All Offering the Same Melody: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at the Church of the Ascension

The Church of the Ascension stands at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street in lower Manhattan, a small Episcopal parish that had taken seriously the social-gospel currents of the period. Its rector had invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to address the congregation on the morning of the second of June, 1912 — the first time, by long tradition, that a non-Christian had been permitted to speak from the parish’s Sunday pulpit.

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The Master rose. He spoke not in confrontation but in widening.

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> The church is a collective center for mankind ... all in the > presence of the Lord, covenanting together in a covenant of love > and fellowship, all offering the same melody, prayer and > supplication to God.

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He framed the church, the synagogue, the mosque, the temple as *collective centers* — places in which scattered humanity could gather around a single principle of love. The real *Collective Center,* He went on, was not a building. It was the Manifestation of God for the day in question. Moses had been the Center for Israel; Christ had been the Center for the early Christian community; Bahá’u’lláh, He continued, was the Center for this age. Around each, in His turn, scattered peoples had been drawn together in covenant.

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Then He pressed a point He pressed often in America. *Material civilization,* however brilliant, is not sufficient. The prosperity of the cities, the science of the universities, the industrial accomplishments of the new century — these are remarkable, but they are not enough. They must be married, in any healthy society, to a corresponding development of the spirit. The West, He suggested, had developed astonishing material civilization without proportionate spiritual cultivation. The East had often done the reverse. The work of the new age was the marriage of the two.

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The Episcopal congregation listened, by the testimony of those who were present, with unusual quiet. The rector spoke afterward of the unprecedented experience of having heard, in his own pulpit, a coherent account of the spiritual purpose of his own church from someone outside it — and of recognising in the account the deepest things he himself had been trying, less ably, to say.

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