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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."
10 stories where faithfulness appears.
A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the steady, almost invisible presence of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, at the elbow of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká: the running of the household, the receiving of women pilgrims, the small reassurances the Master Himself relied on.
In *The Chosen Highway* Bahíyyih Khánum recounts the night in August 1852 when soldiers of the Sháh seized her father in the village of Lavásán and carried Him to the Síyáh-Chál — and the long vigil her mother kept in their plundered house with the children clinging to her skirts.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives the most reliable account of her husband's last days — a brief illness in a London hotel, the flu that turned to a heart attack, and the night of the fourth of November 1957 when the Guardian of the Cause of God passed from the world at the age of sixty.
On the morning of May 6, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá arrived by train at the Cleveland Union Station and was received by the small Cleveland Bahá'í community. He addressed them on the platform itself with a brief but characteristic speech: that the spirit of the Cause is carried not in great gatherings but in the small, faithful community of two or three friends.
In *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh* Mr. Furutan preserves the household memory of how Bahá'u'lláh, during the years in Bahjí, would step out into the small garden each afternoon with a handful of grain in His hand for the wild pigeons of the plain — and the gentleness of a creature who, in His own words, *did not wish to disappoint* the birds.
In April 1918 the Star of the West relayed an account, from talks of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the Holy Land in early 1914, of a former servant of Bahá'u'lláh's household named Esfandayár, who had remained quietly devoted to the family of the Blessed Beauty through years of persecution.
In 1926 the Star of the West printed the obituary of Howard MacNutt, the early New York believer who had compiled and edited The Promulgation of Universal Peace from the stenographic records of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's American talks of 1912.
In a 1915 issue of the Star of the West, Mary Hanford Ford published an early survey of the Bahá'í communities then in existence across the United States, naming city by city the small assemblies and scattered isolated believers — a snapshot of the American Faith just as the war was beginning to reshape the world it was being preached into.
In 1916 the Star of the West introduced its readers to the young Japanese Bahá'í Saichiro Fujita, who had come from Yamaguchi to study in California, found the Faith there, and would in time travel to Haifa to spend the rest of his life in the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.
In October 1912 the Star of the West printed the news of the death of Thornton Chase — the first American to embrace the Bahá'í Faith, who had passed in Los Angeles only weeks after meeting 'Abdu'l-Bahá on the Master's American journey. The Master called him *the first American believer.*