Brooklyn

Mahmúd's Diary preserves the moment in early June 1912 at a Unity Club gathering in Brooklyn when Admiral Robert E. Peary, the polar explorer, unexpectedly invited 'Abdu'l-Bahá to address the room — though the Master had been there only as a guest. The talk, given without notes, brought the distinguished gathering to a complete stillness.

In *Portals to Freedom* Howard Colby Ives describes the Sunday morning in 1912 when he invited 'Abdu'l-Bahá to speak from his own Unitarian pulpit in Brooklyn — and the strange experience of standing in his own church and watching his own congregation be addressed by the man whose presence had reorganised his ministry from within.

At the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn on June 16, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traced religious discord to one root: the inheritance of ancestral imitations rather than the active investigation of truth. Where conscience is free and every soul may speak its own conviction, He said, growth becomes inevitable.