peace

‘Abdu’l-Bahá returned to the same theme the next day when speaking about the peace conference: Once I wrote the Persian friends that if the workers of peace conferences do not apply in their own lives what they advocate, they are like…

Later, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encountered a group of young people, to whom he told this story in relation to the effects of the Peace Conference: Once the rats and mice held an important conference on the subject of which was how to make peace with…

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.

Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's brief stop in Seattle during the western leg of October 1912 — a public address in a downtown hotel ballroom, attended by some two hundred guests arranged through the local theosophical society.

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.

On the train from Sacramento to Denver, ‘a salesman came through the cars selling pennants of various schools.’ The Master joked, ‘Tell him to bring the banner of universal peace if he has it. We want a flag under which the whole world…

On December 5, 1912, on the deck of the steamship Celtic in New York harbor, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave His final talk before sailing for Europe. After nine months in the West, He left the believers with the standard against which their whole tour was to be measured: the earth is one native land, and all mankind one family.

On November 5, 1912, at the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke to friends about the role He saw America playing in the bringing of universal peace — and proposed an international conference of all nations that would surpass even the Hague tribunal.

On May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed a public gathering at Handel Hall on East Randolph Street in Chicago — one of His earliest Chicago talks. The Master spoke of the necessity of an international consciousness as the antidote to the prejudices of nation, of class, and of race that had been the burden of human history.

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.

At a meeting of the International Peace Forum at Grace Methodist Episcopal Church on West 104th Street, New York, on May 12, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá argued that the United States was uniquely positioned to lead the world toward disarmament — precisely because she carried no imperial baggage.

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.

On October 7, 1912, at the Japanese Independent Church in Oakland, California, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the Japanese Young Men's Christian Association on the destructiveness of prejudice — drawing on what He had personally witnessed during His exile in Rumelia.

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.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the revelation in Adrianople of the Súriy-i-Mulúk, the Súrih of the Kings — Bahá'u'lláh's first general address to the rulers of the world collectively, calling them to recognise the One Who had appeared in their midst and to lay down the arms with which they oppressed their peoples.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the context of one of the great Tablets to the Kings: the Tablet addressed by Bahá'u'lláh from 'Akká to Queen Victoria of Britain in the early 1870s. The Tablet praised her abolition of slavery and her elective parliamentary system, and called upon all rulers to lay down their arms in favour of collective security.

In August 1914 — the very month Europe collapsed into the Great War — the Star of the West printed a Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to American women on their particular duties in the work of universal peace. The capacity of women to *advance and to take power*, the Master argued, would accomplish what was, in 1914, plainly beyond the capacity of the men's world.