Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
33 stories on this theme.
Although a person of good deeds is acceptable at the Threshold of the Almighty, yet it is first “to know,” and then “to do.”
The Supper of the Lord which His Highness the Spirit ate with the apostles was a heavenly supper and not one of material bread and water, for material objects have no connection with spiritual objects.
All the people have formed a god in the world of thought, and that form of their own imagination they worship; when the fact is that the imagined form is finite and the human mind is infinite.
The Bahá’í teaching is at one with science and philosophy in declaring the essential nature of God to be entirely beyond human comprehension.
Bahíyyih Khánum recalls how, as a youth in Baghdád, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá argued with the learned men in the mosques, who came to call Him the youthful sage. Asked who His teacher was, He answered that His Father had taught Him.
In Káshán a tradesman thought to be unlettered asked the Shaykhí leader Hájí Muhammad-Karím Khán to show him the Fourth Pillar that the Hájí's own book said every believer must know.
Mullá Muhammad-'Alí, a learned divine of Zanján, sent a trusted disciple to Shíráz to look into the claims of the Báb. When he read the writings the man brought back, he declared his faith and closed his books.
On a train journey from Salt Lake City to California in 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke of Peter's spiritual education and remembered seeing, as a child in Tihrán, the learned Vahíd fall at the muddy feet of a servant of the Báb.
When Howard Colby Ives wrote in 1912 that his Brotherhood Church had closed for lack of funds, 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reply joked about the philosophy of the age and urged him to give his whole life to spreading the teachings.
In the summer of 1911 Juliet Thompson met two professors from New York near 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Lake Geneva. One lunched with Him and asked his questions; the other stayed away and watched from a window.
No one could claim to be ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s teacher, yet Bahá’u’lláh approved His answers to religious questions with “very good”; His wisdom and love brought a change of heart to people such as Horace Holley.
Between 1904 and 1906 Laura Clifford Barney put her questions to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká, often at the lunch table. His answers were taken down in Persian, and He corrected the text twice in His own hand before it was published in 1908.
Sent by Muḥammad Sháh to investigate the Báb, the learned Vaḥíd resolved to ask, only in his heart, for a commentary on the Súrih of Kawthar. At their third meeting the Báb offered it unasked and wrote it before him.
Speaking at Green Acre in August 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá contrasted knowledge confined to the senses, which even animals possess, with the true virtue of man: the power to investigate the ideals of the Kingdom.
November 5th Today the weather is gloomy and dull! In the East there is continual sunshine, the stars are never veiled, and there are very few clouds.
When the philosopher Nabíl-i-Akbar visited 'Akká around 1873-74, Bahá'u'lláh revealed for him the Tablet of Wisdom, which speaks of the origin of creation and of the ancient sages who learned from the Prophets.
A subject that is essential for the comprehension of the questions that we have mentioned, and of others of which we are about to speak, so that the essence of the problems may be understood, is this: that human knowledge is of two kinds.
Question.—What connection has the Reality of Divinity with the Lordly Rising-places and the Divine Dawning-points?
Question.—One of the powers possessed by the Divine Manifestations is knowledge.
Question.—Of what degree is the perception of the human world, and what are its limitations?
There are only four accepted methods of comprehension—that is to say, the realities of things are understood by these four methods.
Thou hast asked concerning the fundamentals of religion and its ordinances: Know thou that first and foremost in religion is the knowledge of God.
O thou son of the Kingdom! Thy most agreeable letters, with their pleasing style, ever gladden our hearts. When the song is of the Kingdom, it rejoiceth the soul.
O spiritual youth! Praise thou God that thou hast found thy way into the Kingdom of Splendours, and hast rent asunder the veil of vain imaginings, and that the core of the inner mystery hath been made known unto thee.
O thou handmaid of God!
Existence is of two kinds: one is the existence of God which is beyond the comprehension of man.
O thou true friend! Read, in the school of God, the lessons of the spirit, and learn from love’s Teacher the innermost truths.
O daughter of the Kingdom! Thy letter hath come and its contents make clear the fact that thou hast directed all thy thoughts toward acquiring light from the realms of mystery.
There are certain pillars which have been established as the unshakeable supports of the Faith of God.
O thou faithful maid-servant of God! What thou has written me hath been seen. Indeed thou belongest to the Kingdom and thou turnest towards the Horizon of Abha.
O thou leaf who art moved by the Breeze of God!
O thou whose heart is pure and whose souls is rejoiced! Verily, thy revered wife sent unto us thy photograph and we say and rejoiced at witnessing thy face, even though it was a (mere) image, for, verily, this image indicateth the reality.
O thou young in age and great in mind! [There is] many a young child who is mature and grown up, and many an aged [one] who is ignorant and stupid.