"Do You Teach the Spiritual Things?" — Stanwood Cobb

*A retelling drawn from **Bahá'í Chronicles** and from Stanwood Cobb's own recollections of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Phrases in quotation marks are words Cobb himself preserved, or words preserved in that record.*

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Knowledge can be wide and still leave out the one thing that matters most. That was the lesson 'Abdu'l-Bahá taught a young American teacher named Stanwood Cobb — not with a lecture, but with a single quiet question that Cobb would remember for the rest of his very long life.

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Cobb was a man of real learning. Born in Massachusetts in 1881, he had been valedictorian of his college class and had taken an advanced degree at Harvard in philosophy and comparative religion. He had given his life to teaching, and he was good at it.

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By the time he encountered the Bahá'í Faith he had already met 'Abdu'l-Bahá more than once — first in the prison-city of 'Akká, on visits in 1909 and 1910, and again during the Master's journeys to the West. Of all those meetings, Cobb said, the one he counted "the most important interview" took place in Paris in 1913.

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He was then on the staff of a travel school for boys. On his first visit, Cobb recalled, 'Abdu'l-Bahá "inquired about the school and asked me what I taught." It was the kind of question a teacher loves to answer. Cobb listed his subjects with the quiet pride of a competent man: "I told Him that I taught English, Latin, Algebra and Geometry." A respectable curriculum, the very furniture of an educated mind.

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Then 'Abdu'l-Bahá "gazed intently" at him "with His luminous eyes" and asked one more thing: **"Do you teach the spiritual things?"**

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The question, Cobb admitted, "embarrassed me." How could he explain that the school's whole purpose was to drill boys for their college-entrance examinations, and that this left no room for anything else? "So I simply answered: 'No, there is not time for that.'"

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'Abdu'l-Bahá said nothing more. He "made no comment on this answer," Cobb wrote. "But He did not need to." The silence did the work that no rebuke could have done. In the days afterward the young teacher heard his own words echoing back at him, and they indicted him. "Out of my own mouth," he confessed, "I had condemned myself and modern education. No time for spiritual things!

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That, of course, is just what is wrong with our modern materialistic 'civilization.' It has no time to give for spiritual things." The Master's question and "His silent response," Cobb came to see, had shown him plainly that "from His viewpoint spiritual things should come first."

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Here is the very heart of the Feast of 'Ilm. Cobb had genuine knowledge — Latin and mathematics are good things, and a teacher who imparts them well does honourable work. But 'Abdu'l-Bahá's question revealed that knowledge of facts, however broad, is not the whole of education, nor the most important part. A schooling that sharpens the mind and starves the soul has left out the one learning that gives all the rest its purpose. The truly educated person is not merely informed; he is wise, and good, and turned toward God.

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Stanwood Cobb took the lesson and built his life upon it. He became an educator of note, and he wrote and lectured for decades on what teaching ought to be, carrying into the wider world the conviction that real education must feed the spirit as well as train the intellect. Late in his life he set down his recollections in a memoir, *Memories of 'Abdu'l-Bahá,* so that others might receive what he had received.

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He lived to be a hundred and one years old, dying in 1982 — and across the whole of that century-long life, the question first put to a proud young teacher in Paris never left him.

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This is what the Feast of 'Ilm asks of us. Gather knowledge, yes — widely, honestly, all your life. But never let it crowd out "the spiritual things." For the knowledge that matters most is the knowledge that makes a soul wise and draws it nearer to God, and there must always be time for that.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Bahá'í Chronicles** and Stanwood Cobb's **Memories of 'Abdu'l-Bahá**.*

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