Four Proofs and a Prayer for Sarah Farmer: Green Acre, 1912

On August 16, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed a summer gathering at Green Acre, the conference centre Sarah Farmer had founded on the banks of the Piscataqua River in Eliot, Maine. The audience included theologians, philosophers, free-thinkers, and a generation of seekers who had come to Green Acre precisely because the denominational lines did not hold them.

The Master began by laying out the four standards by which human beings claim to know:

Proofs are of four kinds: first, through sense perception; second, through the reasoning faculty; third, from traditional or scriptural authority; fourth, through the medium of inspiration.

He then walked through each in turn and showed why no single standard is enough. The senses err — water appears bent in a glass; the sun appears to move. The reason errs — philosophers contradict each other across the centuries. Tradition errs — what one community holds sacred another rejects. Inspiration errs — every fanatic has claimed it. Only when these four are integrated and disciplined by one another can a human being approach reliable knowledge of reality.

From epistemology He turned, characteristically, to love. The single force that binds the four standards into a coherent life, He said, is the same force that binds the universe itself:

Love is the cause of the existence of all phenomena, and the absence of love is the cause of disintegration or nonexistence.

Cohesion in the mineral kingdom, attraction in the vegetable kingdom, instinct in the animal kingdom, the fellowship of human beings — all of these, the Master insisted, are degrees of the single principle of love.

He spoke briefly of the human spirit and its independence from the body. Man is the sovereign of nature; he breaks nature’s laws, He said: though an animal fitted by nature to live upon the surface of the earth, he flies in the air like a bird. The spirit, free of the conditions of matter, is therefore immortal.

The talk closed with a prayer the audience would carry home. Sarah Farmer, the hostess and founder of Green Acre, had been ill for some time. The Master prayed for her by name — that the same God who had inspired her to gather these conferences would now grant her healing and continued service. Many of the friends remembered afterward that the talk’s long logical argument had ended in a single tender intercession for one woman in the room.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of August 16, 1912 at Green Acre, Eliot, Maine. 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/