The Doctor Who Read His Way to Certainty: John Esslemont

A retelling drawn from Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by Dr. J. E. Esslemont and the published record of his life. Esslemont's own book devotes an early chapter to "the independent investigation of truth." Phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in those sources.

The Bahá'í teaching that each soul must investigate the truth for itself, setting aside what is merely inherited or merely assumed, found one of its purest examples in a Scottish doctor named John Ebenezer Esslemont. He was by training and temperament a man who did not take things on trust. A physician educated at Aberdeen, he had spent his life learning to observe carefully, to weigh evidence, and to withhold judgment until the facts were in. He was also, for most of his adult life, a sick man himself, worn by the tuberculosis that would shorten his days. Such a man does not believe easily, and he does not believe quickly.

In late 1914 a small pamphlet about the Bahá'í Faith reached him at the sanatorium in Bournemouth, in the south of England, where he was the resident physician. By his own account he read it and was "immediately attracted." But attraction was not conviction. What Esslemont did next is the heart of the matter, and the reason his name belongs to the Feast of 'Ilm. He did not let a warm first impression stand in for knowledge. He set himself to investigate.

He began corresponding with the small community of British Bahá'ís, asking questions and gathering what literature existed. He attended his first Bahá'í gathering. He read, and compared, and weighed — bringing to the claims of a new religion the same disciplined scrutiny he would have brought to a question of medicine. Only when his examination satisfied him did he declare himself a Bahá'í, in 1915. It was the assent of a man who had checked his sources.

Then he discovered a need that turned his learning outward. The handful of books then available in English, he judged, was not equal to the serious questions that thoughtful Western inquirers were beginning to bring. So he resolved to write one himself: a single clear volume that would set out the history of the Faith, its teachings, and its practices for "the ordinary intelligent reader." He worked at the manuscript for seven years. He did not rush it; he gathered, checked, and revised.

His thirst to get it right drove him to a remarkable labour. Already in failing health and well into adult life, Esslemont set himself to learn Persian and Arabic, so that he might read the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá in their original tongues rather than rely on the translations of others. A dying man took up the long discipline of a new and difficult language — for no reward but accuracy, no motive but the wish to know the truth at first hand and convey it faithfully. That is what 'Ilm looks like when it is also a virtue of character: knowledge sought honestly, at real cost, in service of others.

The care extended even to the proof. While the book was in progress, 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself reviewed portions of it, and sent corrections through His household in Haifa, so that what Esslemont wrote might be sound. The completed work appeared in 1923 as Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era. It became the most widely read introduction to the Faith in the English language, carried to inquiring hearts in country after country, and translated in time into dozens of languages — the quiet fruit of one careful mind that refused to publish until it was sure.

In 1924, at the invitation of Shoghi Effendi, Esslemont travelled to Haifa to serve at the Guardian's side, taking up residence in the Master's house and helping with the translation and correspondence by which the young Guardian was building the worldwide structure of the Cause. He died there of his old illness on the twenty-second of November 1925, only fifty-one years old. Shoghi Effendi named him, after his death, a Hand of the Cause of God, and he was laid to rest on the slope of Mount Carmel.

The Aberdeen doctor's life answers a question people still ask: must careful, independent investigation be the enemy of faith? Esslemont's answer was no. Brought to bear honestly and humbly, the very rigour that made him doubt was the rigour that led him to certainty — and then made him labour, in his last years, to learn the languages of the Revelation he had found. He read his way to the truth, and then he wrote the book that has helped a century of others find it too.

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*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241