The Days Are Many, the Sun Is One: At the Church of the Divine Paternity
'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, (1922), Bahá'í Publishing Trust · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
New York (today: New York, NY, USA)
On the evening of May 19, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed a Universalist congregation at the Church of the Divine Paternity on Central Park West, New York. Esther Foster took the notes preserved in The Promulgation of Universal Peace. The setting was apt: a church whose theology already reached toward the universal.
The Master began with the image that would stay with the audience:
Religions are many, but the reality of religion is one. The days are many, but the sun is one.
Reality, He said, does not admit of multiplicity. There is only one truth; there are only innumerable approaches to it. The various holy Manifestations who have come — Krishna, Moses, Christ, Muḥammad, the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh — are as the sun, which shines forth from different dawning points. The dawn changes with the season; the sun does not.
From this He drew two consequences that the Universalists in the hall would have heard with relief and shock at once. The first concerned reason:
If religion does not agree with science, it is superstition and ignorance; for God has endowed man with reason.
A faith that requires the believer to deny what reason can see is not a faith — it is a habit. Religion, properly understood, never comes into final conflict with science, because both are investigations of the same single reality.
The second consequence concerned hatred:
If [religion] become the cause of hatred and strife, its absence is preferable.
This was a hard sentence for a religious congregation. The Master did not soften it. The purpose of religion is unity. Where it produces division, it has been corrupted into its own opposite — and where it has been corrupted into its own opposite, it would be better that it not exist at all than that it continue in that form.
He closed by recounting how, in Persia under Bahá’u’lláh, Christian and Muslim, Jew and Zoroastrian had been brought into a single fellowship where the old hostilities had simply ceased to operate. Such a unity was possible, He told the New York audience, because the foundation that produced it was real. The same recognition was asked of the West.
Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of May 19, 1912 at the Church of the Divine Paternity, New York. Notes by Esther Foster. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.
Cite this story
'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/
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