The Garden That Must Be Cultivated: At the Maxwell Home, Montreal

‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived at the home of William Sutherland Maxwell and May Maxwell at 716 Pine Avenue West in Montreal in late August 1912, and on September 2 He spoke from their drawing-room to the gathered friends. The talk preserved in The Promulgation of Universal Peace turns on a single sustained image.

The Master began by asking the company to consider nature as it is, not as one might idealise it.

Nature is the material world. When we look upon it, we see that it is dark and imperfect.

A field left to itself, He said, fills with thorns and thistles. A forest left to itself does not become a garden. Even Montreal — the city outside the Maxwells’ window — was, only a few generations earlier, wild, uncultivated land. What now made it a city was not nature; it was the cultivating work of generations.

The same logic, He went on, holds for the human being. Without education, the human is the most dangerous of animals:

If man himself is left in his natural state, he will become lower than the animal and continue to grow more ignorant and imperfect.

The animal is bound by the limits of its kind. The human, free of those limits, can sink below them. So a human being depends, more absolutely than any other creature, upon the education that makes him fully human.

Material education — the schools, the universities, the sciences, the inventions of telegraph and telephone — is one part of that work, and an essential part. But material education by itself cannot produce the fully human person. It produces only an educated animal. The complete education is divine.

The mission of the Prophets of God has been to train the souls of humanity and free them from the thralldom of natural instincts.

The cultivator who turns the wilderness into a garden, in this analogy, is the Manifestation of God. Krishna, Moses, Christ, Muḥammad, the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh — these are the gardeners of human history. By their cultivating, humanity becomes possible.

The Master closed with a definition of the human glory the Maxwells’ guests would carry home:

The glory of man is in the knowledge of God, spiritual susceptibilities, attainment to transcendent powers and the bounties of the Holy Spirit.

The Maxwell house would itself become, decades later, the only private home in the West to be designated a Bahá’í shrine — preserved precisely because the cultivation that took place under its roof had borne so much fruit.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of September 2, 1912 at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Sutherland Maxwell, Montreal. 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/