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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."
30 stories where sincerity appears.
In London in September 1911, a painter came to ask 'Abdu'l-Bahá whether art was a worthy vocation. The Master answered in three words. Then an actor asked about drama, and the conversation widened into a memory of a Mystery Play that, as a child, had kept Him sleepless for nights.
Among the most distinguished early converts to the Báb's Cause was Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known later as Vaḥíd, the Peerless. Sent from the court of Muḥammad Sháh to investigate the new movement, he came as a sceptic; the Báb's revealed commentary on the Súrih of Kawthar undid his scepticism in a single afternoon.
In the *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*, Bahá'u'lláh devotes a substantial passage to the spiritual significance of trustworthiness — naming it as the foundation of the Cause's standing in the world and as the mark by which the true believer is recognised.
The opening Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's first counsel in the mystical aphorisms revealed in Baghdád — names what He most desires of the human heart: that it be pure, kindly, and radiant, so that an everlasting sovereignty may be conferred upon it.
The thirteenth Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's confronting question to the soul that has forgotten its own original nobility and has set itself in the rank of the abased.
The third Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's promise that the soul which finds within itself the love of God shall enter the bounty of His mercy.
The thirty-second Hidden Word in Arabic — Bahá'u'lláh's image of the soul's freedom: that no journey through space and no traversal of the heavens can substitute for inner detachment from all save God.
The opening Hidden Word in Persian — Bahá'u'lláh's foundational description of the human temple as the residence of His remembrance, the place where His mention shall be made.
The third Hidden Word in Persian — Bahá'u'lláh's tender injunction that the believer plant only the rose of love in the garden of the heart, and that the heart itself be the dwelling of the Beloved.
The thirty-second Persian Hidden Word — Bahá'u'lláh's command that holy words and pure deeds rise to the heaven of celestial glory, and the warning that fair speech without fair conduct is empty.
The fourth Hidden Word in Persian — Bahá'u'lláh's invitation to the believer to behold, with the eye of the heart, the manifestation of God's eternal beauty in His own being.
The forty-fourth Persian Hidden Word — Bahá'u'lláh's praise of the soul who has chosen a single true companion in the Beloved over the world's many fair-weather companions.
The seventh Persian Hidden Word — Bahá'u'lláh's testimony that the believer is, in his or her created reality, the day-star of the heavens of God's holiness, and must therefore not allow the dust of the world to dim the light.
A famous scholar planned the hardest question in the world to test the Báb — and kept it a secret inside his own mind. Then something happened he could never explain.
In the years before His Declaration, the young Báb was known in Shíráz not for any claim or office but for the depth of His devotion — a Youth of great personal beauty and gentle manner, unfailing in His prayers and fasts, who obeyed not merely the outward forms of His religion but lived, even then, in the very spirit of its teachings.
When his teacher Siyyid Káẓim died, Mullá Ḥusayn — already among the most learned of his generation — did not stay to claim the empty seat. He withdrew for forty days of fasting and prayer, purified his heart, and set out to find the Promised One whose nearness his teacher had foretold. The search ended at the gate of Shíráz, where the knowledge he carried met the Knowledge it had been seeking.
Hippolyte Dreyfus was a brilliant young Parisian lawyer with everything the world prizes when he encountered the Bahá'í teachings. Recognising their truth, he did something few Western believers had done: he set himself to master Persian and Arabic so that he could read the Writings in their own words and carry them to the French-speaking world. He became the first French Bahá'í and one of the Faith's earliest Western scholars and translators.
A young American woman travelled again and again to the prison-city of 'Akká, sat at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's table, and asked Him question after question — about God, the soul, the prophets, the meaning of the Scriptures. Out of three years of patient asking came *Some Answered Questions,* a book that includes the Master's teaching on the four ways human beings try to know the truth — and why only one of them is sure.
An Aberdeen physician in failing health, trained to weigh evidence and trust nothing he could not examine, found a small pamphlet about the Bahá'í Faith in a sanatorium. He did not simply believe it. He studied for years, learned Persian late in life to read the Writings in the original, and wrote the careful introduction by which the English-speaking world would come to know the Cause.
A Harvard-trained teacher, proud of the Latin, algebra, and geometry he drilled into his pupils, met 'Abdu'l-Bahá and was asked one quiet question that exposed the great gap in modern education. Stanwood Cobb spent the rest of his long life — he lived to 101 — trying to put back what his schooling had left out.
On the night the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz, He entrusted Mullá Ḥusayn with a sacred charge: to find in Ṭihrán a soul of a noble house and deliver into His hands a scroll of the newly revealed Word. The young schoolteacher who carried it never learned the meaning of his errand — but Bahá'u'lláh read the Words, and the first utterance of the new Revelation reached the One for Whom, unknown to all, it had been written.
From His confinement in the remote mountain fortresses of Ádhirbáyján, the Báb revealed, in answer to a seeker's questions, the Dalá'il-i-Sab'ih — the Seven Proofs — which Shoghi Effendi ranks among the most important of His doctrinal works. In it the Báb sets out the evidences of His mission and, with extraordinary tenderness, calls the inquirer to weigh the truth fairly, for the sake of God alone.
An eminent Swiss scientist, long an unbeliever, sent his deepest questions about God and the soul to 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The reply — one of the last great Tablets of the Master's life — answered him so fully that Auguste Forel, near the end of his days, embraced the Faith whose Word had reached him.
Howard Colby Ives was a Unitarian minister with a restless, questioning mind and a heart full of unanswered longing. When he first encountered 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 1912, he did not believe — he struggled, argued inwardly, and held back for months. His memoir, Portals to Freedom, is the honest record of a thinking man's doubts slowly giving way, not to argument, but to a love that answered the questions beneath his questions.
A young Englishman on his way to America stopped in Paris in the summer of 1901, was introduced to a Bahá'í teacher, and spent three days asking everything he needed to ask. His questions answered, he wrote a two-line letter of belief to 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and then faced one more question, about the source of his own income, that turned his new faith into action.
In 1844, while Bahá'u'lláh was still veiled from the eyes of men, a wandering dervish cooking his food by a brook in the district of Núr was, in a single brief conversation, "changed completely" — and recognised the Light that no one else yet saw. Leaving his cooking-pots behind, he rose and followed on foot, chanting a love-song whose refrain has outlived his name: "Thou art the Light of Truth."
A Unitarian minister who had spent his life hungry for a reality his own theology could not give him met 'Abdu'l-Bahá in New York in 1912. Recognition did not strike him like lightning; it dawned, slowly and against his own resistance, over months of inner struggle — until the light he had been looking for all his life rose at last, and he walked out of one ministry into another.
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 home of Dr. and Mrs. Florian Krug on Park Avenue in New York on July 15, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá distinguished between thanks given by the tongue and thanks given by the conduct of a life — and asked the friends to send Him away from New York with the sight of unity among them.
Adib Taherzadeh's account, in *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh*, of the Tablet known as the *Lawḥ-i-Aqdas* — the *Most Holy Tablet* — addressed by Bahá'u'lláh from the prison-city of 'Akká to the Christians of the world.