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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."
16 stories on this theme.
Shoghi Effendi's narration, in *God Passes By*, of the Master's laying of the cornerstone of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár at Wilmette in May 1912 — a moment the Guardian describes as the inauguration of the construction of the first House of Worship of the Bahá'í Dispensation in the Western world.
On a busy day by a great lake, the special cornerstone for a new temple went missing — until one ordinary woman offered a little stone she had picked up by the road.
One believer carried a plain little stone all the way to a cold, muddy field — and 'Abdu'l-Bahá chose her stone to begin a great House of Worship.
Many people sent stones for the very first stone of a great temple — but on the big day, only the stone a poor seamstress had dragged across the whole city had actually arrived.
Mahmúd's Diary records that on May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá travelled from Chicago to the small lakeside village of Wilmette to dedicate the cornerstone of the future House of Worship of the Western world. He laid the stone with His own hand and invited each delegate of the gathering to place upon it a stone of his own.
On May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traveled north of Chicago to lay the cornerstone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the West. Many stones had been sent from Bahá'í communities for the ceremony. Only one — found in a builders' rejection pile and dragged to the site by Nettie Tobin, a Chicago seamstress — had actually arrived. The Master asked for hers.
Ḥájí Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, the Afnán, was a kinsman of the Báb and a prosperous merchant of Yazd. After Bahá'u'lláh's ascension he gave up his comfort, his business, and his estates and went to 'Ishqábád, where he poured out his entire fortune to raise the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár — the first Bahá'í House of Worship ever built. "This," 'Abdu'l-Bahá said, "is the way to make a sacrifice."
In 1912 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid with His own hand the foundation stone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the Western world, on the shore of Lake Michigan at Wilmette. Over the next forty years a community of working people — giving in dimes and dollars, across two world wars and a great depression — raised above that stone a temple of lacelike grandeur, a gift that most of its builders gave knowing they would never see it finished.
For nearly half a century Corinne True gave herself to a single labour of service — the raising of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the West on the shore of Lake Michigan at Wilmette. Across two world wars and a great depression she gathered the dimes and dollars of working believers, held the project together through every discouragement, and lived to see the temple she had served dedicated to public worship. 'Abdu'l-Bahá called her the Mother of the Temple.
In the city of 'Ishqábád, in Russian Turkistan, the Bahá'í community raised the first House of Worship the world had ever seen — a stately, nine-sided edifice set in gardens, ringed by the institutions of practical service the Cause ordains beside its temples: schools, a traveller's hospice, a clinic. Shoghi Effendi numbers its construction among the signal triumphs of the Faith's early history.
Scattered across an enormous continent, the early American believers could not build a House of Worship one city at a time. So in 1909 the delegates of their far-flung communities met in Chicago and brought into being Bahá'í Temple Unity — the first national institution of the Western Faith, the instrument through which a whole people could act as one to raise the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West.
Hájí Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, the Afnán — a cousin of the Báb known as the Vakílu'd-Dawlih — gave up his comfort, his business, and his estates and hastened to 'Ishqábád, where he poured out nearly all he possessed to raise the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the world, becoming, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, "the first builder of a House to unify man."
Long before he had ever heard of the Bahá'í Faith, the French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois believed his life's work was to build a universal temple of Truth for all humanity. When he found the Cause, he found his commission — and poured the rest of his life into the luminous nine-sided House of Worship at Wilmette, a building whose ornament gathers the symbols of all the world's religions into one.
At the dedication of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár grounds in Wilmette on May 1, 1912 — the same gathering at which Nettie Tobin's stone was laid as the cornerstone — 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke about the future Houses of Worship that would arise across the world, and gave the specific architectural instruction that the building must be *circular,* never triangular.
*Star of the West* records the dedication, in 1908, of the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the world — at 'Ishqábád (Ashgabat) in Russian Turkmenistan. The community of Persian exiles and emigrants on the steppe had built, with their own hands and from a fund collected over a generation, a nine-sided dome that would for forty years be the model for every subsequent Mashriqu'l-Adhkár.
In 1920 the Star of the West printed Corinne True's report on the acquisition of the Temple property at Wilmette, on the shore of Lake Michigan — the small group of acres on which, by the Master's direction, the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West would in time be raised.