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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
19 stories on this theme.
At a great university in New York, 'Abdu'l-Bahá taught a hall full of students and professors why a person needs both science and religion — just as a bird needs both of its wings to fly.
Almost two thousand young students filled a great hall to hear 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and He told them that being kind to everyone is one of the oldest ideas in the whole world.
In quiet rooms at a great English college, a young man taught himself English so perfectly that he could one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá — never guessing how much that quiet work would one day matter.
A boy named Shoghi Effendi went far away to school in Beirut, where he studied hard and learned new languages — and was being made ready for something great he could not yet see.
Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's visit to Columbia University in New York on April 19, 1912. The Master spoke to the assembled faculty and students on the immortality of the soul and the inseparability of scientific investigation from spiritual enlightenment.
On October 8, 1912, Mírzá Maḥmúd records, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed an audience of approximately 1,800 students and 180 professors at Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto — the largest single audience of His American journey, gathered in the university chapel to hear a Persian teacher speak on universal peace.
A Harvard-trained teacher, proud of the Latin, algebra, and geometry he drilled into his pupils, met 'Abdu'l-Bahá and was asked one quiet question that exposed the great gap in modern education. Stanwood Cobb spent the rest of his long life — he lived to 101 — trying to put back what his schooling had left out.
At fifty-eight, when many would be winding down, Dr. Susan I. Moody closed her Chicago medical practice and travelled alone to Tehran at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's call — to carry the light of healing to the sick and the light of learning to the daughters of a country that did not yet think girls worth teaching. Her first letters home carried one quiet, decisive sentence: "The girls' school is assured."
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the months Shoghi Effendi spent at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1920–1921, perfecting his English so that he might one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator — a small private programme of self-discipline that would, only months later, bear an unimaginable wider fruit.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the years the young Shoghi Effendi spent at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — later the American University of Beirut — where the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the West for the first time inside a Western classroom, and was prepared, without knowing it, for the office that lay ahead.
At the Hotel Plaza in Chicago on May 3, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out the central distinction between two kinds of educators: the philosophers, who train themselves and a circle around them, and the Manifestations of God, who alone have proved capable of universal education across whole nations.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the students and faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C. — the historically Black institution at the heart of African American higher education. His subject was the station of the human being: created in the image of God, possessed of a divine spark beyond every material limitation.
At the home of William Sutherland Maxwell and May Maxwell at 716 Pine Avenue West in Montreal on September 2, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá compared the human being left to nature to a field overgrown with thorns and thistles, and the Manifestations of God to the cultivators who turn that wilderness into a garden.
On October 7, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the assembled students and faculty of Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto. He took up the great Bahá'í theme of the harmony of science and religion — and warned that the cultivation of one wing without the other could not carry the bird of human progress.
In the August 1915 issue of the Star of the West, the editors surveyed the program of the Green Acre Bahá'í summer school at Eliot, Maine — the gathering that, since Sarah Farmer's gift of the property, had become the principal summer institution of the American Bahá'í community.
In June 1921 the Star of the West reported on the small school for Bahá'í children that had begun on the slope of Mount Carmel — a visible answer to one of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's most insistent themes: the universal education of children, irrespective of station or means.
In 1911 the Star of the West printed a report from Tihrán on the Tarbíyat Schools — the Bahá'í-founded schools for boys and for girls in the Persian capital that, in the years before they were forcibly closed by the Persian government in 1934, became the educational pride of the Iranian Bahá'í community.
In 1910 the Star of the West relayed letters from Dr. Susan I. Moody, the American physician sent by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Tehran. She wrote back about a gathering of women in the Persian capital and the plans then under way for the Tarbíyat Girls' School. *The girls' school is assured.*
In Issue 1 of Volume 2 of the Star of the West, dated March 1911, the editors reported on the work of the Persian-American Educational Society — a small body of American Bahá'ís that had enrolled sixty-three scholarships and remitted seven hundred dollars to support the Bahá'í schools in Tehran. The Master had asked them, in particular, for *one… efficient in science and arts.*