Bahá’í World/Volume 4/The Bahá’í Movement and North American University Circles
THE BAHÁ’Í MOVEMENT AND NORTH AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CIRCLES
BY MARTHA L. ROOT
(Miss Martha L. Root, American journalist and international Bahá’í teacher and lecturer, has spoken in more than four hundred of leading universities and colleges and other higher institutions of learning in the five continents. At the time of writing this article, she was completing a tour across the United States from Honolulu, and San Francisco to New York and Washington, D. C. She has spoken in the universities and colleges and broadcast in every city through which she passed during her stay of eleven months in America. She had an unusual opportunity to meet the university circles of the United States, both in lecturing and in individual contacts with students and professors. Owing to her constant and uninterrupted traveling, writing and daily lecturing, she has only summarized here a few of the impressions of the Bahá’í Movement and American university circles, but they throw a light upon the minds, the aims and the spiritual needs the students of North America, or, one might almost say the cosmopolitan needs, for in these universities are students, not only of the United States, but representative students from almost every country of the world.—EDITORS.)
DURING my trip across our North American Continent my theme in the university circles has been the universal principles of Bahá’u’lláh, the great World Educator. I presented His vision of a spiritual world with universal peace and complete disarmament through universal education, and the kind of international education our colleges and universities should teach. I stressed the education of the inner spirit of man, as well as the intellect and the training of the reality that leads to genius, the presentation of the harmony of science and religion, and the program to unite religions send men out in order to be brothers to their fellowmen. Sometimes the topic was the new solution of the economic problem through the Divine Economic World Plan of Bahá’u’lláh, by which every child in every country can have the proper education to develop the capacity to earn his living and at the same time be an asset to the community. Sometimes the subject was a universal auxiliary language with proofs of what the unification of language can do to help bring world understanding. Often the theme was outlined of a Parliament of Man which is a higher League of Nations, and the necessity of a World Court was made clear through the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. The doing away of prejudices, racial, national, political and religious, was explained.
This article will have to do only with the most vivid impressions that came to me from these visits to North American university circles. I found that there was keen interest in religion as a spiritual solution for world problems among many students; and among a class of students who were sometimes misrepresented as agnostics, I found that they are not non-believers in the pure teachings of Christ and the other World Teachers but only disbelievers in theology, and by that I mean the outer forms of religion.
To begin first with the youth who are not satisfied, a number of times in our American universities, students say to me: “Some older people think that we students are Godless, that we do not believe in any religion. This is not quite true. Many of us do wish religion but we wish it liberalized.” One group of young men and women still in the ’teens—whose parents are all prominent literalists in religion—said: “We refuse to be bored by religion that has to do only with forms and dogmas and
The Eggleston Farm near Flint, Michigan.
Bahá’ís assembled for their Summer School, June, 1930.
[Page 463]
unscientific
creeds, but the liberal side of religion
would interest us.”
When I asked one student what he considered the function of religion, he replied: “An important function of religion should be to get rid of our rituals, of things that mean nothing, to free our speech of dead orthodox words and to find something that will solve living problems.”
One young man in one of the most distinguished universities of America said: “Parents and professors think they are dealing with the generation that refuses to believe in ancient authority. They are. They are dealing with a generation that cannot believe in it. The college undergraduate body feel that their intelligence is being insulted when little or no attempt is made in religion to take account of those facts they have just come from hearing about in their sociological and scientific courses. We students want to know whether the teachings of Jesus are significant for this age, whether they are in accordance with what we know to be true and whether there are any other new teachings, or renewed teachings, equally or more important for this universal age. The mere fact that the past has accepted Jesus and that His life has become a tradition is not enough. If people did instinctively think of Jesus in every act of their life, there might be more justice in such an emotional approach.”
Another student said: “There is very little association between the student and the church.” Another student quoted Niebuhr that modern religion is being discredited much more through its ethical failure than by its inability to conform to present day intellectual ideas and that religion must be able to impress the mind of modern men with the essential possibility and scientific respectability of its fundamental affirmations. One student said: “The only sane and rational way to achieve a religion that will have any meaning for us students, is to examine them all, to confront the facts of science and to draw our own conclusions. Certainly no one religion should be given the sole authority in a college or university where the mind of the student is presumably receptive and ready to form such opinions and conclusions.” He felt that the student, himself, should take part and express his doubts and beliefs and make issues of the questions that are troubling him. He stated that under such a system there would at least be some interest in religion.
The same student also said: “Whether we embrace catholicism or humanism, whether we are iconoclasts or compromisers, whether we accept Jesus Christ or reject Him, we must begin to think about these vital problems. We wish to show a definite reason carefully thought out for what we have decided to believe and why we believe it.”
I found that students like these without any prejudices, did many times listen with eagerness to the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh concerning a spiritual world plan. These students had my sympathy and I thought that they are like the students in Japan, for as long ago as 1915 when I took a journalistic trip around the world during the world war, Count Okuma, founder of Waseda University and at that time one of the greatest statesmen of that nation, had said to me, when I visited him in his home in Tokyo: “What the youth of Japan need more than anything else is pure religion, not the creeds of the Christians nor the dogmas of the Buddhists but the pure teachings of Christ and the pure teachings of the Buddha. I will look into the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh and if they offer pure religion, I shall teach them to the youth of Japan.”
Everywhere across the continent I was
impressed with the profound interest some
students have in religion as a solvent of
world problems. Several times, young men
would say: “This is the first time I have
heard of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings, they are a
dynamic solution.” One evening I spoke in
a great western university before the
engineering section on the new economic
solution. Immediately after the lecture, a young
man spoke to me and said: ‘This is the first
time I have heard of these teachings and
they sweep me off my feet. I am the
President of the Young Men’s Christian
Association in this university. I wish
to introduce to you one of the girls here who is the
President of the Young Women’s Christian
Association. Would you come up to our
sorority house tomorrow afternoon and
speak[Page 464]
to
a group of students whom we shall invite
to hear more about these universal principles
of Bahá’u’lláh?” I promised to come, and I
gave the girl a photograph of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
The next afternoon when I went to the
sorority house to speak, I saw on the bulletin
board this photograph of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and
it was an announcement of who
‘Abdu’l-Bahá is and a résumé of the Bahá’í
solution of the economic problem (the notes
which this young woman had taken at the
lecture the evening before). A group of
students came to listen to the talk and to
ask questions. The interest was so great that
the students sent out and had a box supper
brought in and the questions continued until
eight o’clock in the evening.
International houses in universities are a liberal education. President Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University in New York City, went even farther. He said, “International House is the only real university,” meaning a place where all may come to exchange ideas. Intellectually and spiritually it is a place to talk over ideas and ideals. Mrs. Harry Edmonds, in International House, expressed it this way: “The spiritual life of the Columbia University students naturally was a lonely one, before we had this House. It is difficult to develop a spiritual life without friends, understanding and appreciation. A little child was very lonely and went in his sadness to one of the family for consolation. He was told that he should talk about his troubles with God. The little boy answered, ‘I want to talk with some one and have some one love me who has a “skin face”’ Increasingly we are learning that it is through our ‘skin faces’ that the light of love and sympathy must shine.”
I found too that the atmosphere in International House in the University of California was distinctly cosmopolitan. Many scholars of international repute are counted among the members of the faculties and there is a constant flow of visiting professors and lecturers from both Occidental and Oriental countries. The student group is distinctly international in character. I found in my two lectures there and in a general lecture in the university, that forty national and cultural groups were present in this great university situated at one of the main gateways to the United States.
International House in the University of Oregon, in the heart of the City of Eugene, Oregon, though smaller, had a fine cosmopolitan spirit and a high academic standard.
Speaking in most of the international houses and meeting the students, I thought of the words of Benjamin Ide Wheeler: “The plain fact is that we are members one of another and that we are not living in accordance with the nature of things—that is, we are not living in accordance with the facts, if we think only our own thoughts and sit nowhere ever except upon the lonesome throne of our own outlook. Hatred between men, hatred between classes, hatred between peoples, represents always this stubborn unwillingness to get over onto the other hilltop and see how the plain looks from there. The call of an International House is unto larger and better things.’
Several international houses have religious committees where all the religions of the world are freely discussed. In one of these international houses, after one of my lectures, a beautiful girl from Yugoslavia came to me and said: “This truth of Bahá’u’lláh’s principles is something that I have been searching for all my life and here in an American university I have found what I seek in religion.” At that meeting fifteen nations were represented and I spoke about the Bahá’í Movement and its progress in each of their countries, for they had requested me to speak directly on, “What is the Bahá’í Movement?” In another great international house, one of the Chinese students said after the lecture: ““Why are not these teachings of Bahá’u’lláh taught in every university in the United States?”
Once when I gave a lecture and a forum followed, three Chinese students were sitting on the front seat; one said: “My father is a Confucianist,” another said: “My father is an atheist,” the third said: “My father is a Muḥammadan, but we three are great friends and we have decided to study all the religions and all the philosophies and when we find out which one is the best, all three of us are going to believe in that religion.”
Pasadena Junior College in California,
where I spoke to thirty-two hundred
[Page 465]
students,
has a principal with a vision. Principal John
Wesley Harbeson, in conversation
with me about the lecture and in his introduction,
said about as follows: “In the hands
of youth, the progress of the world is assured;
before the determined drive of youth,
no impediments can stand and no failure can
be final. In the ideas of youth lie the hopes
of a progressive world, a spirit of
uncompromising idealism is enthroned in the
hearts of our young people. Unbiased by blind
prejudice; undiscouraged and uncrushed by
a thousand defeats and miscarried plans;
unafraid of the hazards and uncertainties of an
unseen future; undaunted by obstacles and
obstructions in the path of progress, youth
faces the future with clear vision, dauntless
courage and an unbounded faith.”
He also said that youth is not just a period of life; gray hairs and wrinkled brow are not the unfailing evidence of senility. The unmistakable signs of declining age are prejudiced minds; the discouraged and crushed spirit; the fearful heart; the hopeless future and the surrendered cause. He told the students that some men grow old in early life, others advance far in their three score years and ten and remain young. He also stressed the high spiritual ideal of life.
Visiting a few of our universities and colleges in America, I thought of the one criticism—and there is only one that I heard —made by the Far Eastern educators of our Western education. Some of the greatest Far Eastern scholars said that the greatest fault in American education, as they saw it, was the fact that religion is not allowed or is never stressed in some of the American institutions. They said that it is the spiritual that adds greatly to the morality and the culture of nations.
Speaking of Asiatic culture, I had a stimulating interview with Professor Arthur W. Hummel, Lecturer in Chinese History in Columbia University, New York City, and also Chief of the Division of Chinese Literature in the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. He said that our universities really teach only one-half of the culture of the world, they have the culture of Rome, Greece and of Palestine—but the great culture of the Far East is not taught in our American universities. I asked him what he thought should be done about the translation of Chinese literature and documentary materials into Western languages. He replied: “There are great masses of Chinese documents outside of the Chinese classics themselves which need to be translated and placed before Western scholars. One of the most urgent tasks is the translation of the twenty-six dynastic histories, which are now closed books to the West, but which contain facts of tremendous importance to the Western historians, sociologists, ethnologists, and others. The translation work should be undertaken as a joint enterprise by competent Western and by Chinese scholars.”
He added: “We should be sending every year a score or more of picked American youths to study the language both written and spoken, to observe and report Chinese customs, and interpret Chinese life in the villages as well as in the larger cities. These students should go to China with open eyes and with an unprejudiced point of view. They should not go as teachers, but in the humble attitude of learners, which is the only attitude in which genuine scholarship can be carried on. All this is self-evident and commonplace to anyone who looks at the world as a whole, but unfortunately, it needs to be impressed upon even the most educated Western minds, who think solely in terms of the culture of Greece and Palestine and Rome.”
Dr. Hummel remarked that what he said of China is almost equally true of Japan, and Korea, and of India, and Persia, though he emphasized China because the Chinese formed the largest group numerically, and their literature is more voluminous and covers a greater number of centuries.
Professor Hummel explained to me the
misconception in the West that the Chinese
are stagnant in everything that is worth
while. He said: “This idea of stagnation is
really a stagnation in our own point of view;
or that the Chinese are stagnant only in
those directions in which students and
professors in the West are particularly strong,
that is in physical sciences; but the Chinese
were not stagnant in those fields in which
they themselves wish to progress. There are
fields in which the Chinese have
progressed[Page 466]
and
in which we cannot be regarded as
their equals at all, that is to say in the study
of human relations and all that pertains to
self-cultivation in the ethical and moral
spheres. The Chinese never developed a
political democracy but they did develop a
high degree of social democracy and we
owe a great deal to their cultivation of right
relationships between men.”
“Do you think the West could with profit, study the Chinese family system?” I asked this keen professor, who knows whereof he speaks, for he has spent two years in Japan and thirteen years in China, and his life work is interpreting the culture of China to Western thinkers. He replied that with all its defects, the Chinese family system trains the individual to think primarily of his relationship to others rather than of his personal rights, and both the Confucian and Buddhist idea that self-cultivation rather than the cultivation of others has produced a type of individual who was not personally aggressive but was trained to be sensitive to the desires and the wants of others. It is just because the values in Chinese culture are not tangible ones and are comparatively little concerned with the outside world that in the past Western observers easily leaped to the conclusion that we have nothing to learn. We think of ourselves primarily as teachers and not as learners. We do have a great deal to teach the Far East in physical sciences, in the true concept of law and the technic of political democracy, but in the other realms we have much to learn. We need in the West today a new sense of humility. We need to put ourselves in the mood of learners rather than teachers. This is precisely the mood in which the Far East has been for a number of decades but this mood is only beginning to arise in the West. It is important that we in Western universities should take full opportunity to place before our youth the best examples of Chinese art and give our students the tools that are necessary to open to them the treasures of Chinese literature, history and philosophy.
There is not one of our social sciences that could not profit by the study of Chinese folk lore, anthropology, ethnology interpreting all the phenomena in these fields in terms of parallel materials in other parts of the world. It happens that in some of the very fields in which we are the least developed that the Chinese have a unique contribution to make.
I asked Dr. Hummel if he did not think that the future peace of the world depends in part upon our full cultural understanding. He replied: “There cannot be genuine political understanding unless it is based in some degree upon cultural understanding, but cultural understanding must be reciprocal if it is to be worth while. We cannot expect the peoples of the Far East to go on indefinitely attempting to understand us, unless we, ourselves, make some commensurate effort to understand them. There must be this kind of understanding as well as political understanding.”
He said that the people of Asia will change, but they will not change to the point of losing their cultural identity and it is to our avantage as well as to theirs that they should be permitted to cultivate all the values that they hold to be good. There are thousands of youths in our colleges and universities who in the present arrangement of the courses have no opportunity to obtain even a glimpse of the rich materials to be found in Chinese literature and philosophy, and hence are in no position to know whether specialization in those fields would be worth while or not. Our students are being trained in the culture of half a world and do not, intellectually speaking, have an opportunity to know that the world is round. It is really tragic that many thousands who might benefit by such studies are missing values that might add richness and enjoyment to their lives. Twenty-five years from now they will not thank us for leaving them in the dark, for failing to place these opportunities before them. It is true too, that in times of financial depression, the first courses to be eliminated are those courses considered to be luxuries, but in terms of the future there could be nothing more worth while.
“How do the Chinese interpret religion?”
was another question I asked Dr. Hummel.
He replied: “They interpret religion almost
exclusively in terms of ethical and moral
ideas. They take almost no interest in sects
or in theology, but the supremacy of
the[Page 467]
ethical
life is the assumption that underlies all
of their classics and was the basis of all their
older education. The Chinese believe that the
most fundamental part of education is the
teaching of humane social relationships.”
The Chinese Clubs in several of the American Universities arranged for me to speak especially to them. Many of them are taking post-graduate work in our universities and they certainly will be among the great moulders of thought in the life of their country when they return to China. Our university training, like our economics, our universal suffrage, is no longer to be thought of in terms of yesterday’s nationalism. Our students think in terms of tomorrow with its new ideal of internationalism and universal education. I have written at length of the interview with Prof. Hummel because it opens a new vista to Western universities and what has been said of the older culture of China and the study of Chinese by a few of our best scholars could be urged for the study of the ancient Persian culture and literature and above all the study and translation of the Works of Bahá’u’lláh from the Persian and the Arabic. Our country has fewer Oriental departments than the great universities of Europe. There is great need for an Oriental department in some of the Universities of the Middle West.
Some of the students in universities where I spoke and especially in the Schools of Religions’ departments, decided to take the subject: “The Bahá’í Movement” for their theses. Many of the students said: “Your message of these universal peace principles will be promulgated by us” or “Your message will be passed on. Your message will reverberate.”
Often when I spoke before one department in a University, students and sometimes professors from other departments would come and invite me to their groups. Sometimes the lectures were arranged before the entire student body, sometimes before the School of Journalism; sometimes by the International Relations Groups. The lecture in Leland Stanford University was arranged by four groups jointly, the Young Men’s Christian Association, Young Women’s Christian Association, International Relations Group, and the Japanese club.
President Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University in New York, had arranged for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to speak in Earl Hall in the University when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was in the United States in 1912. I gave Dr. Butler “Foundations of World Unity” compiled from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. “May I keep it?” he asked. And when I said I had brought it for him, “I should like so much to have it,” he said. President Butler spoke of the university and the international mind and gave me his lecture on this subject which he had delivered at Charles University in Praha, Czechoslovakia, this year. He said: “The twentieth century university fails of its mission if it does not seek and claim leadership in this new movement of international understanding, international cooperation and international responsibility for meeting the great problems which face mankind. It possesses a freedom of thought and action which is denied to the political organized state and which is quite impossible for the diverse and conflicting forms of religious belief. The university is the natural leader toward the new day and no matter in what country its home be found, no matter what language it habitually speaks, it must rise to the full height of its new opportunity and not only accept but claim responsibility for leading human effort into new fields of understanding and achievement and for inspiring humanity to new accomplishment. The university may not content itself with being only the expounder and defender of old and well-established truth; it must in justice to its history and its purpose claim its place of leadership in discovery and proclaiming truth which is new.”.
Dr. Robert E. Hume, Professor of the
Institute of Religions of Columbia
University, New York City, arranged for me to
address his students on “The Bahá’í Movement.”
Introducing me he spoke of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
and showed His picture. He also
showed them a photograph of the Bahá’í
Temple in Chicago and explained its
significance. One of his statements too, about
religion I shall always remember. He said:
“Even as nations have been learning that
no one of them suffices to itself, but that
each needs to help and to be helped by
others,[Page 468]
so
also the religions of the world will come
to see that each must seek to serve and to
be served in the work of peace, and to go
hand in hand towards the common goal.”
One student in this Institute of Religions decided to make the subject for her thesis, “The Bahá’í Movement.” Several addresses were given in the schools of religion in connection with American universities. Some of the students asked their professors to have courses in Bahá’u’lláh’s Teachings as a part of the curriculum and that credit be given.
One talk was given in the beautiful chapel of Colorado College. Dr. James G. McMurtry, Professor of Biblical Literature and Applied Religion of that college gave me an excellent definition of education and religion. He said in part:
“Education is discipline—a gradual, progressive, continuous discipline of mind. The quality of education is not to be defined through the subject of education, but through the effect of education on the student’s mind. The end of education is not information, but inspiration; not facts, rules, tables; but insight, initiative, grasp, growth.” He quoted President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, who said, “It becomes impossible for us ever again to identify education with mere acquisition of learning. It means a gradual adjustment to the spiritual acquisitions of the race.”
Dr. McMurtry explained his idea of religion as “adjustment to the spiritual acquisitions of the race.” He stressed that the field of religion is the field of the spirit. His own words were: “The man of today reads few books, and especially few magazine articles, who does not see that our age is fast moving toward the assurance that in education the intellect alone is not able to curb desire; that the physical, untrained by the moral, is as an uncaged lion and works devastation in the realms of the finer sensibilities and gentler natures. So religion is coming back. The spiritual in education is looming larger and larger. A reaction has set in. The universities are taking a new attitude, courses in the Philosophy of Religion, Comparative Religions, History of Religion, Religion and Ethics are being scheduled in most of the colleges and universities.”
He spoke, too, of the great foundations for the carrying on of religious work among the students and that these foundations have been formed at the urgent desire of American students.
President Livingston Farrand of Cornell University in Ithaca said: “I quite agree that we are turning toward broader conceptions of religion. More and more a universal view and effort must be expressed. That is what the university is now concerned with. Officially it does not care whether you are Jew or Christian if you are sincere and seeking the true values of life. Any sincere search for truth or thought that is based on the search for truth is welcome here.
“Religious work at Cornell is one of the most encouraging things in American education today. More I cannot say.”
Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, of Pasadena, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. In an interview, he said: ‘Personally, I believe that essential religion is one of the world’s supremest needs, and I believe that one of the greatest contributions that the United States ever can or ever will make to world progress—greater by far than any contribution which we ever have made, or can make, to the science of government— will consist in furnishing an example to the world of how the religious life of a nation can evolve intelligently, inspiringly, reverently, completely divorced from all unreason, all superstition, and all unwholesome emotionalism.
The wife of one of the distinguished Professors of Howard University, in Washington, D. C., the world’s leading institution for the higher education of the negro, said to me in thanking me for my talk to the students: “Thank you a thousand times for what you have done for peace and goodwill since you have been in this city. The hearts of youth have been touched, and no one can tell what suffering and injustices have been saved from children yet unborn because those of today have listened to your glorious message.”
One Director of Religious Activities in
an American college, in introducing me said:
“For the eleven years in which I have made
a special study of the American Race Problem,
the Bahá’í Movement has done
more[Page 469]
than
anything else to convince me that people can
live together in harmony regardless
of race or color.”
One Professor also said to the college students in introducing me: “The Bahá’ís live the life of Christ in regard to the race problem.”
Still another Professor in a college said in introducing me: “The Bahá’ís are the finest white people I have ever met.” After the lecture he said: “The anti-slavery movement in the United States began just the same way, by people quietly speaking to groups everywhere, just as you are doing, about a higher way.”
The University of Wisconsin is said to be the first in the United States to install a radio station to broadcast higher education. The writer gave two lectures over the air from that studio as well as seven other lectures in the university. Also, there was a bill before the Wisconsin Legislature at that time to introduce the universal auxiliary language of Esperanto into the University of Wisconsin and I spoke in the Legislature Hall on “The Progress of Esperanto in Five Continents.”
Several Quaker College Professors in summing up my talks after my addresses thanked me for presenting to their pupils the vision of a world of peace and how to make this vision a solid reality.
One lecture was given in Temple University in Philadelphia. The founder of that university, Dr. Russell H. Conwell, in an interview with me several years ago had made the following significant statement which I quoted to the students: “You may quote me as saying that the Bahá’í Movement is the biggest movement in the world today for world-wide Christianity and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is the peace Prophet of this age. I spent seven months in the Orient and I saw that millions of Orientals have come up beautifully into our Christianity through becoming Bahá’ís. I cabled to Egypt asking ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to speak in my church, Baptist Temple, in Philadelphia, when He would come to the United States in 1912.”
There is not time in this article to describe fully the work at all the different universities and colleges where I spoke in this trip across the continent, but some among those where groups of lectures were given or at least one lecture, those not already mentioned, are: Fresno State Normal School, Unitarian School of Religion, Oakland, Calif., University of Washington, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Agricultural College, Colorado, Iliff School of Religion, Denver, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Illinois in Urbana, Northwestern University, North Park College in Chicago, Lewis Institute, Chicago, Garrett Biblical Institute, Francis Parker School, Chicago, Jewish Peoples Institute, Chicago, Art Institute, Chicago, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, University of New Hampshire, Harvard University, Summer Session, Boston University, Teachers College, Columbia University, School of Journalism; Columbia University, Hunter College, New York University, Cheyney Training School for Teachers, Swarthmore College, Haverford College, American University, Washington, D. C., Mt. Vernon Seminary, Chevy Chase School for Girls, Howard University, Miner Normal College, Virginia State College, Morgan College, Baltimore,—and about sixty high schools.
As this is written lectures are being arranged in the universities and colleges in and around Boston, Worcester and a few more talks in universities and colleges in Philadelphia and New York City before I sail for Europe in four weeks. In all of these institutions I met with an eager and enthusiastic response from the students.
So these Bahá’í Teachings do speak to the souls of the students. Opinions flow and ebb; philosophies come and go; fashions of thought change with the rise and fall of civilizations and empires, but man remains what Plato called him, the spectator of eternity; and what Christ called him, the Son of the Most High. He is stirred now by the Logos brought again to earth by the great World Educator Bahá’u’lláh. He has mighty hopes of these New Teachings. He may not know so well the history of the Source perhaps, but he feels the beauty of these universal principles; he is summoned by the compelling voice of the unselfish love. He looks with wonder upon the Truth which has come forth from Persia and the Most Great Prison in ‘Akká, Palestine.
