Christ and the Dead Animal

Writing to Dr. M. G. Skinner of Washington, D.C., whose aims included the prevention of backbiting, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said: “One must expose the praiseworthy qualities of the souls and not their evil attributes. The friends must overlook their shortcomings and faults and speak only of their virtues and not their defects.” He continued:

It is related that His Holiness Christ—May my life be a sacrifice to Him!—one day, accompanied by His apostles, passed by the corpse of a dead animal. One of them said: “How putrid has this animal become!” The other exclaimed: “How it is deformed!” A third cried out: “What a stench! How cadaverous looking!” But His Holiness Christ said: “Look at its teeth! How white they are!” Consider, that He did not look at all at the defects of that animal; nay, rather, He searched well until He found the beautiful white teeth. He observed only the whiteness of the teeth and overlooked entirely the deformity of the body, the dissolution of its organs and the bad odor.

This is the attribute of the children of the Kingdom. This is the conduct and the manner of the real Bahá’ís. I hope that all the believers will attain to this lofty station.

Source: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablet to Dr. M. G. Skinner, “Tablet from Abdul-Baha concerning ‘Backbiting’”, Star of the West, vol. 4, no. 11 (27 September 1913), p. 192

Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: fault-finding).

Various. *bahaistories.com archive*. https://bahaistories.com/subject/fault-finding