The Days Are Many, the Sun Is One: At the Church of the Divine Paternity

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.

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The Master began with the image that would stay with the audience:

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> Religions are many, but the reality of religion is one. The days > are many, but the sun is one.

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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.

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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:

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> If religion does not agree with science, it is superstition and > ignorance; for God has endowed man with reason.

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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.

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The second consequence concerned hatred:

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> If [religion] become the cause of hatred and strife, its absence > is preferable.

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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.

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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.

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