Quiet, Untheatrical, Most Convincing: Esslemont on the Master in London

J. E. Esslemont, the Scottish physician whose Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era would become the most widely read introduction to the Faith in the English-speaking world, encountered ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for the first time at Esslemont’s own home in Bournemouth in 1914. But the chapters of his book that describe the Master at length draw on the recollections of those who had seen and heard Him in the West three years earlier — particularly during the 1911 visit to London.

Esslemont quotes the testimony of those who attended the gatherings at the Westminster home of Lady Blomfield, where the Master was the guest. They had expected, many of them, the kind of theatrical religious performance to which Edwardian London had grown accustomed. They received something quite different.

His delivery was quiet, untheatrical, most convincing.

The Master spoke without notes. He did not raise His voice. He made no rhetorical gestures and no special claims for Himself. He explained the teachings of His Father with the patience of a teacher with all the time in the world, sometimes pausing mid-sentence to wait for a translator to render the Persian into English.

What Esslemont’s witnesses report, again and again, is the strange weight of the Master’s simplicity. The simpler the sentence, the more difficult it became to forget. People who took notes found, in their own books afterwards, that their notes captured very little of what they had felt was happening in the room.

Esslemont returns, throughout Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era, to the conviction that the Cause was best understood not from the outside but from the inside — that the proofs of revelation lie not chiefly in argument but in the kind of life and presence that revelation produces. The Master in London in 1911 was, for him and for many other Westerners, the principal evidence on which they came to consider all the rest.

The Esslemont who eventually wrote the book was a doctor by training and a sceptic by habit. He had been brought, by what he had seen in others and then in himself, to a settled conviction. The book he wrote was, in effect, the record of how untheatrical, most convincing speech can change a careful mind.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (1923). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241