Europe Is Like an Arsenal: Sacramento, October 1912

‘Abdu’l-Bahá reached Sacramento, California on October 25, 1912, late in His American journey. The next evening He addressed the friends in the Assembly Hall of the Hotel Sacramento. Bijou Straun took the notes preserved in The Promulgation of Universal Peace.

He opened with a tribute to California — its beauty, its noble people, His hope that they would become the most exalted and perfect altruists of the world. Then He turned to a darker matter. The Balkan wars were already underway; the great European powers were arming; and the Master saw, with unsparing clarity, what the news from the chancelleries did not yet acknowledge.

The greatest need in the world today is international peace.

Europe, He said, was like an arsenal. Powder and weapons had been gathered in such quantity, and grievances and prejudices in such proportion, that a single spark could ignite the whole. The audience was hearing, in October 1912, a description of the catastrophe that would in fact begin in August 1914.

But the Master did not stop with the warning. Against the closing sky He set an image of permanence:

The reality of Divinity is like unto the sun, and revelation is like unto the rays thereof.

The bounty of God is not exhausted. The rain of revelation is ever on the face of the earth somewhere... pouring down. If the present religious institutions had ceased to bear fruit, the fault was theirs, not God’s. The dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh, He told the Sacramento audience, was the present pouring of that same rain.

He closed by appealing for what the European powers were manifestly unable to imagine:

Cast aside all the prejudices of ignorance, and raise aloft the banner of international agreement.

Less than two years later, the arsenal of which He had spoken in Sacramento exploded. Many of those in the room would remember the talk for the rest of their lives, and would tell the generations that came after them that the Master had warned them.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of October 26, 1912 at the Assembly Hall, Hotel Sacramento. Notes by Bijou Straun. 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/