mercia, and developed the monastery of Glastonbury. It is
> said that to-day 155 Irish saints are still venerated in Germany, 46 in France, 32
> in Belgium, 13 in Italy, 8 in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
> Those who thus found in Ireland a fountain of knowledge at which they could
> slake their thirst were not unappreciative beneficiaries; sometimes an old record
> will give some quaint witness to the gratitude of eminent foreigners to the Irish
> schools which had taught them so well.
> Thus there is still extant a letter from Alcuin, the most learned man at the
> court of King Charles of France, addressed in affectionate terms to “his blessed
> master and pious father” Colcu, or Colgan, chief Professor at Clonmacnoise. Not
> only did Alcuin send a letter, but he sent also 100 shekels of silver (5o from
> himself and 5o from the king) to the brotherhood of Clonmacnoise as a gift, with
> a quantity of olive oil for the Irish Bishops.
> For a time fate rang down the curtain upon this scene of intellectual activity
> and happiness. The Danes arrived, terrorising and destroying. Invasion followed
> invasion. But when in AD 1014
> The genius of Ireland                           107
> Brian Boru utterly defeated the Danes at the battle of Clontarf and set the land
> free, missionary work was again resumed. This was the period when Irish
> influence in Germany was at its height.
> A monk from Donegal founded a monastery of St. James at Regensburg in
> 1076. Soon a daughter house was opened at the same place, dedicated to St.
> Jacob. From this centre Irish influence spread in all directions. Twelve Irish
> monasteries were founded in Germany and in Austria, at Wurzburg, Nurnburg,
> Constanz, Vienna, Eichstadt, and other places. Irishmen coming directly from
> their native land travelled far and wide through Europe carrying the Gospel, and
> sometimes founding monasteries. Irishmen were chaplains of Conrad III and of
> Frederic Barbarossa. Under the latter monarch a monastery was founded in what
> is now Bulgaria, and an Irishman appointed abbot.              John, Bishop of
> Mecklenburg, preached to the Vandals between the Elbe and the Vistula. Pope
> Adrian IV studied under an Irish professor in the University of Paris. The fame
> of Irish saintliness and learning was established everywhere. Students still came,
> like their ancestors, to visit this island so celebrated for its intellectual and
> spiritual wealth.
> But this revival burnt itself out, and no such flame has ever since been lit
> again. With the Normans there was introduced a condition of permanent warfare,
> which soon disintegrated Irish life. Suitable recruits were no longer sent out to
> the Continent, and the great Irish monasteries in Germany and elsewhere were
> either secularised, like that at Nürnburg, or turned over to local authorities, like
> those at Vienna or Wurzburg.
> Such, in brief, were the Christian schools, such the signal achievement which
> won for Ireland that title which remains unforgotten as a call to aspiration,
> showing that once she has been, and yet may be again, an island of saints and
> scholars.
> Long years of invasion and turmoil followed, but the settlers who came in this
> period to Ireland from overseas did not obliterate this temperamental mysticism
> of the native race. Indeed, in the era of Plantation it was noted that they soon
> took on the general characteristics of the people they had come to dwell among
> and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.
> 108                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Early in the eighteenth century, as if to prove that the flame of mystical
> genius, if overlaid, still burned in Ireland as strong as ever, there arose George
> Berkeley, Bishop of Coyne, whose spirit of self-sacrifice and missionary
> enthusiasm made him own brother of the ancient Irish saints. He foresaw the
> future greatness of America and in his verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts
> and Learning in America wrote the famous lines:
> “Westward the course of empire takes its way.
> The first four acts already past
> A fifth shall close the drama with the day—
> Time’s noblest offspring in his last.”
> He conceived the project of founding a college in the Bermudas by a charter
> from the crown for the Christian civilisation of America, and managed to get a
> vote of £20,000 from the English House of Commons for the purpose. In 1728,
> he sailed west and for three years—by way of preparation for Bermuda—lived
> and laboured in Rhode Island. As the promised grant was withdrawn he was
> obliged to return to Ireland, but not before he had planted in America the seeds of
> his idealistic philosophy. Westward therefore as well as eastward the missionary
> light of Irish Christianity has shone! Berkeley’s place in history, however, is due
> to his metaphysical insight. His famous and often misunderstood doctrine of the
> non-existence of matter means in reality that matter apart from its apprehension
> by mind—the mind of man or the mind of God—has no existence at all. In other
> words, he held, (it has been said) that the material universe can have no existence
> apart from its inclusion in a great spiritual order, which one may call the life of
> God. Since his day, illustrious critics have variously challenged, ridiculed,
> pondered over, commended, admitted the validity or exposed the fallacy of his
> arguments; but they have not ignored his philosophy. “It is a fact of history,”
> writes one authority, “that Berkeley has employed the modem philosophical
> world in a struggle, virtually about his new conception of the Universe, which
> has lasted for nearly two hundred years.” Primate Darcy, in a sermon on
> Berkeley in which he quoted from a number of contemporary philosophers,
> concluded “My purpose
> The genius of Ireland                           109
> in referring to these works of to-day, the writings of men who occupy a foremost
> position in the world of thought in our time, is to show that the influence of
> Berkeley in philosophic thought at the present time is more potent and more
> creative than at any time in the past. Philosophy cannot get away from him.”
> Berkeley died in 1753, a true successor of the saints and scholars of old and
> perhaps the only Irishman who has earned an assured place in the main current of
> world thought.
> Now once again—among the manifold activities of the nineteenth-twentieth
> centuries—Ireland has given conspicuous expression to this same spiritual gift in
> a new form. “A man is hidden behind his tongue”, says an Arabian proverb. A
> nation is hidden behind its literature. The writings of a people form a mirror in
> which the popular mind and heart are reflected. A poet is not a creator only, but a
> revealer; and he reveals, not only his own soul, but the soul of his people and of
> his age. The recent revival of letters in Ireland has been written about in many
> lands as an Irish Renaissance. And in the work of this Renaissance no human
> quality has found such general or such felicitous and ardent expression as that of
> spirituality.
> In all ages nations have been proud of their poets. When they wish to display
> their greatness, it is to their poets they point—the English to Shakespeare, the
> Germans to Goethe, the Italians to Dante, just as long ago the Romans pointed to
> Vergil and the Greeks to Homer. A country’s poets give the highest expression
> of the national character. Set half-a-dozen poets of the Irish Revival beside a
> similar group of to-day’s poets from England, or the Colonies, or from America,
> and one of the traits which is seen at once to mark the Irish writers is the
> vividness and ardour of their religious feeling. This feeling is not, of course,
> absent from the contemporary poets of other lands: far from it. But it is not
> elsewhere so pervasive, so emphatic, as in Irish verse, nor has it the same quality
> of instinctive yearning and aspiration. No one can read the verse of Lionel
> Johnson, of Katharine Tynan-Hinkson, of Pearse, of Dora Sigerson, of Joseph
> Campbell in his earlier years, or of many another, without noting the devotional
> and often mystical quality of the author’s temperament. Indeed, the wealth
> 110                                 The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> of idealistic material is so great that it is some matter of surprise that no one has
> yet published an anthology of Irish verse of this special type.
> The two finest and most famous of Irish poets are, however, those in whose
> works this spirituality shines out with the greatest brilliance and power. It is to
> *
> both Yeats and A.E. the one dominant thought, the one central theme. The hero
> of their verse is not man the mortal, but man the immortal, and their sadness is
> that of a spirit ill-content to dwell in a house of clay amid a world of illusions.
> Yeats has spoken of “the disembodied ecstasy” of A.E.’s verse, and no two words
> can better describe its special quality. “Be it thine,” writes A.E. of his own
> poetry, “be it thine to win Rare vistas of white light, Half-parted lips through
> which the infinite murmurs its ancient story … until thy song’s elation Echoes
> the multitudinous meditation.” His verse is, in an extraordinary degree, aetherial,
> and its ideals of human life noble and august. He loves his country, but has no
> patience with those who are slaves of the embittering traditions of history. Of
> himself and those who think like him he says:
> “We are less children of this clime
> Than of some nation yet unborn,
> Or empire in the womb of time.
> We hold the Ireland in the heart
> More than the land our eyes have seen,
> And love the goal for which we start
> More than the tale of what has been.
> We would no Irish sign efface,
> But yet our lips would gladlier hail
> The first-born of the coming Race
> Than the last splendour of the Gael.
> No blazoned banner we unfold,
> One charge alone we give to youth,
> Against the sceptred myth to hold
> The golden heresy of truth.”
> If only the voters of Ireland could reach up to this thought, how quickly might
> the ship of State sail out from among the rocks
> 
> *
> William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the
> foremost figures of 20th-century literature. George William Russell (1867–1935) wrote with the
> pseudonym Æ (sometimes written AE or A.E.), was an Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter
> and Irish nationalist.
> The genius of Ireland                            111
> that now beset us, and seem likely to beset our children!
> A.E. looks out upon a world full of unhappiness, and he sees human sorrow as
> springing always from men’s forgetfulness of their divine origin and of that high
> estate which once was theirs before they descended into this world of matter.
> “We dwindle down beneath the skies, and from ourselves we pass away.” They
> who forget they are from everlasting spiritual beings invoke misery. The
> remembrance of this truth brings an inward joy which lies “far beyond earth’s
> misery” and is the one road to real dominion and self-completion. Lesser goals
> of effort than this delude and disappoint. The whole universe, in its vastness and
> in its tiniest detail, is spirit-woven, and the Mighty Artist who reared “the
> changing halls of day and night” shows forth His delight likewise in the
> perfection of the wild flower of the field.
> The volume of his Collected Poems, first published in 1913, and many times
> reprinted, includes more than two hundred and thirty pieces, and runs to 369
> pages. The treatment of a theme so vast and rich in so many brief lyrics leaves,
> perhaps, on the reader a sense of fragmentariness. More than twenty years ago a
> writer in an American paper, the Sewanee Review, spoke of A.E. as an “Irish
> Emerson”. It is a suggestive comparison; but Emerson was a dreamer and a
> thinker, while A.E., in his verse, appears rather as a dreamer and a singer. The
> view of life and of the universe which A.E. presents is taken from the
> Upanishads. The mythology which he employs is Celtic. Those readers,
> therefore, who are trained in the classical tradition of the West may find
> themselves here in a strange world. But the poet’s facility, the splendour of his
> language, the delicacy of his colour-sense, the occasional magic of his descriptive
> phrases, attract and charm; and no reader can be unmoved by the magnanimity
> and loftiness of the poet’s thought. Technically the work does not always show
> infallible clarity and finish. The poet seems a genius first, an artist in the second
> place. Yeats, on the other hand, is a genius in the second place, an artist first.
> If Mr Yeats has not in the same degree as A.E. an unquenched and
> unquenchable assurance of the truth and reality of his vision, nevertheless his
> work likewise depends for its individuality on a
> 112                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> rare and ardent idealism. The dominant mood of his poetry, taken as a whole, is
> one of dream and reverie, of loneliness and longing. A belief in something better
> than the actual and a desire to reach and to enjoy it, form the main source of his
> inspiration. And though he has written in many moods, and ranged far in his
> choice of themes, yet it is when he makes adoration his motive that his touch is
> most sure, his eloquence most compelling. His idealism has many sides, and the
> ideal types which his heart or fancy present to him are now of one kind, now of
> another. Sometimes it is an image of ideal love on which he broods, sometimes
> an image of ideal joy, sometimes of ideal beauty. But the one of which he
> dreams more constantly than any other, the ideal of which he writes with a
> reiteration that never seems to slacken or grow weary is a perfection of beauty—a
> beauty still sensuous yet transcendently more fair than any that charms the senses
> of mankind on earth.
> With the world of ethics his idealism has little concern. Save in one brilliant
> poem, he pays scant attention to perfection of character or to standards of
> conduct. He has shown in the Countess Cathleen what he can do in this field
> when he so wills. He has here taken an old legend which tells how once upon a
> time an Irish Princess, in order to save her people, gave up for them the most
> precious thing she possessed, her own soul. When she died, the Almighty
> pardoned her and received her into heaven because, if her deed was evil, her
> motive was divine. This story Mr Yeats weaves into a dramatic poem, in which
> he does not bring out the conflict of the warring forces within the heroine’s breast
> before she makes her awful decision, but emphasises the moral beauty of her act
> and the religious significance of her ultimate forgiveness. The Lady Cathleen
> seems not so much a mere being of the earth as the spirit of a selfless love
> incarnate in a woman’s form. The whole poem is of so high and rare a loveliness
> that none of Mr Yeats’ later work, brilliant though it be, seems quite to fulfil the
> promise given here.
> Joy is set by the poet among his ideals, and yet it plays but a small part in his
> poetry. He writes with more affection of sorrow; and the lady of his dreams is
> nearly always sorrowful, and never
> The genius of Ireland                           113
> joyous. He speaks of joy as one of the marks of the land of his heart’s desire, and
> in the Wanderings of Oisin he tells in a score of graceful lines the part joy plays
> in the universe. But even here, when he sings joy’s praise, he carries little
> conviction, because he sings always in a minor key. Nor does Yeats write of the
> love of man and woman with the enthusiasm that marks most poets, and which
> inspires them to their best verse. Only in one poem does he tell what is
> essentially a love story, or seek to express that inspiration which impels the soul
> to seek for happiness through a love union with its perfect mate. But here, in
> Shadowy Waters (which, though in form dramatic, is in its nature lyric and
> personal) the theme has done for Mr Yeats what it has done for almost every poet
> who has treated it—it has ennobled his style and enabled him to write some of his
> most exquisite and haunting poetry. Apart from this poem, Mr Yeats’s attitude
> toward love is one of deprecation. As implied in many places and expressed in
> his Rose of Battle, his view is that love brings contentment and repose which are
> inimical to the divine hunger of the poet. It is to the sad, the lonely, the
> insatiable, that Nature reveals her mysteries. The poet must abjure love and drive
> it from him to “hide its face amid a crowd of stars.”
> Doubtless the poet’s failure to write at length of joy and love and moral
> perfection is not so much due to his loving these less, but to his loving another
> ideal even more. The ideal which he prizes most highly is that of beauty. He
> chants the praise of beauty in his lyrics, his narratives, his plays. He chanted it
> when he was a boy, and he chants it now he is a man. So active is his
> imagination when enkindled by the desire for beauty, that the poet seems able to
> look at his ideal now from this angle, now from that, to see it in a hundred
> different forms, and to sing it in a hundred different ways. And if he writes of
> this theme late and early, he writes of it also with an emotion which, though it
> may seldom be impassioned or rapturous, is always sincere and earnest and
> profound.
> The great function of poetry is to him the expression of beauty. He sees the
> poets as “labouring all their days to build a perfect beauty in rhyme.” Nor could
> they well choose a worthier theme,
> 114                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> since it is the love of beauty that has impelled men to the heights of epic
> achievement (as in old Hellas and ancient Ireland). Moreover, beauty was,
> indeed, the cause of creation, since God made the world that He might provide
> the Angel of Beauty with a place where she might wander at will. In one poem
> Mr Yeats claims that an aesthetic difference is an ethical one, and that ugliness is
> unrighteous. “The wrong of unshapely things,” he cries, “is a wrong too great to
> be told.” So monotheistic is he in his worship that when he turns to indite a poem
> in honour of Erin he fears he may be guilty of unfaithfulness, and, therefore,
> saves himself by propounding the belief that beauty is the tutelary Goddess of
> Erin, and still loves that land as her peculiar haven and home on earth. In what
> might seem intended as love poems Mr Yeats writes not so much of love as of
> beauty. He praises his beloved because she reminds him of the loveliness that
> has long faded from the world; he tells her that when she sighs, he hears White
> Beauty sighing too, and that she seems to him an incarnation of that Angel of
> Beauty to whom his heart is given. He does not seem self-forgetful, like the true
> lover, but conscious of himself and of his dreams; so that, for instance, when he
> tells his beloved that he spreads before her feet his dreams as cloths for her to
> walk upon, he is careful to ask that she tread lightly.
> This sensuous beauty, which Yeats so devoutly adores, he often personifies as
> a woman or goddess of whom he is the humble devotee and priest. But at other
> times he thinks rather of some ideal age or place where there is nothing, neither
> form nor colour, nor odour, nor sound, that is not beautiful. Frequently he speaks
> of bygone ages as possessed of a loveliness which, like Astraea, has long since
> fled from earth. In one or two brief lyrics some favourite spot in Ireland like the
> Lake Isle of Innisfree is painted as the ideal place of his dreams. But in his larger
> works the dwelling-place and home of beauty is some imaginary land beyond the
> known borders of the world—in The Wanderings of Oisin it is the Isle of the
> Blessed; in The Land of Heart’s Desire it is the realms of Faery; in Where There
> is Nothing it is the heaven of the mystic’s faith.
> It has been Mr Yeats’s custom to place this halcyon home of
> The genius of Ireland                            115
> Beauty in strong and striking contrast to the actual life of man on earth. The
> workaday world he shows as a hard and sordid place, whose darkness he uses as
> a foil to set off the glory of the land of his dreams. This opposition is, to him, not
> a mere artistic device, but a profound fact of Nature, and it provides him with the
> subject of some of his best poetry. Indeed, the poems which have appealed to his
> readers as most sincere, and which are the most general favourites, are precisely
> those in which this opposition is the crux and central theme.
> In these points Mr Yeats’s method—if without injustice to his art one may
> point for a moment to the foundations and the ground-plan on which he has
> built—is to place the hero (or heroine) in the midst, with Earth on one side and
> Elysium on the other, and then have him decide which of the two he will choose.
> The making of the choice, the struggle to escape from earth, and the final
> attainment of Elysium provide the plot. The hero’s weariness of earth, his
> longing for Paradise, and his delight on reaching his haven, supply the emotion of
> the piece. Names, dates, places may vary, but this plan varies not. Oisin, Maire
> Bruin, Forgael, Paul Rutledge—mythic warrior, peasant girl, pirate, and
> nineteenth-century country gentleman—all stand in similar dilemmas, all make a
> similar election, and all reach similar goals. There is, however, one play which,
> though it belongs to this class, yet stands by itself as apart from its fellows. This
> is Cathleen Ny Houlihan. For in this piece the hero does not seek the personal
> enjoyment of any delectable Paradise, but refuses the good things of earth that he
> may the better do his duty and fight in his country’s cause.
> Yet if in this large group of poems Mr Yeats changes neither the theme nor
> the essentials of his plot, he does considerably change his point of view and his
> treatment of the story. When he was young he looked at the matter from one
> angle, and wrote The Wanderings of Oisin; when he was a little less young, his
> point of view was changed, and he wrote The Land of Heart’s Desire; when he
> reached middle age he saw it all in yet another way, and wrote Where There is
> Nothing. In his youth his fancy broke its leash, and he revelled in the delights of
> his dream-
> 116                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Elysium. His hero of this period, Oisin, escapes forthright from earth and rides
> with a fairy bride to the Isle of the Blessed, and the poet fills almost the whole of
> his poem with enraptured descriptions of that wonderful world. But with
> growing experience Mr Yeats’ perspective changed, and the thought of earth
> became obtrusive. Maire Bruin, the main figure in The Land of Heart’s Desire,
> did not find so quick or easy an escape to the place of her dreams as did Oisin. It
> is only when Earth has grown at last unbearable that she calls for the fairies,
> whom she has loved so long, to take her out of “this dull world.” Even then her
> decision has to be fought out in a hard and bitter struggle, for earth has its ties,
> and she cannot win her fairy land till she has broken the bonds of faith and home.
> Paul Rutledge has a yet more arduous experience than Maire. Less fortunate than
> she, he does not know where that which he desires is to be found. No fairy-child,
> no princess from the Happy Isles, comes to his need. He must go out and search
> for his ideal himself. He does so in a fashion which is, at least, uncompromising,
> and becomes by turn tinker, monk, and self-appointed friar. But his goal remains
> unknown till, at the very last, as he drops dying beneath the stones of the mob, he
> cries “I go to the sacred heart of flame,” and finds his soul’s desire through
> martyrdom. So hardly did Paul Rutledge attain what Oisin was given as a gift;
> and so little is the reader told of that Paradise which in the earlier poem a
> thousand glowing lines were hardly sufficient to describe.
> Mr Yeats himself is acutely conscious of this change. He sees no more the
> heavens opened, nor does he tell burning tales of dream-guided adventurers
> forsaking all to seek the mystic home of Beauty. He cannot write now in that
> high, happy strain. His songs no more thrill with faith and hope. He doubts. “Is
> this my dream, or the truth?” he asks. Once he wrote a poem—The Rose of the
> World—to protest against the false dream that “Beauty passes like a dream.”
> Now he records the wisdom of the old men: “I heard the old, old men say, ‘All
> that’s beautiful drifts away like the waters.’” He feels the loss and laments the
> change. “I am worn out with dreams,” he cries; and again, “Now my
> The genius of Ireland                         117
> heart is sore. All’s changed”—“My barren thoughts have chilled me to the
> bone”—and
> “The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
> I have nothing but the embittered sun;
> Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
> And now that I have come to fifty years
> I must endure the timid sun.”
> He tries to think, however, that if the fading of his early vision be sad, yet it
> has its gains. Perhaps he was wrong then and is right now.
> “Through all the lying days of my youth
> I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
> Now I may wither into the truth.”
> “The truth!” What, then is this truth which has come when joy is gone? One
> reads The Green Helmet, and comes on the following lines, and wonders whether
> they really can be written by the same pen as that which charmed all hearts not
> long ago with a story of that Land of Heart’s Desire where beauty has no ebb,
> decay no flood”:
> “How shall I know
> That in the blinding light beyond the grave
> We’ll find so good a thing as we have lost?
> The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech,
> The habitual content of each with each,
> When neither soul nor body has been crossed.”
> Heaven, it seems, is closed. Only the earth remains. But when the poet took
> this for the burden of his song, his power and his rapture left him. He is still the
> craftsman, but he cannot move men’s spirits. Like his heroic Oisin, so soon as he
> slips from his faery-steed and touches the common earth, his strength turns to
> water and the years master him. “O, who could have foretold that the heart
> grows old!” he cries. He has no tidings now. What is an Irish poet who has lost
> his idealism? He is as a saint without the knowledge of heaven, as a scholar
> without the knowledge of the earth.
> But Mr Yeats has not spoken his last word. Progress moves not in a straight
> line, but in a spiral. Wordsworth’s Child, who at
> 118                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> first saw all things apparelled in celestial light, and later, as he grew to man’s
> estate, lost the happiness of this intuitive vision, found in later years the same
> high wisdom restored and deepened through thought and contemplation. So may
> it be with this poet whom God has gifted and man has justly honoured. Before he
> lays down his pen he will, of a surety, see once again the gates of pearl cast wide,
> and, in fuller, stronger tones than ever before, will sing in his old age the glories
> of the Land of the Ever-Young.
> The poems of Mr Yeats, with those of A.E., have made the name of Ireland
> honourably known through the English-speaking world, particularly among the
> educated and most influential classes. They have, in a dark and doubting age,
> upheld with power and persuasiveness, the cause of idealism and of spirituality.
> They have had the effect, throughout the Empire and in America, of connecting
> this cause with the revival of letters in Ireland. It has been felt that the special
> qualities of these poems are not merely personal, but are typical of the genius of
> the Irish people.
> Here lies the national significance of these two great poets’ work. Their
> achievement is not the singular and unaccountable outburst of an extraordinary
> talent; it is not unrelated to its environment, a flaming bush in a wilderness. On
> the contrary, Mr Yeats and A.E. are children of their country. Their greatest and
> most splendid quality is one which they inherit from Ireland. Their power of
> vision is an Irish gift. It marked the Irish long ago, and it marks them now. What
> is singular in their attainment is not that they possess the seer’s temperament, but
> that to it they add a rare faculty of poetical expression. It is not their privilege to
> sing of themes unknown or strange to the Irish people, but rather to give
> utterance to aspirations which many among the Irish felt, yet none but themselves
> can put in music or in words. Indeed, what these two men have achieved might
> well be impossible had they not had the spirit of the people with them. For they
> have done something which, in the realm of letters, is comparable with the work
> of an ancient Irish missionary in the realm of religion. In an age when the
> Philistines have captured the Ark of Beauty, when most poets sing of earthliness
> and shadows and despair, here are two Irishmen singing, in strains of
> The genius of Ireland                          119
> rapture and desire, tidings of joy and light and loveliness.
> “Men yet shall hear
> The Archangels rolling Satan’s empty skull
> Over the mountain tops”
> is continually the burden of their song. And where else in the wide world to-day
> will this be found as the characteristic and dominant note of a nation’s
> contemporary verse?
> Perhaps the victory of the Archangels over Satan which Yeats foretold was
> nearer than he knew. Perhaps had he learned where to turn his ear, he might have
> found yet fairer songs to sing in his later years than he had found in his brilliant
> youth.
> Our poets saw in vision the eternal light of heaven shining afar and caught a
> glimmer of its radiance down on this earth amidst the uncomprehending gloom of
> human life. They expressed their vision in forms and images gathered from the
> love of the ancient East or from the myths and faery legends of their own land.
> They did not sing of the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, of the Sun God scattering
> for ever the Spirit of Darkness, nor—as Shelley did—attempt in a hundred
> impassioned lyrics to raise the chant of all created things hymning in adoration
> the glory of a regenerated Universe.
> Their imaginations ranged far and wide for thoughts and images through
> Celtic or mediaeval or oriental myths and legendary lore; they did not seek their
> inspiration from the one central source from which Columba and his fellow saints
> and scholars derived their knowledge and their strength.
> Now has come, now has spread far and wide through the globe a fuller, richer,
> happier Message; the Message promised by Christ long ago and now at length
> after well-nigh two millenniums brought by him and given in tones that are heard
> only by spiritual ears (as He used to say when He taught “He that hath ears to
> hear let him hear”). A poet-prophet of the East, a hero-saint of the ancient land
> of Iran, Bahá’u’lláh, has brought, as God’s Messenger, Tidings of a New Heaven
> and a New Earth. Tidings that Light’s Arrows have pierced the heart of
> Darkness, that the battle which the Patron Saints of Ireland fought of Truth
> against Error, Knowledge against Ignorance, Love against Hate, has
> 120                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> been won for us, and that Victory will descend when men stretch out their eager
> hands to gather it. Blinded with self-desire, men and nations drain the bitter
> dregs of disillusion and cannot see what spectral hand holds to their lips the cup
> of death—cannot see the underlying cause of the world’s want and woe is
> spiritual poverty.
> What nation will be the first to behold the vision of truth, the first to declare
> it? Might not their great tradition call the Irish to this task?
> To consider in how marked a degree this precious gift of spirituality has been
> theirs in the past: to look back at their history and see how the religious genius of
> the people has over centuries made Ireland a lamp of Faith in a darkened world,
> directing its light both East and West, to realise that still there burns deep in the
> heart of the people that ancient fire: to hear to-day in our midst the voice of poets
> beginning to raise again the strain so long unheard, and chant in the ears of a
> forgetful world the praise of eternal beauty and eternal truth: thus to watch, to
> listen, and to reflect is to be filled with hope that Ireland may not be slow to catch
> the vision of the New Day, of the coming of the Kingdom of God, and that she
> may do for mankind now such service as she did for the world long ago in the
> hour of its darkness and its need.
> Part II
> 
> To
> Bahá’u’lláh
> ONLY Beloved! With a heart on fire
> And all my longings set in one desire
> To make my soul a many-stringed lyre
> For Thy dear hand to play,
> I bend beneath Thy mercy-seat and pray
> That in the strength of perfect love I may
> Tread with firm feet the red and mystic way
> Whereto my hopes aspire.
> I have forgotten all for love of Thee
> And ask no other joy from destiny
> Than to be rapt within Thy unity
> And—whatso’er befall—
> To hear no voice on earth but Thy sweet call,
> To walk among Thy people as Thy thrall
> And see Thy beauty breathing throughout all
> Eternal ecstasy.
> Lead me forth, Lord, amid the wide world’s ways,
> To bear to Thee my witness and to raise
> The dawn song of the breaking day of days.
> Make my whole life one flame
> Of sacrificial deeds that shall proclaim
> The new-born glory of Thy ancient name;
> And let my death lift higher yet the same
> Triumphal chant of praise!
> 
> Part III
> 
> Meditations, devotions and poems
> For a seeker
> I HAVE set forth as Thy pilgrim, my Lord; but there are many lands and
> unknown seas to travel before I approach the threshold of Thy Sacred Shrine.
> At every step I am admitted into a new realm, and at the end of each day’s
> wayfaring I pitch my tent in a fresh El Dorado.
> What earthly journey could be like this Journey! What adventure like this
> Adventure! What were the possession of the whole world compared with the joy
> of this Quest for Thee!
> My longing for Thee ever increases. Wonder uplifts me. My heart leaps with
> exultation, and trembles in awe. This gift of Thine is beyond all my hopes and
> my imagining. I do not dream now of the shining domes of Thy far-distant
> sanctuary. I am no longer restless nor impatient. It is enough for me to seek
> Thee and to seek Thee, day after day.
> O my God, my Beloved! Grant me at Thy hand a draught of the Wine of
> Immortality that I may seek Thee through this world and all Thy hidden worlds
> for ever and for ever.
> LORD, I have launched out upon the vast ocean of Search in the barque of
> Faith. I know that I shall never find Thee unless Thy hand direct me, and the
> breath of Thy mercy bear me on the way. I am weak, and the source of strength
> lies not in me.
> Error perpetually wells up in my soul, estranging me from Thee.
> Yet, do I seek Thee for ever! Everywhere I find traces of Thee, and I cannot
> refrain from my seeking. Thy voice echoes in the still recesses of my heart, and
> my longing for Thee gives me no rest.
> O beloved One; my heart is emptied of all save Thee. Leave me not to my
> loneliness. Breathe Thy Holy Spirit upon me, that I may be borne far away from
> the world, and approach the threshold of Thy unity.
> 
> Meditations and devotions                         123
> 
> O LORD of love, Giver of Knowledge!
> The twilight of Thy dawn breaks upon my soul, and the shadows of illusion
> flee before the white arrows of Thy Truth.
> Slowly knowledge widens. Unfamiliar meanings gleam from familiar things.
> Hidden chambers of treasure open before the outstretched hand of thought. I feel
> like a child carried by magic into a far, strange land. Breathless with
> astonishment, I behold wonders leap into being everywhere in endless variety.
> But always the way of Truth is love, the key of Truth is love, and Truth’s own
> self is love.
> O MY Lord!
> I have sought Thee all my life, yet I still wander in a chequered world of light
> and shadow. Oh, lift me at last into the pure splendour of Thy Truth beyond the
> reach of any darkness that I may behold Thee as Thou art, and live in Thy
> continual presence evermore.
> THE darkness changes and pales, but no light breaks. Error grows intolerable,
> but Truth still is hidden out of sight. I rest not, but I never reach my goal.
> Yet, do I not ask anything, but to journey onward and onward. My path is of
> Thy making, and Thou leadest me on the way. I ask no more, and I desire no
> more.
> 124                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> I HAVE left behind me impatience and discontent. I will chafe no more at my
> lot. I commit myself wholly into Thy hands, for Thou art my guide in the desert,
> the teacher of my ignorance, the physician of my sickness.
> I am a soldier in my King’s Army; I have given up my will to Him, and my
> life is His to dispose of as He may please.
> I know not what fate Thou designest for me, nor what work Thou hast
> ordained for me, nor will I enquire nor seek to know. The task of the day suffices
> for me, and all the future is Thine.
> Little by little Thou trainest me. Little by little Thou changest weakness to
> strength, doubt to faith, perplexity to understanding. When I am fit to bear the
> burden Thou wilt lay it on my shoulders. When I am prepared to take the field
> Thou wilt assign me a place in Thy army of Light. Now I have no other duty
> than to equip myself for Thy service.
> With eagerness and patience, with hope and gratitude I bend to the task of the
> hour lest when Thy call to battle comes I be found unready.
> The task is hard. But I know it has come from Thy hand; therefore it shall be
> the choice of my mind, and the delight of my heart. I will utter no word of
> complaint, nor admit a thought of grief. I will follow in the footprints of all those
> who have sought Thee for love of Thee. I will find in effort my rest and my
> peace, and out of pain I will wring a hidden joy.
> Thus, 0 Beloved, Whose sweet voice I hear calling me, and still calling me, I
> will draw near to Thy abode bearing Thee the only gift Thou wilt accept, the only
> gift I have to offer: the gift of my heart.
> Meditations and devotions                         125
> 
> FOR every void there is a filling, and to every prayer there is an answer.
> All tribulation has its ending, and to every seeking there is a finding.
> For the weary, rest is waiting, and for the lonely, love.
> Therefore will I be content, and will keep a heart at peace. My faith is
> founded upon Truth, and I will bear witness through every trial to the goodness
> and mercy of God.
> ALONE in the darkness before the dawn I repair to Thy shrine, and bow
> before Thy sacred threshold. In the rapture of communion with Thee, self and
> the world momentarily fall away. The veil of Thy Beauty is lifted, and the
> sweetness of Thy Mercy enfolds me …
> On the far horizon darkness breaks and flees, and through the tracery of
> leafless boughs I watch the brightening sky. Day calls me hence, and I must
> leave Thy sanctuary for the roaring city and the busy mart. Grant me, O Lord,
> Thy continuing presence and protection, that when night brings me back to Thy
> temple I may not come to Thee in estrangement nor in shame. Vouchsafe me, all
> the day through, Thy help and strength. Above the babel let me hear Thy Voice.
> In the turmoil let Thy Peace hold possession of my heart. When I walk among
> the idols that once I worshipped, let me not heed them nor remember them, being
> enrapt with utter love of Thee.
> 126                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> TO Thee now, O Beloved One, the Merciful, I bring my weakness, my
> consciousness of failure—to Thee I pour out my griefs—to Thee I con fide my
> disappointments; and from my knees I rise leaving behind me all my burdens,
> freed from every sadness, strengthened by Thy strength, arrayed in faith, seeing
> Thy sunshine everywhere and desiring to find throughout the day opportunities of
> proving my gratitude to Thee for Thy abundant gifts.
> IN the growing light of self-knowledge, O God, I stand revealed to myself,
> and conscience-stricken I come to Thee in horror and contrition. Till now I never
> recognised the baseness of my state nor suspected the depth of my guilt in Thy
> eyes.
> Fill my heart so full of love that there shall be no room for anger; so full of
> hope that there shall be no room for fear; so full of radiant joy that sadness may
> not enter nor approach. Deprive me, 0 God, of all the world holds dear, and of all
> that men may offer unto men; bestow on me pain, penury and humiliation if by
> this means I may be purified of my sin, and freed from these anarchic passions.
> Spare me not. But grant me in the end attainment to my Goal: the knowledge
> of Thy Truth, the blessing of Thy Love.
> Meditations and devotions                        127
> 
> OUT of the dark depths of my being there well up continually hateful desires.
> The Enemy of my life has his stronghold in the dim mysterious background of
> my consciousness which lies beyond the reach of my will.
> Horrid thoughts and impulses assail me unawares, and in weak moments. I
> struggle, and I will not yield; but I cannot conquer. Legion succeeds legion, and
> the tumult is endless.
> I long for Thee, 0 my God: for Thy Truth, Thy Glory and Thy Peace. But
> how can I win my goal while I lie thus open to my foes, and the Evil Principle
> has its seat within my heart!
> In desperate need, in conscious impotence I turn to Thee. Make me anew, O
> Lord! Leave me not to this monster who harbours within me. Deliver me from
> this satanic self. Cleanse my whole being, and light within me such a flame of
> love as will bum darkness and its brood out of my heart for ever.
> O MY Lord, how can I ask to be delivered from these tests and trials that
> bring me so much suffering and anguish! They come from Thee, awakening me
> from self-delusion, and revealing my weakness. I stand before Thy Judgment
> Seat, uncloaked, dishonoured. Horror overwhelms me and abases me. Then at
> last shame stings me to life, and remorse spurs me to escape from the cause of
> this misery.
> My Lord, I do not shun pain in Thy path. Whatever it cost me, do not permit
> me to delay on my journey to Thee, nor to turn aside from Thy way. Send me
> whatever difficulties or suffering my soul shall need to cleanse and purify it
> utterly of all that is false and wicked. Help me to grow in self-knowledge and
> wisdom, and to put into practice what I learn, till each weakness is turned into
> strength, and I pass into the realm of Thy might through the gates of victory.
> 128                         The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> O LORD!
> Thy mercy is endless and Thy love cannot be compassed by gratitude or
> praise or knowledge. I adore Thee ever more and more; I am overwhelmed with
> wonder and drawn to Thee in longing and rapture. Yet, this lesser self, this
> narrow I with whom I am involved turns from Thee again and again and breaks
> away, flouting Thy law in open rebellion. Ashamed and in utter misery I turn
> back. I do not dare to approach Thee, but kneel far away in a wretched place, an
> alien. I cannot understand why I fall away from what I truly desire; and I despair
> of myself. The desolation of loneliness overwhelms me.
> But Thou dost not despair of me. Thy forgiveness descends and touches me
> ere I raise my eyes to look towards Thee. Thy mercy enlightens me. Thy love
> pours warm hope again into my heart, and Thou leadest me back to walk in the
> courts of Thy Spiritual Palace.
> Yet, of my own strength I cannot make myself an abiding place close to Thee.
> There lingers in me the foreboding that again I shall stumble and fall away from
> the sweetness of this communion with Thy love.
> O compassionate almighty God, I commit myself in utter humility to Thy
> boundless mercy, begging Thee to save me (I know not how) from this Horror,
> and to vouchsafe me that which is my true, my only desire—to attain to Thy
> Presence, to know and to obey Thy Truth.
> Meditations and devotions                         129
> 
> To assailing doubts
> I WILL have God or nothing.
> I will not accept that which you offer.
> I will not seek help from the world, for it passes and has no strength; nor from
> ambition, for it cannot satisfy; nor from money, for no man has that to sell which
> I desire.
> I have beheld the Truth, and I will not forget it.
> I have heard the promise of my Lord, and I will trust my all to it.
> You afflict me, but you will not capture my heart.
> You are many now, but you will become few. You seem strong, but your
> strength is already passing away. You are God’s enemies, liars against the Truth,
> and I am girded with God’s strength to master and subdue you. I will not cease
> from this battle till I have used you that you will never raise your heads from the
> dust to threaten me again.
> O GOD!
> Help me to give battle to the Enemy, and cease not; but ever to keep my heart
> in peace.
> Help me to be the servant of my fellow servants, and to find in this servitude
> infinite freedom.
> Help me to turn away from the semblance of beauty which lies about me, and
> to seek in my heart the eternal beauty.
> Help me to pass beyond love and hate that in self-abandonment
> I may cast myself at the feet of the Lord of Joy.             Amen.
> 130                         The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> KEEP Thou, O God, the door of my heart that no evil thought proceed from it;
> and guard my lips that they utter no uncharitable word.
> Teach me to look for the good in others that I may rejoice in it; and for the
> evil in myself that I may amend it.
> Watch over my actions that I do no injustice, nor cause unhappiness to any
> one.
> Divest me of pride that I may count myself less than any other, and may
> become the servant of all for love of Thee, my Lord.
> DEAR God of Splendour, Whose light is greater than my darkness, and
> Whose love is stronger than my loneliness, end forever with one shaft from the
> Bow of Thy Glory this night of error wherein I wander and am lost.
> Light in my heart the fires of love, 0 God, that being delivered from all selfcentred desire I may love Thee for Thine own sole sake without hope of reward
> here or hereafter, or thought of any heaven save this enraptured abandonment of
> love for Thee.
> MAKE my heart, O God, as this unshadowed mountain lake that sets its face
> forever toward heaven, and in its calm depths reflects the peace of Thy remote
> vast worlds of light.
> Meditations and devotions                        131
> 
> A vision of God’s triumph
> OUT of the depths I greet the sunlit heights. Out of gross darkness I sing
> hymns of light.
> Thy Glory has spread across the heavens, Thy Beauty has kissed the mountain
> tops, and Thy Love beats upon the hearts of men.
> The doom of the Night has sounded. The troops of darkness gather in the
> valleys. The stars have fallen. The skies are cleft asunder, and far in the
> empyrean from the Fountain of Knowledge pours the river of life, and the hosts
> of heaven chant the Glory and the Victory of God.
> The peoples tremble in their sleep. The nations are shaken to their base.
> The gates of Hell pour forth the last of their legions.
> Where can the Night flee, or the armies of Satan take refuge? Death descends
> upon them. Despair hardens their hearts. Breathing destruction they are
> themselves destroyed.
> For the Glory of God has encircled the world. His love has filled the earth.
> The treasure chambers of heaven are thrown wide, and the gifts of the Most High
> are showered upon Mankind.
> There shall be no more death nor oppression nor tears. God has ascended His
> throne. He has taken possession of the hearts of men.
> Therefore from the darkness with hymns of light I greet the Source of Light,
> and from the depths give answer to the heights.
> 132                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> A vision of the day of judgment
> ONE touched my eyes. I looked and saw above the Mountain of Holiness the
> light break. And a Voice above the Mountain called to me and said:
> “That thou seest is the Dawning of the Judgment. Therefore, repent, lest thou
> be found among the workers of inquity.
> “Woe to them that have thought to hide their evil deeds in the gloom of their
> misbelief, and to keep their wickedness secret from their Lord.
> “Woe to them who through My long forbearance have imagined Me forgetful,
> and ignorant of their guilt.
> “Woe to the oppressors, and to them that wrong the poor, though it be in ever
> so little.
> “Woe to them that have made My Holy Name a cloak for injustice, and have
> stamped on My Truth the image of their own base desire.
> “Woe to them that misguide My people, reviling My Messengers and
> traducing My Gifts.
> “Woe to them that lift their strength against My strength, and utter blasphemy
> against My Word.
> “Woe to them that turn away from My Light, and seek the shelter of the
> darkness.
> “Their hour is come, and the Seal of My Covenant is set upon their doom.”
> The Voice ceased. I watched the dawn grow clear, and the risen Sun pour its
> beams from the east to the uttermost west, paling the last lone star of morning.
> The glory of the light ran burning through the sky. At its caress the hidden
> beauty of the world came forth unveiled. The air instinct with fire trembled in
> ecstasy. The winds, the seas joining in nature’s hymeneal joy chanted the bridal
> song of Earth and Heaven.
> But man, afar, alone, lay unaware, dreaming of vanities, drugged in sleep.
> Meditations and devotions                           133
> 
> JOY is from Eternity!
> Joy is more ancient than Time—vast as infinitude!
> Out of joy doth all proceed, and in the arms of joy is Creation upheld!
> Joy is in the Beginning, Joy is before the founding of the worlds!
> Joy is the mighty, the impregnable, the everlasting.
> Joy is the life and light of all; and naught exists that is not
> filled with the breath of joy.
> The voice of joy breaks forth on every hand in water, in wind, in rustling leaf
> and singing bird; and listening night lays her hand upon the earth’s wild heart to
> hear the universal chant of joy float from the fiery stars.
> 
> O God, O God, the dawn of joy is broken!
> The flood-gates of light are open, and joy descends in torrents on the earth.
> The frosts of life melt in the sunshine of Thy joy. Thy kiss of joy has touched
> all, sweetened all!
> Thy joy triumphant conquers the heart of man, and in the depth of our being
> joy awakes.
> There is no room for sadness, for doubt. Within, without, joy fills all space,
> all time, all thought.
> The prophet’s voice, the lover’s heart, proclaim the victory of joy. Far and
> wide, in every clime, in every land, the soul of man wakens to join at last that
> triumph-song of praise which for long ages Truth, unheard of men, has sung to
> God in solitude.
> 134                         The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> For Ireland
> LOOK Thou, O Father, upon this land where once Thy Son’s name set hearts
> on fire and His light shone in lonely splendour across the darkness of the west.
> Now in this Advent of a mightier Day awake anew that power of vision, that
> readiness to answer Thy clear call. Make us on whom the fullness of the times
> has come, prove ourselves true heirs of all that is most heroic in our past. Use
> once again, but now for a yet larger end, the spiritual gifts Thou hast vouchsafed
> this people. Let them swiftly arise as one in common acclamation of the Day of
> Glory.
> Thou hast in this Great Age ordained the nations of the west to bear to the
> world the Message of Thy regeneration of the whole human race. Guide, 0
> Father in heaven, the people of this land to the path Thou hast appointed them.
> Kindle the flame of adoration in our hearts; teach us the joy of the soul’s
> surrender to its God. Speed us on our forward way. In our share of service to
> this crowning Day of Days let us find at last the challenge and the meaning of our
> country’s ancient title, Inisfail, the Isle of Destiny.
> Meditations and devotions                        135
> For father and mother
> O WATCHFUL and loving Lord! Keep our little ones this day under Thy
> protection. Permit no evil influence to reach or to come near them. Preserve
> them from illness, from accident, and from all mishap. And in the evening bring
> them home to their rest in safety and happiness.
> PRAISE be to Thee, 0 God, Who hast given to these children the boon of
> earthly life, and brought them thus far upon the road that leads to life eternal!
> O Thou of many gifts, vouchsafe these little ones the mortal boon of health,
> prosperity and happiness; and since these blessings soon must pass away and be
> no more, admit them to Thy boundless worlds of love, endow and so train their
> hearts that they may be able to receive and hold fast for ever in joy the
> knowledge of Thy coming and Thy glory. Thou art the All-Compassionate, the
> All-Wise.
> THIS home is a garden, 0 Lord, which Thy hand has planted in the world, and
> the hearts of these children are Thy flowers. Do Thou tend them and nourish
> them.
> Pour down the rays of Thy truth upon them. Breathe Thy Holy Spirit upon
> them at every breath. Let Thy mercy descend on them like refreshing rain.
> So shall these flowers of Thine mature, and bloom in beauty, and shed afar
> the fragrance of Thy love and remain thine to their lives’ end.
> 136                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> PRAISE be to Thee, dear Lord, Who grantest to Thy servants bounty upon
> bounty. Thou bestowest on us the marriage-blessing of children bringing with
> them a thousand delights; and in this very gift Thou openest to us of Thy grace a
> new world of service to Thee, a new road to Thy good pleasure and favour.
> Help us, in love and gratitude to Thee, so to direct and train these little ones
> that they may become men and women after Thine own heart, and may take their
> place as Thy lamps shining brightly in a dark world.
> O THOU, the Lover, the Creator and the Lord of these children, help us their
> parents to guard and train them not through human love alone, but as an act of
> love for Thee, and of obedience to Thy command.
> Grant us selflessness and devotion, that we may be able in our hearts to hear
> Thy bidding, and understand Thy will for these little ones.
> Help us to do for them our utmost in Thy name, and in calm trust to leave the
> rest to Thee, the All-wise Who lovest these Thy children better yet—far better—
> than any human parent may love his child.
> LET Reverence towards Thee, dear Lord, and kindness towards all that lives
> be graven deep into these children’s hearts.
> Give to us, their parents, wisdom and steadfastness, that we may unfold to
> them, little by little, at the right time and in the right way, the knowledge of Thy
> Truth, and by the example of our lives may amend whatever is amiss in our
> teaching.
> Let them increase day by day in spiritual strength that they may learn of Thee
> the mystery of prayer, and may attain the reward of conscious communion with
> Thy Spirit.
> Meditations and devotions                          137
> 
> O FATHER in heaven, Who givest to a parents’ intercession a special
> privilege, hear Thou our prayer for these children whom Thou hast entrusted to
> our care.
> Protect them, we beseech Thee, against the evil that arises in their own hearts,
> against the contagion of their parents’ frailties and imperfections, against the
> power of those whose hearts are turned from Thee.
> Help us to pray for our children with concentration and humility of spirit, and
> by force of prayer offered in Thy Name to keep back, far from them, the evil
> influences that seek their destruction.
> O THOU Who hast blessed us with Thy gift of children, let not the wonder
> and the happiness of these days of their infancy ever pass wholly from our hearts!
> Grant us a strong undying memory of whatever is most precious in these
> fleeting days, that in the aftertime when our little ones are no longer little we may
> still keep in our hearts countless images and echoes of their babyhood, may see
> again their open innocent faces, may hear their voices striving to imitate their
> elders’ speech and recall these tireless infant feats of growing knowledge and
> gathering strength.
> So shall the unworldly beauty of these childhood days abide with us forever,
> and not be wholly lost in the ripe happiness of the later time.
> 138                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
> GRANT to these little ones, O Lord, that the gifts and qualities which now are
> theirs through weakness they may make their own by strength. Let them through
> all the years retain this child-like heart, continuing humble and receptive as now,
> full of wonder, eager to learn. Increase day by day and year by year their faith
> that as the children of a Higher Home than this they may become heirs of
> Eternity and earn the blessed fruits of this
> Divine Age of Fulfilment.               Amen.
> HERE, O Lord, within the precincts of Thy protection, Love is king and Faith
> and Hope are the lords of thought. But in the world without, Faith and Hope
> wander in a wilderness and a stranger sits upon Love’s throne.
> Be Thou, O Lord, the strength and shield of these little ones from their life’s
> beginning to its very end. Grant that their love and faith and hope may prevail
> against every enemy and put to shame all doubt and disbelief. Give them
> fortitude and power that through childhood and manhood, in prosperity and in
> adversity, they may continue that journey toward Thee which here they have
> begun, and may to their lives’ end bear witness to Thy truth and remain firm in
> Thy covenant.
> Meditations and devotions                        139
> 
> O GOD, look on us who with ceaseless care keep watch and ward over these
> children, and suffer not our anxiety for them to become a sign of lack of trust in
> Thee.
> We acknowledge that they are in Thy safe keeping. It is for Thee to appoint
> unto them their tasks in life, and Thou wilt bestow on them ample strength and
> means to perform all that Thou requirest.
> Help us to pass on to them the divine Message of the Day of God to give to
> them the best we have to give, and doing this, to leave their souls to Thee in
> perfect trust.
> 
> PRAISE be to Thee, O God, for Thy bounty to the weak, the young, the
> humble, and for Thy power whereby Thou doest whatsoever Thou wiliest,
> unhelped, unhindered, uncomprehended by the thoughts of men!
> Thou puttest down the mighty, and dost exalt them of low estate.
> Thou hidest Thy mystery from the wise and learned, and revealest it to them
> who are as babes.
> The scholar and philosopher see and perceive not, read and understand not;
> the child beholding Thy beauty steps into Thy Kingdom.
> O Loving Lord, Who hast never turned away from a longing heart, nor an
> appealing cry, we pray then by Thy Most Great Name to deal with these little
> ones—these tender branches of the tree of life—according to Thy all perfect
> knowledge and desire.
> 140                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> O LORD, look upon these little ones, children of Thy covenant born of those
> whose hearts are turned to Thee. Keep them from the first unto the last under
> Thy protection and suffer them not to follow any desire save what may become
> servants of Thy truth, lovers of Thy Beauty.
> HEAR Thou, O God, our prayer for the children of this Age throughout the
> world!
> Look with pity on those whose parents have not turned their hearts to Thee
> nor humbled themselves before Thy Manifestation. By Thy boundless mercy and
> Thy prevailing will, deliver them out of the darkness that surrounds them, and
> draw them toward Thy light. Create in their souls a hunger and thirst for
> righteousness, a longing for spiritual truth; and prepare their minds to listen for
> Thy voice and to welcome Thy glad tidings.
> And now, O God, we beg Thee for these our children and for all others born
> beneath Thy covenant that Thou wilt endow them with power to recognise and to
> use to the utmost the blessing Thou hast given them. Grant them strength to
> stand fast by Thy truth, to uphold Thy cause, and in their time to spread far and
> near the knowledge of Thy glory and dominion.
> FATHER of mine, and of my little son who kneels at my side and lifts his
> voice to Thee, hear Thou his prayer and mine. Protect those whom he loves and
> prays for. Lead him onward and ever onward in Thy way till he shall understand
> that within his weak and mortal body is hidden the sacred light of Thine
> imperishable Presence.
> Meditations and devotions                         141
> 
> O TRANSCENDENT and Incomparable Lord!
> Thou hast bidden us look to Thee as to our Father in heaven; teach me to keep
> in my heart this chosen Name of Thine, that I may discern the true ideal of
> fatherhood, and learn what Thou wouldst have an earthly father be. Strengthen
> me with Thy Spirit that I may deserve the trust, the obedience and the love of my
> little ones. Make me remember that they will learn the meaning of fatherhood
> from their earthly father, and forbid, O Lord, that I by my unworthiness should
> lead Thy children astray in their first thoughts of Thee. Thou art the Everpresent,
> the All-wise.
> THERE was one who, being crossed, spoke to his son in anger, and saw the
> child’s face change in fear.
> Thereafter, praying in penitence, he heard the Voice of the Spirit speak to
> him:
> “Think not to number this weak one among thy possessions, nor imagine him
> to be thy creation. Thou callest him thy son. Yet within his infant soul lies
> hidden that which is deeper than thy knowing. In heaven his spirit stands now
> among the angels of My presence, and here on earth the sword of My justice
> protects and avenges him against all, and especially against thee. Love thou thy
> son, and love thyself in him. Teach him My way, and walk in it thyself that thou
> mayest be his guide. He is not thine, but Mine. Therefore, in all thou dost with
> him keep Me in remembrance, and fear Me. This is thy duty. See that thou fulfil
> it always, and slack not therein.”
> 142                           The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> O LOVING Lord!
> To the mountain-stream Thou hast given its bubbles that dance and tremble
> and break in light.
> To the forest depths Thou hast given the fresh flowerbuds that burst and open
> and unfold their tender petals in perfect beauty.
> To me Thou hast given the first baby-kiss of this little one who presses her
> tiny lips upon my lips in love.
> LITTLE one, little one of my heart, I am thy first love and the first to give thee
> a heart in love.
> When I come near, thou smilest and stretchest out thy little hands. And when
> I lift thee to me, thou foldest thine arms about my neck, and pressest thy smooth
> cheek to mine, calling me love names in thy baby-talk.
> What is there so sweet as love! and what love is so sweet as love at its
> dawning, new love, first love!
> Yet night by night I kneel, and beg of Him Who answers every prayer that
> through the coming years He will make ever more deep and sweet this early love
> of ours.
> Meditations and devotions                         143
> 
> O LITTLE one, my Una, April’s child, thou breath of the spring wind
> embodied!
> The bluebells cluster about thy knees; overhead the giant beech trees spread
> their half-unfolded leaves; across the meadow the cuckoo calls, and from the
> distant bog comes the curlew’s lonely cry.
> How happy art thou, leading the revel of the woods, their native queen, for
> whom a thousand springs have come and gone to weave thy flower-beauty, and
> to find their meaning and perfection in these fresh lips and laughing eyes of thine.
> O little one, joys more rare than these await thy wakening heart! A richer
> spring has cast its bounty at thy feet, a greater glory shines from another Heaven.
> And never morning breaks nor evening falls but lovers’ prayers go forth to beg
> the early vision of God’s Golden Age for thee who playest here thinking all
> happiness is already thine!
> CHILD of my heart, call not me your Father; and this dear wife of mine that
> gave you birth, call not her your mother. Think not the home we make for you is
> your True Home. The life that is bestowed on you through us will soon pass
> away and perish; but you, my son, you will not perish.
> This life is a steed to bear you to the Kingdom of Eternity, of which you are
> born a Prince. The Ruler of that Kingdom is your Father. His Palace is your
> Home. You are heir to a mighty princedom because you are born His son.
> Ride straight and fast to take your heritage. Fear no danger. Stop not for
> flood nor foe. Look not to right nor left. Your Father waits for you.
> Ride on. Rest not. Remember you are the son of a King.
> 144                            The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> GOOD-BYE, my baby boy, good-bye; you are gone from us for ever!
> What love did you bring with you into the world!
> What love did you stir and quicken in your father’s heart.
> With what love have I watched you, played with you, tended you in all
> conditions, at all hours, by day and by night; and who was happier than I!
> How many scenes made beautiful by love, and filled with joy unroll before
> my eyes. Again I see our child of longing, the first born in his first sleep: the
> young adventurer voyaging from chair to chair: the blue-clad boy among the
> buttercups seeking to make playmates of the eluding lambs …. But all this is
> past. You are gone from us, my baby-boy, and have no being now save in the
> close warm strong embrace of your mother’s memory and mine.
> So must it be.
> The bud perishes that the blossom may shed its fragrance, and babyhood
> yields its place to the larger life of the boy.
> And have not you, my little newcomer, my little four-year-old-son, have not
> you all that the baby who brought you to me had—and how much more. What
> was all that baby-sweetness of yours which is now gone by save the light you
> cast before you on your way to me! You too, in your turn, will pass away from
> me, and the years will ever bring to you change upon change. Deepening
> happiness awaits you. You will pass from knowledge to knowledge, from
> strength to strength. And through all the years, you and I, please God, will be the
> closer friends and comrades because we have loved each other so dearly in the
> baby-days gone by.
> Meditations and devotions                         145
> 
> WHILE they are at your side, love these little ones to the uttermost. Forget
> yourself. Serve them; care for them; lavish all your tenderness on them. Value
> your good fortune while it is with you, and let nothing of the sweetness of their
> babyhood go unprized. Not for long will you keep the happiness that now lies
> within your reach. You will not always walk in the sunshine with a little warm,
> soft hand nestling in each of yours, nor hear little feet pattering beside you, and
> eager baby voices questioning and prattling of a thousand things with ceaseless
> excitement. Not always will you see that trusting face upturned to yours, feel
> those little arms about your neck, and those tender lips pressed upon your cheek,
> nor will you have that tiny form to kneel beside you, and murmur baby prayers
> into your ear.
> Love them and win their love, and shower on them all the treasures of your
> heart. Fill up their days with happiness, and share with them their mirth and
> innocent delights.
> Childhood is but for a day. Ere you are aware it will be gone with all its gifts
> for ever.
> 146                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> WE are thy teachers because God has appointed us. You are to hear us
> because God wishes you to do so. He made us your father and mother, because
> He chose that you should be taught by us.
> We provide you with food and clothing and warmth. This is good; but the
> good of it will not last forever. The truth we teach you is the greatest of all the
> gifts we have to give you. Nothing else is important compared with this. Truth
> and the effects of truth last for ever: not only for a little time. The teaching
> which God has told us to give you will make you more happy than clothes or
> houses or pleasure or money. People cannot be happy without truth, even on this
> earth: in the next world we shall be very unhappy without it.
> Remember, these teachings are of more value than all else we have to give
> you. We teach you because we wish to obey God. We teach you not only
> because we love you very much, but for God’s sake.
> To teach you as God would have you taught is not easy. We are not so wise
> nor so good as we should like to be; nor even so wise and good as we hope soon
> to become. God himself alone is a perfect teacher. We pray God constantly to
> help us; and because we so truly wish and strive to please Him He strengthens us
> with the power and wisdom of His Spirit. Whatever is true in our teaching, and
> whatever is good and right in it comes not from us, but from God.
> Meditations and devotions                         147
> 
> THE greatest benefit which we have to confer on you is: Guidance to God.
> When God chose us to be your parents He commanded us to offer you this
> guidance. Therefore, it is by His will that we give you His Holy Teaching. We
> speak to you of Him and of His prophets, we surround you continually with
> thoughts of faith and worship, and we never cease to pray for you. We cannot
> compel you to learn the lessons which we teach; we would not compel you if we
> could, for God intends our wills to be free. You must choose for yourself Your
> mother and I are trying—as best we may—to follow the leading of that Guidance,
> and it is our hope and prayer that you will travel with us. We should be very
> lonely if we had to take one step without you. For this teaching which God has
> given us to pass on to you is the most precious thing we have to give you: more
> precious far than food, or clothes or schooling, or even life itself—for this
> knowledge is ETERNAL life.
> FILL Thou, O God our home with harmony and happiness, with laughter and
> delight, with radiant kindliness and overflowing joy, that in the union of our
> hearts Thy love may find a lodging place, and Thou Thyself mayst make this
> home of ours Thine Own!
> 148                         The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> UNTO Thee, O God, we dedicate this home. Cleanse it from all that is alien
> to Thee that it may become fit for Thy acceptance, and may be to friend and
> stranger as to ourselves a place of peace, a refuge from materialism, a herald of
> Thy Kingdom.
> 
> O GOD, make Thou this home of ours the garden of affection, a ripening
> place of love, where the hidden powers of our hearts may unfold, expand and
> bear the fruit of an abiding joy.
> 
> GLORY and honour, praise and thanksgiving be unto Thee for ever from us,
> and from all mankind!
> Thou art the One God, the Boundless, the Eternal, Who in Thy creation hast
> unveiled Thy Majesty and revealed Thy love.
> For our sakes Thou hast called from infinitude this realm of space and
> moulded it to serve the uses of the soul.
> For our sakes Thou hast laid upon eternity the semblance of bonds, and
> measured Time to us with fingers of gold and silver light.
> For our sakes Thou hast brought us forth from the void of nothingness, and on
> the mirror of our being cast the beauty of Thy Own similitude.
> Meditations and devotions                           149
> 
> PRAISE be to Thee Who hast called into being Thy worlds of Time and of
> Eternity to give utterance to Thy love. Thou hast made all things for man and
> man for his own glory and blessedness (not for Thine!) In his being Thou hast
> hidden Thy light; on his heart Thou hast printed Thy image. Thou hast placed the
> knowledge of Thyself and of Thy heaven before his face, and laid the way thereto
> plain and open at his feet.
> Thou hast commanded from the beginning Thy covenant with man to deliver
> him from mortality and to grant him the freedom of Thy eternal Kingdom.
> Age after age Thou hast sent Thy prophets to renew the same, to bear Thy
> children love-messages from Thee, and to bestow on them new and ever richer
> gifts.
> Praise be to Thee, O God, from us who remember our benefits, who recount
> our blessings, and Who from our hearts give thanks unto Thee, the Beloved.
> Praise be to Thee Who hast granted us birth in this time of wonder, this great
> age of breaking light!
> We have walked in pride before Thee, but Thou hast overcome us by Thy
> humility.
> We have turned from Thy presence, but Thy love has overtaken us, and drawn
> us home to Thee.
> We have earned the wages of sin, but Thou hast brought to us Eternal Life.
> Praise be to Thee Whose compassion has overshadowed us, whose
> forgiveness has descended upon us, Whose mercy has given us life, Whose hand
> has guided us to the highway of Thy Kingdom, Who chose for Thyself exile and
> bonds that Thou mightest redeem us.
> O Thou Whose holiness and might are above Thy creatures’ praise, accept
> from us who love and worship Thee this praise we offer.
> A little child shall lead them
> Often with enchanted pleasure
> Have I sped an evening’s leisure
> Taking to me for a guide
> From my lonely fireside
> Homer or Scheherazade
> And the wondrous tales they made
> Of a world beyond the dawn
> Where magic and her brood were born.
> Whoso enters there will meet
> Sorceress and grim Afreet
> Heroes go adventuring
> Carpets fly and sirens sing
> Gardens where prodigious gems
> Nod on all the flower-stems
> Lavish on a beggar’s chalice
> Wealth that would have decked a palace.
> Marvel treads on marvel’s heels
> Till the dizzy Reason reels
> And e’en Fancy is perplexed
> Wondering what can happen next
> This I read, and thought it all
> Gorgeous but chimerical—
> Till the day I married you
> And then I found it all was true!
> Ghoul and wizard, ______ and sprite
> Could they all their charms unite
> Ne’er should win the witching power
> Love has given you for dower.
> Though they post on every breeze,
> Dive beneath the tropic seas,
> Though in cave and mountain peak
> Far they roam and long they seek
> All they’ll win by force of stealth
> Were a trifle to the wealth
> Of that secret inner world
> 
> A little child shall lead them   151
> That within your smile is curled.
> Yours is not a conscious art;
> ’Tis the wild magic of your heart.
> You but speak a simple word
> Often said and often heard
> When before my wondering eyes
> An unveiled Paradise
> Bursts about me into flower.
> Here each nimble-footed hour
> Daft with all the fun that’s in it
> Dances like a madcap minute.
> All the earth in light enfolden
> Seems a chamber green and golden
> Dight for love’s festivities;
> And a thousand harmonics
> Softer sweeter more endeared
> Than my heart had ever heard
> Gush from every bank and rise
> Fill the woods and touch the skies.
> Wind and cloud and leaf and stream
> Notes of purest music seem
> And all Nature like a choir
> Tuned to the sun-God’s lyre
> In new hymns of jubilee
> Chants her ancient ecstasy.
> Yet the flowing cup of bliss
> Holds more precious wine than this.
> Our sweet rapture did but screen
> Brighter glories yet unseen;
> ’Twas a distant fragrance blown
> From a Garden yet unknown.
> Love has pierced the mystery
> Hid within the prophecy
> Of the heavenly poets who said
> ‘By a child shall they be led,’
> ‘From a babe is wisdom gained
> From the weak is strength ordained.’
> 152                          The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> By some mightier miracle
> Than any feigne’d charm or spell
> A little smiling newborn boy
> In his gift will hold more joy
> Open glimpses of a heaven
> More remote from earth than even
> That enchanted land we knew
> Where all fairy-tales came true.
> Now when e’er I gaze upon
> This my loved and loving son,
> When beside his bed I keep
> Watcho’er his elysian sleep
> When I fold him in my arms
> Nestling safe from all alarms
> Or behold his innocence
> With a sinner’s reverence—
> Lo, an infinite high hope
> On my longing ‘gins to ope!
> With this tiny hand to guide
> We will leave the cold earth’s side
> And faring far and far away
> Beyond the springs of night and day
> Will travel to the end the road
> That bears all lovers up to God.
> Envoy
> BE of good cheer!
> What but the glory of the Light of Light
> Could cast such shadows on a world forlorn?
> If our hearts whispered not the hope of morn
> Would we so hate the horror of his night?
> What is it else than desperate bitter fear
> That drives the troops of evil, who know well
> Their hour is come, to vent their dying rage
> Upon the people of this heaven-lit age
> And seek by every means they may to sell
> Their lost dominion dear?
> Be of good cheer!
> The very depth of our perplexity
> Amid this whirling world of strife and care
> Where disillusion beckons to despair
> Is of itself a call for help, a cry
> That angels’ hearts will not be slow to hear.
> For it is ever in such a time as ours,
> When man has ransacked sea and land for rest
> And never sought the heaven in his own breast,
> That God reveals once more His hidden powers
> And in His might draws near.
> Be of good cheer!
> Though all things change, Truth’s kingdom is secure.
> The forms of faith come, go, and are forgot,
> But that which they enshrine can perish not.
> Altars may crumble, worship will endure.
> Those holy things that God bids man revere
> Reign on unchecked by man’s satanic will;
> Wisdom and love are of a higher birth
> Than these frail phantom forces of the earth
> And take their deathless power from Him who still
> Above all change stands clear.
> 
> 154                         The Mission of Bahá’u’lláh
> Be of good cheer!
> What kings desired in vain God gives to you
> And in this wondrous day before our eyes
> Unseals His ancient book of mysteries
> Making all things in earth and heaven new.
> Truth hath come down from some far flaming sphere;
> Lo, in our midst her sacred fires burn!
> And see—trace back these countless rays of light
> To the One Point wherein they all unite,
> And bow your forehead in the dust to learn
> That God Himself is here!
>
> — *The Mission of Baha'u'llah: And Other Literary Pieces (Used by permission of the curator)*