True Shepherds Gather, They Do Not Scatter: Fanwood, 1912

On May 31, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed an audience at the Town Hall in Fanwood, New Jersey. The setting was modest — a small suburban hall in a small New Jersey town — and the talk that survives in The Promulgation of Universal Peace is among the clearest of His statements on what religion is, when it is working, and what it is, when it is not.

He began with a diagnosis. The instability of the modern world, He said, is not principally an economic or political matter. Its root goes deeper:

The cause of the chaotic condition lies in the differences among the religions and finds its origin in the animosity and hatred existing between sects and denominations.

The fact that humanity cannot agree on its highest things, He continued, makes it impossible to agree on anything else. And the sectarianism is not, by and large, the fault of the original Founders. It is the fault of inheritance — of believers who have ceased to investigate and have begun, instead, to repeat:

Imitation destroys the foundation of religion, extinguishes the spirituality of the human world, transforms heavenly illumination into darkness and deprives man of the knowledge of God.

He gave the example of the Jewish authorities who had inherited their commentaries on the prophecies and so could not see Christ when He stood before them. The trouble was not the Tradition; the trouble was reading the Tradition as though it were itself the prophecy.

The remedy is to return to the work of the Manifestations themselves. And that work, the Master said, has a single shape across the dispensations:

The Prophets of God have come to unite the children of men and not to disperse them, to establish the law of love and not enmity.

A true Shepherd gathers. A false shepherd is known by what He scatters. Moses brought together a scattered people; Christ gathered fishermen and Romans, Greeks and Jews into a single fellowship; Muḥammad united the warring tribes of Arabia. The Bahá’í test of any teaching, then, is whether it produces the gathering, or whether it produces the scattering.

He closed the Fanwood talk by appealing for the laying-aside of all prejudice — whether it be religious, racial, political or patriotic. This was the only foundation on which the universal peace He had crossed an ocean to proclaim could rest.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of May 31, 1912 at Town Hall, Fanwood, New Jersey. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'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/