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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
By 'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1922 · Bahá'í Publishing Trust
Formative Age (1921–1957) · public domain
Talks delivered by 'Abdu'l-Bahá during His 1912 American journey.
About 'Abdu'l-Bahá
Eldest son of Bahá'u'lláh and, by His Father's explicit Covenant, the appointed Centre of the Faith and authoritative interpreter of His Writings. Travelled to Egypt, Europe, and North America between 1911 and 1913, founding the Western Bahá'í community.
1844–1921 · Centre of the Covenant
Stories by era covered
Featured figures
“He has renewed that springtime.”
“white and black sitting together.”
From All Colours Are One: The Master Proclaims Oneness at Howard University
“Tonight I have come to meet you, the kings of God's earth.”
“When freedom of conscience, liberty of thought and right of”
From Where Conscience Is Free: Brooklyn's Central Congregational Church
“speech prevail — that is to say, when every man according to”
From Where Conscience Is Free: Brooklyn's Central Congregational Church
Memorials of the Faithful
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1915
Some Answered Questions
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1908
Paris Talks
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1912
Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1909
Bahá'í World Faith
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1943
A Traveler's Narrative
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1886
'Abdu'l-Bahá in London
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá · 1912
Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá
Primary Source'Abdu'l-Bahá
The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation
Cited in Authoritative HistoryNabíl-i-A'ẓam · 1932
God Passes By
Cited in Authoritative HistoryShoghi Effendi · 1944
The Chosen Highway
Secondary RetellingLady Blomfield · 1940
Portals to Freedom
Secondary RetellingHoward Colby Ives · 1937
The Diary of Juliet Thompson
Secondary RetellingJuliet Thompson · 1947
World Order
Secondary RetellingWorld Order Editors · 1935
During His 1912 journey across America, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gathered the friends in New York to speak to them of the Covenant of Bahá'u'lláh, and gave that city a name it has carried ever since — the City of the Covenant. The talks of that journey, collected in The Promulgation of Universal Peace, show the Centre of the Covenant pointing the new Western believers toward firmness, unity, and the great work of teaching the Cause to all the world.
In the spring of 1912, only weeks after the Bahá'í new year, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke in a New York home of the deepest meaning of the season. The coming of each Manifestation of God, He taught, is a divine springtime that quickens a wintered world; Christ's advent was such a spring, and the long winter that followed had now given way again, for "Bahá'u'lláh has come into this world. He has renewed that springtime."
In April 1912, in the segregated capital of the United States, 'Abdu'l-Bahá stood before a great mixed audience of Black and white at Howard University and proclaimed, plainly and without flinching, the oneness of humanity — that there are no whites and blacks before God, that all colours are one, and that the world of humanity is a single garden whose many colours are its beauty.
Isfandíyár had been a servant in the household of Bahá'u'lláh, freed when Bahá'u'lláh emancipated His father's slaves. When persecution scattered the family and the Sháh's officers hunted him, he had every chance to flee — yet he refused, because he owed money to the shopkeepers of Ṭihrán and would not let it be said that a servant of Bahá'u'lláh had taken goods without paying. Half a century later, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called him a perfect man.
On April 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the men of the Bowery Mission in lower Manhattan — several hundred of New York's poorest, many homeless, gathered in the Mission hall for the evening service. The Master spoke to them as the equals of any king and gave them, at the close of the address, a silver quarter from His own hand.
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.
On the second of June, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá entered the Church of the Ascension at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street in Manhattan, and addressed an Episcopal congregation on the *Collective Center* — the Manifestation of God around whom every people, of every race and belief, can become a single melody.
On June 15, 1912, in a home on West Seventy-eighth Street in New York, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the kind of distinction He wished for the Bahá'ís — not financial or worldly eminence, but a distinction of love, character, and steadfast service.
At the Church of the Divine Paternity on Central Park West on May 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told a New York congregation that religion has many forms but one reality: as the days are many but the sun is one, so the Manifestations are many but the Truth they reveal is single. If religion sets itself against science, it becomes mere superstition; if it becomes a cause of hatred and strife, its absence would be preferable.
At Coronation Hall in Montreal on September 3, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed socialists and labour leaders. Drawing on the body's nervous system as His metaphor, He laid out a vision of economic justice in which no member of the human family could be permitted to remain in want.
On the evening of November 8, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the congregation of the Eighth Street Temple in Washington — and reframed the long history of Jewish-Christian misunderstanding by arguing that it was through Christ that the Torah travelled into six hundred languages.
At the Town Hall in Fanwood, New Jersey on May 31, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá named the chaos of the modern world as a chaos produced by religion itself — by the partisanship of sects clinging to inheritance rather than searching for truth. The true Manifestations, He said, are shepherds; their work is to gather, never to scatter.
On December 5, 1912, on the deck of the steamship Celtic in New York harbor, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave His final talk before sailing for Europe. After nine months in the West, He left the believers with the standard against which their whole tour was to be measured: the earth is one native land, and all mankind one family.
On November 5, 1912, at the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke to friends about the role He saw America playing in the bringing of universal peace — and proposed an international conference of all nations that would surpass even the Hague tribunal.
At Green Acre on August 16, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá enumerated the four fallible standards of human knowledge — sense, intellect, tradition, and inspiration — then turned, in the same talk, to love as the binding force of all phenomena, and ended with a prayer for Sarah Farmer, the founder of the Green Acre Conferences.
On May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed a public gathering at Handel Hall on East Randolph Street in Chicago — one of His earliest Chicago talks. The Master spoke of the necessity of an international consciousness as the antidote to the prejudices of nation, of class, and of race that had been the burden of human history.
At a reception given in His honor by the New York Peace Society at the Hotel Astor on May 13, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá took the platform with one of His most quoted sentences: peace is light, war is darkness — and asked the assembled American peace movement to lead the world into the new century as the century of lights.
At the Hotel Plaza in Chicago on May 3, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out the central distinction between two kinds of educators: the philosophers, who train themselves and a circle around them, and the Manifestations of God, who alone have proved capable of universal education across whole nations.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the students and faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C. — the historically Black institution at the heart of African American higher education. His subject was the station of the human being: created in the image of God, possessed of a divine spark beyond every material limitation.
At a meeting of the International Peace Forum at Grace Methodist Episcopal Church on West 104th Street, New York, on May 12, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá argued that the United States was uniquely positioned to lead the world toward disarmament — precisely because she carried no imperial baggage.
On May 4, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called at Hull House in Chicago, the pioneering settlement house founded by Jane Addams in 1889 in the immigrant West Side district. He addressed the assembled residents, social workers and immigrant neighbors in the small main hall and later took tea with Miss Addams herself.
On September 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed a gathering of the Twin Cities Bahá'ís and inquirers in the parlour of the Leland Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. He spoke on the Holy Spirit as the living, active, present-tense bond between the human soul and the Divine reality.
On the morning of May 6, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá arrived by train at the Cleveland Union Station and was received by the small Cleveland Bahá'í community. He addressed them on the platform itself with a brief but characteristic speech: that the spirit of the Cause is carried not in great gatherings but in the small, faithful community of two or three friends.
At the dedication of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár grounds in Wilmette on May 1, 1912 — the same gathering at which Nettie Tobin's stone was laid as the cornerstone — 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke about the future Houses of Worship that would arise across the world, and gave the specific architectural instruction that the building must be *circular,* never triangular.
At the home of William Sutherland Maxwell and May Maxwell at 716 Pine Avenue West in Montreal on September 2, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá compared the human being left to nature to a field overgrown with thorns and thistles, and the Manifestations of God to the cultivators who turn that wilderness into a garden.
On April 30, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the Fourth Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Handel Hall in Chicago. He told the gathering that the colour of skin is accidental in nature; the spirit and intelligence of man is essential, and there alone are the divine virtues to be measured.
Speaking at the Orient-Occident-Unity Conference in Washington on April 20, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá invoked Bahá'u'lláh's image of humanity as *leaves of one tree, drops of one sea,* called America to be the first nation to lay the foundation of international agreement, and thanked the Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople for the liberation that had made His Western journey possible.
At the Hotel Schenley in Pittsburgh on May 7, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out six of Bahá'u'lláh's principles in a single sustained address: independent search after truth, the oneness of humanity, the harmony of religion and science, the abolition of prejudices, the equal education of women, and the necessity of a spiritual rather than merely material foundation for universal peace.
On October 7, 1912, at the Japanese Independent Church in Oakland, California, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the Japanese Young Men's Christian Association on the destructiveness of prejudice — drawing on what He had personally witnessed during His exile in Rumelia.
At the home of Dr. and Mrs. Florian Krug on Park Avenue in New York on July 15, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá distinguished between thanks given by the tongue and thanks given by the conduct of a life — and asked the friends to send Him away from New York with the sight of unity among them.
Two years before the First World War, 'Abdu'l-Bahá stood in the Assembly Hall of the Hotel Sacramento on October 26, 1912, and warned His audience that Europe had become *like an arsenal* in which a single spark might detonate the whole continent. The remedy, He said, was not in the chancelleries but in the spiritual recognition that all the religions are renewals of one revelation.
On October 7, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the assembled students and faculty of Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto. He took up the great Bahá'í theme of the harmony of science and religion — and warned that the cultivation of one wing without the other could not carry the bird of human progress.
On October 12, 1912, the Reform Jewish congregation of Temple Emmanu-El in San Francisco received an unprecedented visitor: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who had come to speak of Bahá'u'lláh and of Christ from a synagogue pulpit. His subject was the common purpose of every revealed religion: the bond of love among human beings.
On April 23, 1912, days after the sinking of the RMS Titanic, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gathered with the friends at the Parsons home in Washington and offered consolation: death, He said, is not termination but the soul's birth into greater light, as the infant is reluctantly born into the world.
At the Hotel Plaza in Chicago on May 2, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the difference between Bahá'í consultation and parliamentary debate — drawing on the example of the early disciples of Christ to show what spiritual conference looks like.
At the Parsons home in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá recounted a Persian historical episode of a Zoroastrian high priest whose prejudice melted when he saw the spiritual authority of the very Arabs his nation had despised — drawing the parallel to His own day.
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