vision

In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves 'Abdu'l-Bahá's recollection of His Father's boyhood: by the age of thirteen or fourteen, the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí had already become known across the scholarly circles of the Núrí district for being able to converse on any subject and resolve any problem put to Him.

In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves the famous 1890 account by the Cambridge orientalist Edward Granville Browne — the only Westerner ever to record his impressions of meeting Bahá'u'lláh. The short paragraph was written in plain academic English. It has never been surpassed.

A short paraphrase from the Baha'i Stories Blog about a letter the young Guardian sent in early 1922 to the small Bahá'í community of Australia, then concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne — one of the first messages sent in the new ministry, encouraging the friends to hold steadily through the change.

In Bahá'í World Faith, 'Abdu'l-Bahá uses the simple image of a seed unfolding into a tree, and the tree producing seeds that will become more trees, to teach that each human being carries within itself the same potential of multiplication — capable of becoming, in due time, a source of life to many.

Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of Bahá'u'lláh's most consequential undertaking of the Adrianople period (1863-1868) — the composition and transmission of the great Tablets to the rulers of His era, addressing each by name and summoning the world's governors to recognise the new Day of God.

Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of Thornton Chase — the Chicago insurance executive who in June 1894 became the first American and the first Westerner formally to embrace the Bahá'í Faith, and who would later be honoured by 'Abdu'l-Bahá as *the first Bahá'í of the United States.*

Shoghi Effendi's narration, in *God Passes By*, of the Master's laying of the cornerstone of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár at Wilmette in May 1912 — a moment the Guardian describes as the inauguration of the construction of the first House of Worship of the Bahá'í Dispensation in the Western world.

Shoghi Effendi's own narration, in *God Passes By*, of the events of late 1921 and early 1922 — the Master's passing, the discovery of the Will and Testament naming the young Shoghi as Guardian, and the formal beginning of the Formative Age of the Faith.

Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of the conference at Badasht in 1848 — and the moment when Ṭáhirih, "adorned yet unveiled," announced that the day of the new Dispensation had begun.

Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's visit to Columbia University in New York on April 19, 1912. The Master spoke to the assembled faculty and students on the immortality of the soul and the inseparability of scientific investigation from spiritual enlightenment.

Mahmúd's Diary records a women's gathering arranged in Denver in late September 1912 — a meeting at the home of one of the city's prominent suffragists, where 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke of the spiritual basis for the equality of women and men.

Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's brief visit to Philadelphia on June 9, 1912, including His afternoon address at the Baptist Temple on Broad Street — a great evangelical Protestant pulpit then known for its commitment to the social gospel.

Mahmúd's Diary records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reception at the Schenley Hotel in Pittsburgh on May 7, 1912, where the Pittsburgh Bahá'í community had organised an afternoon gathering of friends and inquirers that included a number of the city's prominent industrialists and ministers.

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.

In *The Promised Day Is Come*, Shoghi Effendi surveys the decline of the established religious authorities — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Sunní, Shi'í — across the early twentieth century, reading the decline as the parallel of the political collapses that had been visible since 1914.

In *The Promised Day Is Come*, Shoghi Effendi surveys the fall of the great monarchies of Europe and the Middle East during the cataclysm of the First World War — reading the collapses as the historical fulfilment of the warnings Bahá'u'lláh had sent to those same monarchs in the Adrianople period.

In *The Promised Day Is Come* (1941), with Europe in flames and the world at war for the second time in a generation, Shoghi Effendi diagnosed the upheavals of the twentieth century as a single judgment-and-redemption: a tempest unprecedented in its violence, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequence.

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts how Shoghi Effendi, walking the slope of Mount Carmel year after year, conceived and laid out the great Arc of buildings — the International Archives, the Universal House of Justice site, the Centre for the Study of the Texts, the Teaching Centre — on which the world administrative institutions of the Faith would in time stand.

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the moment in the spring of 1953 when Shoghi Effendi, looking out from the newly completed Shrine of the Báb on the centenary of its Founder's enthronement, summoned the Bahá'í world to the most ambitious teaching plan in its history — to settle believers in every remaining unopened country and territory of the planet.

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 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.

On May 4, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called at Hull House in Chicago, the pioneering settlement house founded by Jane Addams in 1889 in the immigrant West Side district. He addressed the assembled residents, social workers and immigrant neighbors in the small main hall and later took tea with Miss Addams herself.

At the dedication of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár grounds in Wilmette on May 1, 1912 — the same gathering at which Nettie Tobin's stone was laid as the cornerstone — 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke about the future Houses of Worship that would arise across the world, and gave the specific architectural instruction that the building must be *circular,* never triangular.

On October 7, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed the assembled students and faculty of Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto. He took up the great Bahá'í theme of the harmony of science and religion — and warned that the cultivation of one wing without the other could not carry the bird of human progress.

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.

From Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a Tablet setting out the central purpose of religion: not the formal observance of ritual, but the unification of hearts, the elevation of human character, and the establishment of the kingdom of justice and fellowship in the visible world.

From Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a Tablet addressed to the women of the East and the West setting out the principle of the equality of women and men as a foundational teaching of the Bahá'í Dispensation.

In the opening chapter of *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá takes up Laura Clifford Barney's question about nature itself — and gives, in one sentence, a sweeping definition: nature is the appearance of composition and decomposition, the meeting and parting of life and death, governed by a single universal law.

In *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá presses the case that humanity, left to itself, does not by some natural process improve. It *requires* an educator of universal scope — and the Manifestations of God are precisely the educators sent for that purpose.

In *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addresses Laura Clifford Barney's question on the prophecies of Isaiah — identifying specific passages of the Hebrew prophet that, in His reading, speak of the Bahá'í Revelation and the age it inaugurates.

An excerpt from the Báb's earliest book, the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá' — a commentary on the Súrih of Joseph revealed in the first hours of His Declaration in May 1844. In this passage, the Báb summons the kings of the world to carry His verses to the peoples of Turkey, India, and the lands of East and West.

In April 1913 'Abdu'l-Bahá visited Budapest. The Star of the West reported that He addressed Hungarian peace societies, Theosophical groups, and meetings drawing some eight hundred listeners — and that He charged a young Bahá'í named Leopold Stark with establishing the first nucleus of the Faith in the Hungarian capital.

In a 1913 Star of the West, the Master tells of a Persian woman from Ardistán who, having become a Bahá'í, returned to her own town and in the space of one year *ignited forty lamps* — taught forty souls the Faith. The Master used the story as a quiet challenge to His Western friends: *Now you must ignite four thousand lamps in one year.*

In 1920 the Star of the West printed Corinne True's report on the acquisition of the Temple property at Wilmette, on the shore of Lake Michigan — the small group of acres on which, by the Master's direction, the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West would in time be raised.

In 1922 the Star of the West printed an early report from the pioneer travel-teachers who had carried the Faith into Alaska — a small notice describing the first contacts with the Native and settler communities of the territory and the response of the small Anchorage and Juneau gatherings.

In 1925 the *Star of the West* carried the announcement of the formation of the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada — the inaugural national institution of the American Faith, elected in convention at the Wilmette Temple grounds.

In a 1913 issue of the Star of the West, the Master praised the American journalist Mrs. Fraser for her newspaper articles on the Bahá'í Cause and gave her a charge that would echo through the vocations of many later teachers: *You must become like a burning torch, that you may melt mountains of snow.*

In 1920 the Star of the West printed the first detailed report from the small German Bahá'í community of Stuttgart and Esslingen — the first solidly established Bahá'í community on the European continent, gathered around the work of Frau Alma Knobloch and the remarkable Esslingen schoolteacher Albert Schwarz.

In June 1917 the Star of the West announced the year's summer gatherings at Green Acre, the Maine retreat founded by Sarah Farmer, and recalled 'Abdu'l-Bahá's praise of the place as a *free and unrestricted platform* for the meeting of religious and spiritual seekers of every background.

In the August 1915 issue of the Star of the West, the editors surveyed the program of the Green Acre Bahá'í summer school at Eliot, Maine — the gathering that, since Sarah Farmer's gift of the property, had become the principal summer institution of the American Bahá'í community.

In June 1921 the Star of the West reported on the small school for Bahá'í children that had begun on the slope of Mount Carmel — a visible answer to one of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's most insistent themes: the universal education of children, irrespective of station or means.

In 1911 the Star of the West printed a report from Tihrán on the Tarbíyat Schools — the Bahá'í-founded schools for boys and for girls in the Persian capital that, in the years before they were forcibly closed by the Persian government in 1934, became the educational pride of the Iranian Bahá'í community.

In April 1910, the Star of the West published a letter from Charles Mason Remey, then traveling through Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. He reported back what no American Bahá'í had yet been told from a Bahá'í pen: *In Japan the spiritual field of work is ready for the laborers.*

In 1915 the *Star of the West* carried news of the small but significant entry of the Faith into Japan — through the patient teaching work of Agnes Alexander in Tokyo and the formation of the first small Japanese Bahá'í community.

In 1920 the *Star of the West* carried the news of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's investiture as a Knight of the British Empire — an honour conferred in recognition of His humanitarian work in feeding the population of Haifa and surrounding districts during the food crisis of the First World War.

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 April 1910 the Star of the West published the longer text of Charles Mason Remey's letter from Rangoon, describing his journey through Japan, China, and Southeast Asia in the cause of opening the way for Bahá'í teaching in the East — and the practical sense of need behind his often- quoted appeal: *American Bahais are needed in Japan*.

In March 1912 the Star of the West carried a letter from May Maxwell in Montreal, reporting on the spread of the Bahá'í teachings in Canada — the lectures she was giving to socialist halls, the friendly notice in the Montreal newspapers, and the city's preparation to receive 'Abdu'l-Bahá later that year.

In 1910 the Star of the West relayed letters from Dr. Susan I. Moody, the American physician sent by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Tehran. She wrote back about a gathering of women in the Persian capital and the plans then under way for the Tarbíyat Girls' School. *The girls' school is assured.*

In 1922 the Star of the West printed Mountfort Mills' account of his visit to Haifa in the months following 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing — the first encounter of a Western pilgrim with the new Guardian of the Cause, Shoghi Effendi, then only twenty-five years old and already, in Mills' words, *the center of the world today.*

In Issue 1 of Volume 2 of the Star of the West, dated March 1911, the editors reported on the work of the Persian-American Educational Society — a small body of American Bahá'ís that had enrolled sixty-three scholarships and remitted seven hundred dollars to support the Bahá'í schools in Tehran. The Master had asked them, in particular, for *one… efficient in science and arts.*

In the spring and summer of 1919 the Star of the West gave its pages to the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan — the Master's great charter of teaching addressed to the North American believers, formally proclaimed at the New York convention in April 1919.

In the spring of 1916 the *Star of the West* carried the first published Tablets of the Divine Plan, sent by 'Abdu'l-Bahá from the war-strained Holy Land to the American believers — eight letters that would prove to be the charter of the Bahá'í teaching enterprise of the twentieth century.

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.

An early Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to the New York believers, preserved in the 1909 *Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá Abbas* — addressing the city of New York as the eventual centre through which the Cause will reach the New World and exhorting the friends to prepare for that destiny.

An early Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Lua Getsinger — the *mother teacher of the West,* one of the first Western pilgrims to 'Akká in 1898 — sent to her after her return to America with a charge to undertake the lifelong teaching work that her pilgrimage had opened.

In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá records the moment in 1844 when the young Merchant of Shíráz — twenty-five years old — began openly to declare His station: the Báb, the Gate, sent to prepare the way for the greater Manifestation soon to come.

In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá relates the encounter between Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known as Vaḥíd, the most learned cleric of his generation in Persia — and the Báb. Three audiences. In the third, a request for a commentary on the Súrih of Kawthar; and the Báb's spontaneous, written reply that emptied the room of every doubt.