America's Calling: A Talk at the Grand Hotel, Cincinnati

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s American tour was, by November 1912, drawing to its last weeks. He had been on the road for seven months. On the evening of the fifth, in the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati, He gathered the friends of the city for a brief talk that took up a theme He had returned to throughout the journey.

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The American republic, He said, had been raised up for a particular work in the family of nations.

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> America has arisen to spread the teachings of peace, to increase > the illumination of humankind and bestow happiness and prosperity > upon the children of men.

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The sentence was not flattery. The country in 1912 was not yet an imperial power; she stood, in the Master’s reading, in a unique position to advocate disarmament and arbitration without the suspicion that attached to every European foreign ministry. The Master commended the efforts then under way — President Taft’s arbitration treaties, the Hague tribunal — but pressed beyond them. He called for an international body in which every nation would have its representatives, a parliament of humanity that would, in His words, surpass even the Hague.

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The dream was, in 1912, ahead of its time. The League of Nations was eight years away. The United Nations was a generation further on. Today’s system of world bodies, with all its limitations, is a distant approximation of the structure ‘Abdu’l-Bahá pictured that night in Cincinnati — though Bahá’ís hold that the full vision still lies ahead, in the assembly of nations Bahá’u’lláh foretold for the fullness of time.

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He left the friends with a sense of charge: not pride in country but service through it. America’s gift, He had said again and again across the journey, was not power. It was peace.

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