The Discourse at Clark: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Worcester

Mahmúd's Diary records that on the morning of May 22, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and a small party travelled by train from Boston to Worcester at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University.

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Hall, in 1912, was one of the most distinguished American academics of his generation — the founder of the American Psychological Association, a pioneer of child development research, the host who two years earlier had brought Sigmund Freud to America for his only American lectures. He had been following the news of the Master's tour and had requested that He visit Clark and address the faculty and students.

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The Master accepted. The diary records the warm reception at the railway station, the carriage to the campus, and the gathering of the university's faculty and senior students at the lecture hall. The audience, Mahmúd notes, included specialists in chemistry, physics, biology, philosophy, and the new psychology that Hall had helped to found.

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The Master spoke on the unity of science and religion. The diary preserves the central thread of the talk: that the universe is the orderly creation of one Creator; that science is the disciplined exploration of that order; that religion, rightly understood, is the disciplined exploration of the same order's spiritual dimension; and that the two pursuits, when each is held to its own true principle, cannot disagree. He gave a sentence the friends would carry away with them:

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> Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's > intelligence can soar.

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He spoke also, Mahmúd records, of the duty of the educated person — the responsibility laid upon the trained mind to use its training in the service of humankind. The faculty members present, several of whom were of the secular cast of mind that had become characteristic of American higher education, found in the talk no quarrel with their work but a frame for it.

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After the talk Hall received the Master in his office for a private conversation. The diary does not preserve the details of that conversation. It records only that Hall accompanied Him personally back to the railway station and saw the party off.

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The Master returned to Boston by the afternoon train. The Worcester morning had taken three hours. The Clark address would be cited, by faculty members in later years, as one of the most arresting they had ever heard in their auditorium.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for May 22, 1912; see original for full text.*

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