A Proof His Life-Work Was Not in Vain: Esslemont on the Master's Passing

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, whose account of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing introduced it to many in the West. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

Among the early books that carried the Bahá'í Faith into the English-speaking world, few have been more loved or more often reprinted than Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, written by the Scottish physician John Esslemont. He had himself made the pilgrimage to Haifa in the Master's last years, had sat in His presence, and had even been entrusted with helping to put His papers in order. So when Esslemont came, in his book, to set down the account of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing, he wrote not as a distant compiler but as one who had known and loved the One of whom he wrote. His telling has a particular value: it is the way an early Western believer, close to the events, understood what the world had lost — and what it had gained.

Esslemont records, first, how gently the end came. There had been no long agony, no dramatic decline. In the small hours of the morning of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá simply slipped away. His two daughters were watching by His bedside, and to them, Esslemont writes, He "passed away so peacefully that . . . it seemed as if He had gone quietly to sleep." There is a whole life contained in that sentence. A soul that has lived in constant nearness to God does not need to wrestle with death; it crosses the threshold as easily as a tired child sinks into rest. The One who had borne exile, imprisonment, slander, and the weight of a worldwide Cause for nearly thirty years met His own death with the same serenity He had carried through all of it.

Then Esslemont turns to the funeral, and here his account becomes a kind of wonder. The news of the passing went out, and the city of Haifa and the country round about rose up to mourn. There came, he records, the High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel; the Governor of Jerusalem; the heads of the various religious communities; the notables of Palestine. And there came the people — and Esslemont is careful to name them all, because the naming is the point. There were, in his telling, "Jews, Christians, Moslems, Druses, Egyptians, Greeks, Turks, Kurds . . . about ten thousand in number." Behind the coffin of this one Servant of God walked a procession that contained, in miniature, the whole quarrelsome, divided humanity of that ancient and contested land — and for that single morning it moved as one body, in one grief, up one mountain.

When the procession reached the Shrine of the Báb on the slope of Mount Carmel, representatives of the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jewish communities rose to speak. Esslemont records that nine speakers in all delivered their orations, bearing, in his words, "eloquent and moving witness to their love and admiration" for the One whom each, in the language of his own faith, had come to honour. Men of religions that ordinarily kept their distance from one another, and sometimes their suspicion, stood in turn beside the same coffin and reached for words large enough to name what their city had lost.

It is what Esslemont makes of this scene that lifts his account above mere reportage. He does not present that mixed multitude only as a measure of how widely 'Abdu'l-Bahá was loved, though it was certainly that. He sees in it something deeper. The whole life of 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been spent labouring for one great end: the oneness of humanity — the breaking down of the walls between nation and nation, race and race, religion and religion. He had taught it on two continents; He had embodied it in His own boundless hospitality; He had fed Jew and Christian and Muslim alike from the same store through the famine. And now, at His death, there gathered around His coffin the very peoples He had spent His life trying to draw together, united for one morning in a single sorrow. That gathering, Esslemont writes, was "a fitting tribute to the memory of One Who had labored all His life for unity of religions, of races, of tongues" — and then he adds the words that are the heart of the whole matter: it was "a tribute, and also a proof, that His lifework had not been in vain."

Pause on that word: a proof. It is one thing to spend a lifetime preaching that humanity is one and that its divisions can be healed. It is quite another to have that teaching answered, at the very end, by the spontaneous coming-together of ten thousand mourners of every creed and people, on no formal summons, in unfeigned grief. The funeral was not a ceremony staged to demonstrate a doctrine; it was the doctrine demonstrating itself. The unity 'Abdu'l-Bahá had proclaimed was, for one luminous morning on Mount Carmel, simply visible — walking up the slope, weeping at the Shrine, speaking in nine voices from three traditions. The seed He had sown all His life had, in that hour, shown its first green blade. His life-work had not been in vain, and the proof was the very crowd that came to mourn its passing.

Esslemont, writing not long after, understood what this meant for those who would read his book in lands far from Haifa. The Master had gone; but the spirit He had released into the world had not gone with Him. The same power that had drawn that mixed multitude up the mountain was already at work, drawing strangers together into friendship in cities across the earth, wherever His teachings were taking root. The funeral on Mount Carmel was not only an ending. It was a first, large, public sign of the thing 'Abdu'l-Bahá had given His life to bring about — and a promise that the work would go on.

On the anniversary of His ascension, Esslemont's quiet phrase is worth carrying in the heart. We mourn, as the ten thousand mourned, sorrowing that such a Presence has departed. But we may also do what Esslemont did: look at the fruit of that life — the unlikely friendships, the broken walls, the peoples drawn together in His name — and read in them the same proof he read in the crowd on the mountain. His life-work was not in vain. It is still bearing its fruit, and we are part of the harvest.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19241/pg19241-images.html