Two of Equivalent Strength: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Los Angeles

In Issue 5 of Volume 7 of the *Star of the West,* dated June 1916, the editors reprinted a talk 'Abdu'l-Bahá had given in Los Angeles on the 19th of October, 1912, during the closing weeks of His American tour. The talk took up a question that had quietly worried the small American Bahá'í communities through the years of His visit: would they ever be enough?

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The Master answered the worry head-on.

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> Two people are equivalent in strength of character to the > whole world.

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The arithmetic was deliberately startling. The Master was inviting the friends to abandon, at one stroke, the discouraging measure they had been using. The Bahá'í community of Los Angeles in 1912 was small. So was the community of Boston. So was the community of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Washington. By the ordinary count of bodies in any one room, the friends were not many.

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Yet the spiritual measure of any community, the Master insisted, is not finally the count of its members. It is the *strength of character* of the souls within it. Two souls of strong character — two souls whose love had become unwavering, whose service selfless, whose firmness in the Cause complete — outweigh, in the spiritual mathematics, the great milling crowds whose faith is tepid or whose devotion is divided.

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He reached for an example His Christian listeners would recognize at once.

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After the crucifixion, the disciples of Christ had been only eleven. Eleven men of no political position, no scholarly distinction, no inherited wealth — and one of those eleven would shortly disappear into despair. The cause they represented was, by every visible measure, finished. Yet within three centuries the Roman empire itself had become Christian.

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The Master let the arithmetic land. Eleven souls — characters strong enough to bear the post-Easter assignment — had outweighed the sum of all the empires that had killed their Lord. The proof was not theoretical. It was historical. The reader had only to look around at any Christian church in any American city to see what eleven faithful souls of strong character had finally accomplished.

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The Bahá'í friends in Los Angeles, He went on, were in a similar position. Their numbers were small. Their resources were modest. The world that surrounded them was vast and indifferent. But two of them, three of them, ten of them, of the strength of character He had described, were equivalent in spiritual weight to the entire world. The work, He suggested, would be done not by the multiplication of casual believers but by the deepening of the few committed ones.

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The *Star of the West* printed the talk in 1916, four years after its delivery, because the lesson had become, by then, a necessary one for an American community whose first growth had slowed, whose first enthusiasm had cooled, and whose deeper work was just beginning. The arithmetic the Master had set down in Los Angeles in 1912 has continued to govern the inner planning of Bahá'í communities everywhere ever since.

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