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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."
23 stories on this theme.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá first stepped off a great ship onto American shores, reporters crowded close to ask why He had come — and His answer was about peace for the whole world.
On a winter afternoon by a great ship, 'Abdu'l-Bahá said goodbye to His friends and left them with one beautiful idea to carry forever.
A fine luncheon was being set, and one good man had not been invited — until 'Abdu'l-Bahá sent for him and gave him the very best seat at the table, right beside Himself.
A boy stood at the edge of a crowd, sure that no one would notice him — until 'Abdu'l-Bahá lifted His hand and called him something beautiful, loud enough for everyone to hear.
Mahmúd's Diary records the first hours of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in America: the SS Cedric pulling into New York harbor on April 11, 1912; the rush of newspaper reporters at the dock seeking to know His purpose; and His steady answer that He had crossed an ocean for *the unity of humankind*.
On December 5, 1912, Mahmúd's Diary records, the SS *Celtic* lay at her berth in New York harbor as 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the small band of friends who had come to see Him sail. He left them with one sentence that summarised the eight months of His American teaching: the whole earth is one globe, and all nations one family.
On April 23, 1912, after speaking at Howard University in the morning, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was the principal guest at a diplomatic luncheon at the home of Persian chargé d'affaires Ali-Kuli Khan. One hour before the hour, the Master sent for Louis Gregory — the African-American Bahá'í who had not been invited — and seated him in the place of honor.
The first African-American Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard-trained philosopher, Alain Locke became the guiding intellect of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also a Bahá'í who put the whole of his learning to the service of human oneness — teaching that the deepest work of the mind is to discover the "common denominators" on which a united world can stand.
From His sickbed in Haifa, near the very end of His life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave Agnes Parsons a single charge: to arrange in Washington a convention for unity between the white and the coloured people. In May 1921, in a city still bound by segregation, some fifteen hundred Americans of both races gathered together for the first such convention ever held — and into it the Master sent a message declaring that no more important gathering had been held since the beginning of time.
On pilgrimage to 'Akká, Lua Getsinger longed to serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He gave her the chance — and sent her to a poor, sick, friendless man in the filthiest quarter of the city. When she recoiled from the squalor, the Master taught her the hardest and most beautiful lesson of her life: whoever would serve God must serve his fellow man, for in every human being is the image and likeness of God.
On Christmas night of 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went to a shelter in Westminster where about a thousand of London's homeless and friendless men had gathered for a Christmas meal. He told them that His company had ever been with the poor, that He counted Himself one of them, and that in the sight of God poverty was greater than wealth — and He left money so the men might feast again on New Year's night.
At the close of His first visit to the West, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave a farewell address at a London settlement house built to serve the working poor and disabled children. To a hall of some four hundred and sixty people of every background, He likened the whole of humanity to a single tree — the nations its branches, the peoples its leaves and buds and fruits — and declared the whole earth one home, bathed in the oneness of God's mercy.
Louis Gregory, an African-American attorney born to emancipated parents, and Louisa Mathew, an Englishwoman, met on pilgrimage to 'Abdu'l-Bahá. At a time when interracial marriage was outlawed in most of the United States, the Master quietly encouraged their union — and on 27 September 1912 they became the first interracial Bahá'í couple, a living sign of the human family made one.
In a Paris drawing-room in the autumn of 1911, 'Abdu'l-Bahá answered the world's fear of difference with the image of a garden. A garden of one single flower, He said, would be dull; it is the many colours that make it beautiful. So it is with the human family — and the diversity that men turn into hatred was meant to be the very source of beauty.
When pilgrims from the West reached 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the prison-city of 'Akká, they found themselves seated at His table beside believers of other nations, races, and stations — and were told plainly why. At this table, the Master said, we are joined in spiritual relationship; we are all of one family. It was the oneness of humankind, made visible over a shared meal.
Isfandíyár had been a servant in the household of Bahá'u'lláh, freed when Bahá'u'lláh emancipated His father's slaves. When persecution scattered the family and the Sháh's officers hunted him, he had every chance to flee — yet he refused, because he owed money to the shopkeepers of Ṭihrán and would not let it be said that a servant of Bahá'u'lláh had taken goods without paying. Half a century later, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called him a perfect man.
The recollections gathered in The Chosen Highway preserve a way of living that astonished every visitor to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's household: He treated servants as honoured family, received the poorest as cherished guests, and accepted no deference for Himself. To the people the world overlooked, He gave the one thing they were never given — dignity. It is a portrait of honour not claimed but bestowed.
In *Portals to Freedom* Howard Colby Ives recalls a moment in New York in 1912 when 'Abdu'l-Bahá publicly greeted a Black boy in a crowd with the loud, unmistakable proclamation that he was *a black rose* — a phrase that, in the racially stratified America of the day, was a small revolution.
In one of the closing chapters of *Portals to Freedom,* Howard Colby Ives describes the gathering on December 2, 1912, in the days before 'Abdu'l-Bahá sailed from America. The Master's parting counsel — to manifest complete love and to count no soul beneath one's own — fell on Ives, he writes, like a *stream of spiritual energy* he could almost not bear.
At a reception given in His honor by the New York Peace Society at the Hotel Astor on May 13, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá took the platform with one of His most quoted sentences: peace is light, war is darkness — and asked the assembled American peace movement to lead the world into the new century as the century of lights.
On April 30, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the Fourth Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Handel Hall in Chicago. He told the gathering that the colour of skin is accidental in nature; the spirit and intelligence of man is essential, and there alone are the divine virtues to be measured.
Speaking at the Orient-Occident-Unity Conference in Washington on April 20, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá invoked Bahá'u'lláh's image of humanity as *leaves of one tree, drops of one sea,* called America to be the first nation to lay the foundation of international agreement, and thanked the Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople for the liberation that had made His Western journey possible.
At the Hotel Schenley in Pittsburgh on May 7, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out six of Bahá'u'lláh's principles in a single sustained address: independent search after truth, the oneness of humanity, the harmony of religion and science, the abolition of prejudices, the equal education of women, and the necessity of a spiritual rather than merely material foundation for universal peace.