Philadelphia: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at the Baptist Temple

On the morning of the 9th of June, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His party travelled by train from New York to Philadelphia. The visit was brief — two days only — but the Master's schedule for the time was full. Mahmúd records the principal appointments: a public address that evening at the Unitarian Church on Locust Street; the following afternoon at the Baptist Temple on Broad Street; private meetings throughout both days at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, a Bahá'í family of the city.

1 / 9

The Baptist Temple address is the one Mahmúd preserves most fully. The Temple, then under the pastorate of Russell H. Conwell, was the great Protestant pulpit of Philadelphia and one of the most prominent evangelical congregations in the country. The audience numbered, by Mahmúd's estimate, over a thousand. The Master had been given a full hour to speak.

2 / 9

He began, in His usual American manner, by honouring what was already good in the tradition the audience represented. He named the social work of the Baptist Temple — its hospital, its educational programmes, its commitment to the poor of the surrounding neighbourhoods — as visible expressions of the spirit of Christ. He praised the city of Philadelphia, named for brotherly love, for the long tradition of religious tolerance that William Penn had established in it.

3 / 9

He then turned to the proposal His own ministry was carrying westward. The brotherly love of which the city was named, the Master said, must in this new age extend not only to the brothers of one's own faith and one's own race but to all the children of the human family without distinction. The teachings of Bahá'u'lláh were the explicit articulation, in terms suited to the present age, of this older principle.

4 / 9

> This city is named for brotherly love. May it become, in > our own time, the practice of the name.

5 / 9

The phrase, lifted by Mahmúd from the close of the address, caught the Master's characteristic rhetorical strategy: He did not propose a new teaching against the audience's tradition; He proposed the deeper practice of the audience's own best inheritance.

6 / 9

The Reverend Conwell, when the Master had finished, rose to thank Him and to commend the address to his congregation as the most distinguished sermon they had heard from a guest speaker in many years. He invited the Master to return on any future American journey. The Master thanked him and the audience and took His leave.

7 / 9

The Philadelphia visit was, in the longer Mahmúd record, one of the smaller stops on the journey. Its symbolism — a Persian Bahá'í teacher in the great American Baptist pulpit, calling the city of brotherly love into the practice of its own best name — was permanent.

8 / 9

*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for June 9, 1912; see original for full text.*

9 / 9