A Stream of Power: Ives at the Master's Farewell, December 1912

In Portals to Freedom Howard Colby Ives describes the gathering on the evening of December 2, 1912, in the small upper rooms in New York where the Master’s last counsel to His American followers was delivered. The SS Celtic was waiting at the docks; in two days ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would sail.

Ives sat as close to the Master as he could. He records the physical sensation of sitting in His presence at that moment — not as poetry but as observation:

I sat very close to Him and it seemed there flowed from Him to me a veritable stream of spiritual energy which at times was overpowering.

The Master spoke quietly. The transcript, Ives notes, runs to about three hundred words; no transcript, however, could carry what was actually present in the room. He likens the evening to sitting at a table with Jesus on the night of the Last Supper. The comparison is bold; he makes it without apology.

The substance of what the Master said was the substance He had been saying for nine months across the continent. But on this last evening it had the simplicity of a final summary. Ives records the central counsel:

You must manifest complete love and affection towards all mankind. Do not exalt yourselves above others but consider all as your equals.

Two practices, then. Active love towards every human being. And the inner discipline of treating no soul as less than one’s own. Together, the Master suggested, these two would be sufficient — sufficient to carry the work He was leaving behind, sufficient to make of the small American Bahá’í community something that the country and the century would feel.

Ives took the counsel literally. The remainder of his life, as Portals to Freedom shows, was an extended attempt to live inside it. The book ends not in a thesis but in a witness: that the stream of spiritual energy he had felt flowing from the Master in that crowded room never quite stopped flowing.

Paraphrased from Portals to Freedom (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937); see original for full text.

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom