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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."
7 stories on this theme.
Standing before a huge crowd in a great synagogue, 'Abdu'l-Bahá asked one gentle, brave question that no one there had expected to hear.
On October 12, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed an audience of approximately 2,000 at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco — the largest synagogue on the Pacific coast — and asked the gathered Jews, with all the courtesy of a guest and all the firmness of a prophet's son, why they had not yet honoured Christ and Muḥammad as the heirs of Moses.
At the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn on June 16, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traced religious discord to one root: the inheritance of ancestral imitations rather than the active investigation of truth. Where conscience is free and every soul may speak its own conviction, He said, growth becomes inevitable.
At the Church of the Divine Paternity on Central Park West on May 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told a New York congregation that religion has many forms but one reality: as the days are many but the sun is one, so the Manifestations are many but the Truth they reveal is single. If religion sets itself against science, it becomes mere superstition; if it becomes a cause of hatred and strife, its absence would be preferable.
At the Town Hall in Fanwood, New Jersey on May 31, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá named the chaos of the modern world as a chaos produced by religion itself — by the partisanship of sects clinging to inheritance rather than searching for truth. The true Manifestations, He said, are shepherds; their work is to gather, never to scatter.
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.
Two years before the First World War, 'Abdu'l-Bahá stood in the Assembly Hall of the Hotel Sacramento on October 26, 1912, and warned His audience that Europe had become *like an arsenal* in which a single spark might detonate the whole continent. The remedy, He said, was not in the chancelleries but in the spiritual recognition that all the religions are renewals of one revelation.