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.

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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.

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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,

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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He closed with a measure for civilisation itself:

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

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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.

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