Six Principles at the Hotel Schenley: Pittsburgh, 1912

On the evening of May 7, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was the guest of the Pittsburgh friends at the Hotel Schenley. Suzanne Beatty took the notes that survive in The Promulgation of Universal Peace. The Master used the gathering to lay out, in one sustained sequence, six of the principles by which Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings were to be recognised in the West.

He began with the search after truth. Truth is one — therefore the investigation of truth is one — therefore those who genuinely investigate must end in unity, regardless of where they began. From this He moved to the oneness of humankind: a single race, a single origin, a single destiny.

The third principle He named was the harmony of religion and science. Any religious belief which is not conformable with scientific proof and investigation, He said,

is superstition, for true science is reason and reality, and religion is essentially reality and pure reason.

He went on to call for the abolition of religious, racial, political and patriotic prejudices, and then turned to women. Bahá’u’lláh, He said, has revealed that woman must be given the privilege of equal education with man. Until that equality is real, the family of humanity walks on one leg; with it, the human world is whole.

He then placed the sixth principle: peace. But not the peace imagined in the chancelleries.

Universal peace is an impossibility through human and material agencies; it must be through spiritual power.

Treaties and conferences cannot, by themselves, hold a world together. Only the spiritual recognition that humanity is one can do so — and that recognition is the work of religion in its purified form.

He closed with a measure for civilisation itself:

The noblest of men is he who serves humankind, and he is nearest the threshold of God who is the least of His servants.

The friends went out into the Pittsburgh night with what was, in effect, a curriculum: not six separate teachings, but a single unified vision in which truth, oneness, science, justice, equality and service were six aspects of one reality.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of May 7, 1912 at the Hotel Schenley, Pittsburgh. Notes by Suzanne Beatty. 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/