All Nations Are One Family: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Farewell from New York

On the afternoon of December 5, 1912, the SS *Celtic* lay at her New York berth, her boilers warming, her stewards making ready. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and His small party were to sail at evening for Liverpool, completing the eight months of the American journey that had begun, on the same harbour, on April 11.

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Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání records the small farewell gathering on the dock and aboard the ship. The Bahá’í friends of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington had come to see Him off. He had been with them, in person, longer than they had ever imagined possible; now He was leaving, and many of them understood — though no one would say it aloud — that they would not see Him again.

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The Master spoke briefly to those gathered. Mahmúd preserves the central counsel He left with them. It was the same counsel He had been giving in different forms across the continent for eight months. Now He gave it in its simplest possible formulation:

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> We must be kind to the people of the world and forget all > religious, racial, patriotic and political prejudices. The > whole earth is one globe. All nations are one family.

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The instruction was both elementary and impossible. *Be kind.* *Forget the prejudices.* The Master had spent eight months laying out, principle by principle, the philosophical and historical reasons why the program He was now reducing to two sentences was correct and necessary. The two sentences were what He wanted His friends to carry into the years that would follow.

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A few days earlier, on December 1, He had spoken to a group of Christian ministers in New York with a hardness that startled the room. *The teachings of Christ are forgotten,* He had told them.

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> Christ commanded Peter to sheathe his sword... But now, > contrary to these teachings, see how Christians are killing > one another.

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He was twenty months from the outbreak of the First World War. He had warned, in talk after talk, that the European arsenals would explode. The friends on the dock did not yet know how soon they would.

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Mahmúd records that as the *Celtic* pulled away into the evening, the friends on the pier waved long after they could see Him. Many of them would never see Him again. Many of them, the diary records, returned to their cities and to the slow patient labour of becoming, as He had asked, *kind to the people of the world.*

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for December 5, 1912; see original for full text.*

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