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World Order

SPRING 1970

THE INVISIBLE SWORD oF ISLAM

Robert L. Gulick, Jr.

THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH AND THE ARTS

Eliane A. Hopson

THE MEANING OF WORSHIP

Horace Holley

THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD

E. S. Stevens

THRONES OF ST. PETER

Firuz Kazemzadeh

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 4 NUMBER 3 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER is intended to stimulate, inspire and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

GAYLE MORRISON

Subscriber Service:

JEANETTE ROBBIN

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts and suggestions for articles and subjects to be treated editorially will be welcomed and acknowledged by the editors.

Subscription: Regular mail USA, $3.50; Foreign, $4.00. Single copy, $1.00.

Copyright © 1970, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Society’s “Quality of Sound”

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7 The Invisible Sword of Islam

by Robert L. Gulick, Jr.

12 The Bahá’í Faith and the Arts

by Eliane A. Hopson

22 Lumbini: Home of the Blessed Buddha

by Keith de Folo

24 The Meaning of Worship

by Horace Holley

28 The Mountain of God

a novel by E. S. Stevens

53 Thrones of St. Peter

a book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

56 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Society’s “Quality of Sound”

EDITORIAL

TO A MUSICIAN, it is a well-known fact that the size and shape of the resonating chamber determines the quality of sound produced by a musical instrument. Thus an E-string plucked on a violin produces one sort of sound, while the E-string on a guitar produces another—and E played on an oboe, because of the different shape of the instrument, produces something different again.

This principle of the resonating chamber which accentuates sounds at certain frequencies and damps them out at others may suggest a useful way of looking at society. Any reasonably large sampling of individuals will produce, statistically, an array of personal characteristics which will not vary significantly from one society to another—such as aggressiveness and submissiveness; individual orientation and corporate orientation; idealism and practicality. With whatever array of characteristics an individual may be endowed, his adaptation to society depends largely on the fit between his personality and those personality traits which are favored or discouraged by his society’s system of stated ideals. For example, France esteems intellect to the degree that there is a school slang word cancre to express general contempt for the student at the bottom of the class. In America, however, we have neither the word nor the attitude. Intellect is frequently regarded with suspicion and intellectuals termed “bookworms”, or “eggheads”. Some of the characteristics which are reinforced by the American resonating chamber are the display of material success and smiling aggressiveness. And so on through the cultures and subcultures of the world.

Does the Bahá’í Faith produce a resonating chamber? Is it one of a conventional sort? Or does it do the impossible: accentuate the best in everyone without damping out any characteristic which in itself is not bad if channeled properly? Though no full answer is possible at this early stage in the development of the Bahá’í community, one does find a common denominator in the commitment of all Bahá’ís to the oneness of God and the oneness of mankind. This commitment, independent of any personal traits, produces immediately recognizable effects in all kinds of personalities, thus demonstrating the existence of a diverse yet single people. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke of it in this way:

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Consider the flowers of a garden. Though differing in kind, color, form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the water of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm and addeth unto their beauty. . . . In like manner, when divers shades of thought, temperament and character, are brought together under the power and influence of one central agency, the beauty and glory of human perfection will be revealed and made manifest. Naught but the celestial potency of the word of God, which ruleth and transcendeth the realities of all things, is capable of harmonizing the divergent thoughts, sentiments, ideas and convictions of the children of men.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

“A PROPHET is without honor in his own country”, the saying goes. The wisest and best men of each generation often go unrecognized, until much later, except by a very few. We tend to be dazzled by power, by the trappings of knowledge, by material success, and to confuse them with greatness. One whose vision exceeds his outward station seems, depending on the mood of the age, inconsequential or foolhardy, mad or dangerous or demonic. This is particularly true of the founder of a great religion—a Prophet with a capital “P”—who invariably makes claims which seem to conflict with the realities of His situation. (A carpenter from Nazareth is supposed to be the Messiah?) Great religions are born in periods of ferment, insecure times when those who challenge the order are most likely to be deemed a threat and thereby harassed or destroyed.

Yet, no matter what the immediate fate of a Prophet (or, to use the Bahá’í term, a Manifestation of God), limited recognition, martyrdom, or exile, His “country” eventually becomes the object of—more than honor—a lasting love and devotion which fleeting greatness can never command. When the political history of a period is forgotten or studied only by a few, the Manifestation continues to inspire men. His birthplace, the paths He traveled (and those paths men wish He had traveled), the scene of His death, all are remembered and venerated. Even as history becomes hopelessly mixed with myth, pilgrims stream to the places He is said to have known.

Today, as Keith de Folo recounts in his sketch of Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal, after over two thousand years, archeology and modern transportation are providing His followers with a new focus for their love and appreciation. The excerpts from E. S. Stevens’ The Mountain of God tell us of another holy place, Mount Carmel, a barren hill that towers in the history of religion. Stevens describes it as having a special place in Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, although he was apparently not a Bahá’í, his fascination with the spot stems from his recognition of its importance for the Bahá’í Faith. He was moved not so much by the place, perhaps, as by the people who believed in its sacredness, whose lives were touched by Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. Their numbers were few in the days when Stevens visited Haifa, but they were imbued with the spirit of pilgrimage. This love, this life-changing commitment, which Robert L. Gulick, Jr., terms “the invisible sword of Islam” in his article, is the real power of religion. It may wane with time—much time—but is always reborn to be a force which can change the world.

To the Editor

EDUCATION

Having finished reading Arthur Dahl’s review of Education and Ecstasy I feel I must disagree with a few implied conclusions. Certainly Bahá’u’lláh has exalted the rank of education, calling it the “most exalted of the professions,” but I hardly think that education of the future will be of the type described in George Leonard’s book.

[Page 5] First, consider what advantage there is to acceleration of the intellectual development of the mind. The highest score ever achieved on an IQ test was 250. This was by a chimpanzee, 6 months old, on a test designed for 6 month old infants. Man’s natural development is slower than the animals’ because he needs the extra time to assimilate more profound lessons. If we try to hurry the natural process the result will be negative rather than positive.

Second, it is a well accepted fact that man passes through stages in his development. In childhood there are certain stages the child passes through. According to the work of Jean Piaget there are stages in the development of the reasoning ability of the child. Suffice it to say that it is impossible, developmentally speaking, for the child of 3-6 to perform intellectual tasks at the high school level.

Third, and most important, is the basic assumption that American education operates under today is wrong. The focus is upon the static aspects of reality rather than its dynamic transformations. We assume that education is the “pouring in” of something (I don’t know what) and if we can invent a more efficient way of doing this we’re home free. Nuts.

Everything changes and the man who can best deal with the everyday changes he is confronted with is considered most intelligent. The Bahá’í Faith has brought the spiritual underpinnings of the new dynamic for a new age, but its implications are only dimly understood at the present time. The application of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh must be on this basis— their own inner dynamic and not the imaginings of another that seem to parallel Bahá’u’lláh’s intent.

RICH MEIER

Amherst, Massachusetts

THE MILLERITES

After reading Billy Rojas’ article on the Millerites in the Fall, 1969 issue of WORLD ORDER, I feel compelled to write concerning Mr. Rojas’ comments about William Sears’ treatment of the Millerites in Thief in the Night.

Having done some research on the Millerites last year, I was rather amused at Mr. Rojas’ assertion that acceptance of stories pertaining to the Millerites’ wearing of ascension robes is acceptance of “distortion”. The real distortion, it seems to me, after reading Francis Nichol’s The Midnight Cry (on which Mr. Rojas seemingly relied heavily, after criticizing Mr. Sears for basing his thoughts on one source) and other Seventh Day Adventist and Millerite works, is not in the acceptance or rejection of the ascension robe stories, but rather the treatment of this topic as if it were of some major consequence. Nichol, for instance, spends over fifty pages “disproving” claims that the Millerites wore ascension robes.

Further, it does not seem that Mr. Sears “uncritically accepted” the robe stories. What Mr. Sears actually wrote was: “Some of the more zealous believers, it is said, donned their ‘ascension robes’ and prepared to await Christ’s descent upon the clouds of Heaven.” (William Sears, Thief in the Night, London: George Ronald, 1968, p. 2).

Mr. Rojas, it seems, “uncritically accepted” portions of Nichol’s work, especially those pertaining to “eccentric behavior” among the Millerites, which Mr. Rojas writes “was exceedingly rare and confined to individuals”. However, Miller himself felt it enough of a problem to write: “My heart was deeply pained during my tour east, to see in some few of my former friends a proneness to wild and foolish extremes and vain delusions, such as working miracles, discerning spirits, vague and loose views on sanctification and etc.” (William Miller in Signs of the Times, November 8, 1843). It is not the acts themselves which are particularly interesting, but rather the Millerite leadership’s overreaction to them, and the strained denials of defenders of the Millerites.

I enjoyed reading Mr. Rojas’ article, after getting past the first page, and found that it had “several qualities to recommend it”.

MARK LITTMAN

Takoma Park, Maryland

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The Invisible Sword of Islam

By ROBERT L. GULICK, JR.

THE HISTORY OF ISLAM has been misread for so long that it is not surprising to find Westerners still misreading it. Even supposedly international-minded graduate students ask, “Isn’t it true that the Arabs spread Islám by carrying a sword in one hand and a Qur’án in the other?” Mark Twain, who had a reputation for telling tall tales, reportedly said that a lie could go around the world while the truth was putting its boots on. Any simple affirmative or negative statement relating to history or economics is likely to be inaccurate, and it is not assumed that a short article will tell the whole truth, but it is the scholar’s duty to clarify as best he can.

While research for this article was in progress, local newspapers carried an account about a sergeant who was crusading in Vietnam with a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other. The notion that Muslims ever literally fought the pagans with sword in right hand and Qur’án in left is, however, utterly false. Muslims do not use the left hand for a handshake, much less to touch the Holy Book. “I bring not peace but a sword” were the words of Jesus, not of Muḥammad, but for both the sword was the “tongue of the Invisible” which separated truth from error. The Qur’án itself commands, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.”

There have been instances in Islamic history of serious violation of this particular Teaching of the Prophet, the slaughter of 20,000 Persian Bahá’ís in the nineteenth century being a case in point. But forced conversion to Islám has not been part of the mainstream of the religion. The wars of Muḥammad were purely defensive. Had the Muslims permitted themselves to be exterminated, there would have been no glorious Islamic civilization. To turn the other cheek would have been to permit genocide.

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH described the first decades of Islám in these words: “In its primitive days, whilst they still adhered to the precepts associated with the name of their Prophet, the Lord of mankind, their career was marked by an unbroken chain of victories and triumphs.” The Persians tell a story about a man whose sheep never strayed from his presence. His neighbors asked him, “Why doesn’t your sheep run away? You have no rope around his neck.” The man answered, “You are mistaken, my friends. This sheep is firmly held by tanab-i-’ishq, the cord of love.” The invisible sword of Islám was attachment to the Word of God, a love so profound as to be unshaken by the tempestuous outcries of the unbelieving multitude.

Lamentable departures from the letter and spirit of Islám occurred after the passing of Muḥammad in the absence of a clearly authorized and accepted succession, a lack that resulted in the triumph of the false god of naked force and of the spurious principle that “might makes right.” Thus we find that the Almohad reign in Spain was the prototype of the Spanish Inquisition, but the Almohads were not orthodox Muslims nor were they for the most part Arabs. In 1839, the fanatical mobs of Shí’ih Muslims in Mashhad, Persia, coerced the Jewish minority into the outward acceptance of Islám; they opted to be live Muslims rather than dead Jews. Some of these [Page 8] “Muslims” went on pilgrimage to Mecca and then continued on to Jerusalem for permanent residence. The persecutions inflicted by the self-styled followers of Muḥammad were signs of the denouement to follow.

“What is the meaning of human life, or for that matter, of the life of any creature?” asked Albert Einstein. “To know an answer to this question means to be religious,” he added. Islám as set forth in the Qur’án provided more comprehensive, detailed guidance in all aspects of daily living than had Christianity and other religions of bygone centuries. The Qur’án was both the miracle of Muḥammad and the sword of Islám for it gave meaning to life and illumined all spheres of human activity, bringing order out of chaos and replacing anarchy with submission to God.

The Muslims of the seventh century were a God-centered minority. Yet the majority acquiesced in the rule of this tiny segment of the population. As that admirable historian Bernard Lewis has so aptly put it, “the Arabs found themselves living among a vast variety of peoples differing in race, language and religion, among whom they formed a ruling minority of conquerors and masters.” What was the secret of their power? According to S. D. Goitein, “. . . Islám was the very cement of their swiftly acquired state and nationhood.” They built nation-states where Rome had failed. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá bids us consider “How the sacred power of His Holiness Muḥammad became the means of uniting and harmonizing the contentious tribes and the different clans of Peninsular Arabia—to such an extent that one thousand tribes were welded into one tribe; strife and discord were done away with; all of them unitedly and with one accord strove in advancing the cause of culture and civilization, and thus were freed from the lowest degree of degradation, soaring towards the height of everlasting glory!” Goitein translates a favorite Arab proverb: “‘Islam received all the sweetness of religion, while its predecessors had to struggle for it bitterly.’” The Muslims were flooded with supernal light while other peoples “saw through a glass yet darkly”, glimpsing an occasional sunbeam.

The astonishing success of the Arab conquests reinforced belief in the myth that Islám was fundamentally a warlike, aggressive religion that required its followers to become masters of the entire planet or give their last drop of blood in the attempt. Some Arab politicians may have clung to such ambitions of world domination. Nonetheless, dreams of global domination have not been limited to the leaders of a single nation or religion.

Centuries elapsed after the Crucifixion before Christianity gained significant political power, but within a decade of the passing of Muḥammad Islám had made startling advances in Asia and Africa. By the time of Muḥammad’s death in 632, Islám was the dominant religion of all Arabia. The conquests of Palestine and Syria followed in 640, of ‘Iraq by 641, and of Egypt the succeeding year. Persia fell in 650. Within a century of the Flight from Mecca to Medina, commencing the first year of the Muslim calendar, Islám had penetrated and subdued most of Spain. Far from dividing and conquering, the Muslims brought unity and fraternity. A. J. Arberry has testified, “Where for centuries Greek and Latin, Aramaic and Pahlavi had divided the world, Arabic, the [Page 9] language of Islám, united all.” It was Muḥammad who immortalized the rich and adaptable Arabic in which there may be a hundred and fifty names of God. So great is the Arabic vocabulary that its words outnumber those in English more than two to one. The Qur’án was the first book written out in this tongue of perhaps a million words. Just as Chaucer had much to do with the form taken by English, so did the Prophet set the course for Arabic. Goitein concludes, “the Arabs’ sincere enthusiasm for their precious inheritance so infected the peoples which came under their rule that they strove with all their might to speak, or at least to write, pure classical Arabic.”

“In their vast newly won kingdom,” wrote Goitein, “the Muslims formed a small minority group which had to depend for its very food, its military security, its finances and administration on the conquered peoples.” It was the relative justice of their dominion that kept them in power.

One of the earliest Muslim battles occurred at Badr; the Muslims brilliantly defeated the pagans and took some captives. The poor were released without payment of ransom, but the rest were assessed 4,000 dirhams each. It is extraordinary and perhaps unique in the world’s military history, that a literate captive was allowed to teach ten children in lieu of paying the heavy fine.

CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, the “people of the Book,” were not coerced into embracing Islám. Moreover, the Zoroastrians, referred to in the Qur’án as the men of Rass (Araxes River), and the Hindus appear to have been regarded as better than pagans. Military supremacy had been established by the Arabs in Egypt and Persia long before the great majority of Coptic Christians and Zoroastrians gave their allegiance to Islám. The Muslims, believing their religion to be a mercy unto all nations, cherished the hope that all mankind would rally to the Prophet’s banner. Nevertheless, the writer suspects that the followers of Muḥammad were at times not overly anxious to have the “people of the Book” join their ranks, receive their privileges, and stop paying the poll tax. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Spain during the Inquisition, when two million Muslims had to choose between death and the Church. One can only surmise that multitudes concealed their true religious beliefs from their persecutors. V. V. Barthold declared, “Mussulmans never indulged in the persecution of those who believed in another religion as the Christians did in Spain.”

Eastern Christians and Jews were often allies of the Muslims, whom they judged to be more compassionate rulers than the hierarchy of the Church of Rome. As Adolph Wismar has pointed out, “In the early days of Islám Jews and such Christians as did not accept the imperial theology were better off under the Muslim caliph than under the Christian Emperor.”

During the Middle Ages, especially 850-1250 A. D., Islám accorded the Jews a position markedly superior to that accorded them under Christianity. The Muslims, unlike the Romans and Greeks, had a clear understanding of Jewish beliefs; and they surpassed the philosophers and historians of old in the accuracy of their descriptions of the creeds of alien peoples.

Although they have at least mental reservations concerning the wisdom of [Page 10] permitting a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man, one of the strengths of the Arab men has been their willingness to marry women of other lands. And despite the provisions of the Sharia, or religious law, forbidding believing women to marry unbelievers, many Muslim women have married Hindus. As a result, the Muslim world was a huge melting pot many centuries before Europe knew anything of America. In the ninth century, a Muslim scholar of Negro extraction, al-Jahiz, contrasted Muslim marital practices with the inbreeding or endogamy of the Jews, and held interracial marriage to be a source of strength. The Muslims have long practiced not only interfaith marriage but also miscegenation, an ugly-sounding word denoting a principle that can accomplish more than a little for world unity.

When that peerless Kurd, Saladin, conquered Jerusalem on October 2, 1187, he was most generous in victory. He personally announced that he would liberate all the aged men and women. His brother, al-‘Adil, set free a thousand Christians given him as a reward for his valor. Steven Runciman wrote, “The victors were correct and humane. Where the Franks, eighty-eight years before, had waded through the blood of their victims, not a building now was looted, not a person injured.” The Arabs had acquired the strength of the strong, cooperation. The Muslims were like a wall whose bricks support each other. One Saladin had the strength of ten or ten thousand men, because his heart was fortified by the spirit of Islám, of surrender to God.

MUḤAMMAD was sharply critical of those whom commerce beguiled to scurry [Page 11] from the mosque when a caravan came within earshot. A nominal Muslim may raid and plunder, but that does not make it the Islamic way of doing things. The fact that an occasional California Indian was brought into the Church by means of the lasso does not mean that this was the standard practice nor does it seriously reflect against the nobility of character of men of the cloth like Father Serra.

Lewis has asserted, “The modern historian will not readily believe that so great and significant a movement was started by a self-seeking impostor.” Muḥammad, like Christ, was concerned not with territorial aggrandizement or the kingdoms of this world but with the cities of men’s hearts. The victory over selfish behavior involves a daily duel between good and evil tendencies possessed by every man, irrespective of individual philosophy or theology. He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city, but he will almost certainly be ignored by the television and other mass media.

Reuben Levy has cited these words of pseudo-Jahiz: “Keep to the truth; for a sharp sword in the hands of a brave man is not more powerful than the truth. And the truth is an honour even if it contain that which you dislike; a lie is humiliation even if it involves something dear to you. Moreover, he that is known to lie is suspect even when telling the truth.” Challenging the mores of pagan Arabia, Islám taught that to forgive was not cowardly but truly noble.

‘Alí, cousin and son-in-law of Muḥammad and Guardian of Islám, was a scholar who was forced to take to the battlefield in defense of Islám. ‘Alí singled out the ten pure qualities of which nobility is composed: reason, religion, knowledge, clemency, liberality, understanding, piety, patience, gratitude, and compassion.

MUSLIMS believe that the salutation in Paradise will be “Peace! Peace unto you!” “No vain discourse shall they hear therein, nor any falsehood but only the cry, ‘Peace! Peace!’” Twenty-four gates lead into the courtyard of the Great Mosque at Mecca that enshrines the Holy Ka’ba from which radiate nine paths of cut stone. But the entrance favored over all others is the Gate of Peace. As he enters the Gate of Peace, the pilgrim recites:

O God, Thou art Peace,

And from Thee cometh Peace.

Let us live, our Lord, in Peace.

And make us enter Paradise, the Abode of Peace.

Thou art Blessed, O God, and Exalted, Thou Possessor of Might and Generosity!

O God, open for me the gates of Thy Mercy and Forgiveness.

Cause me to enter in God’s Name! And praise be to God!

And prayers and peace unto the Messenger of God,

Upon Whom be salutation and blessing.

A contemporary Arab historian, Majid Khadduri, has reached the conclusion that “jihad—holy war—is largely a religious duty aimed as much at spiritual salvation as the protection of the Muslim state.” We are indebted to him for this report:

On one occasion after a military campaign, the Prophet is said to have remarked: “We have just fulfilled the lesser jihad; it is now our duty to embark on the greater jihad.” A companion inquired, “What is the greater jihad?” “The struggle to save one’s soul,” answered the Prophet.

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The Bahá’í Faith and the Arts

By ELIANE A. HOPSON

. . . in accordance with the Divine Teachings, the acquisition of sciences and the perfection of arts it considered as acts of worship. If a man engages with all his power in the acquisition of a science or in the perfection of an art, it is as if he has been worshipping God in the churches and temples.

WHEN WE CONSIDER contemporary art and the enigmatic forms it assumes, the financial speculations in the artistic world, the superficiality of many spectacles, and the empty life of most artists, we seem to have little reason to accept the Bahá’í teaching which opens this essay. Nevertheless, the sincere artist and the art lover can sense its truth: they know that in their artistic experience they reach a domain of spiritual dimensions, an ecstasy in which material elements blur their outlines and become transfigured.

In our present era of “cultural explosion” which has opened avenues of art to all, a profusion of specialized books and articles attempt to guide our steps. Some of these works, intended as contributions to esthetics are not very convincing. Esthetics as a branch of philosophy was originated by eighteenth century philosophers who took it upon themselves to define its norms. They did so in relationship to the behavior and manner of thinking of the sophisticated elite of their time. Since then, generations of thinkers and writers have pondered deeply over the problem of art and have offered diverse and contradictory theories. The social scientists at the end of the nineteenth century have added their superficial and materialistic point of view. Psychologists find in the arts the confirmation of their scientific theories, and some art critics practice their trade, indulging in a pompous and sybilline style which succeeds most often in demonstrating the confused thinking of the artist or his puerile quest of the sensational.

The American philosopher, Suzanne K. Langer, has already devoted several volumes to her own philosophy of art—one of the best documented, to my knowledge. In Feeling and Form, she makes an excellent critique of the different methods applied to the study of artistic phenomena—and then brushes them aside as incomplete and false. Then, starting from a good definition (“Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling”), Mrs. Langer analyzes brilliantly the various artistic symbols. But sometimes even she seems to lose sight of her initial theme.

Mrs. Langer seems, in fact, to deny the intrinsic ritualistic power of art; in her analysis such experience is to be understood in the context of ancient civilizations of which religion was a fundamental element. She demonstrates rather the function of the artistic symbol in the creation of an “illusion” necessary to the structure of the otherwise dreary social relationships of the modern world. In assuming this position, Mrs. Langer allies herself with other philosophers who are in sharp contrast with those European and Asian artists for whom art is always a ritual.

Sir Tyrone Guthrie, former Director of the Old Vic in England and now creator and director of the Minnesota Theatre Company, is an eloquent example, in his writings and in [Page 13]

[Page 14] his work, of the attitude of such European artists. In an article which appeared in the New York Times on August 28, 1966, he explains the magic of the theatrical rite, whose origins he finds in the rituals of the Greeks, and concludes in these terms:

The theater, through all its checkered and frequently degraded history, has at its best demanded great energy of its two collaborators—the performers and the audience. This energy manifests itself not in the manufacture by the performers of fables which the audience is beguiled into accepting for truth; but rather in the prescribed recreation of significant words and acts which the audience knows to be Ritual, and from which it seeks not merely relaxation but inspiration and wisdom. Such a theater will be an altar where Rites in honor of an Unknown God, but not on that account an unworthy God, will be performed with the purposeful intensity of prayer.

It appears difficult to form an opinion on the nature of art when confronted with such authoritative but contradictory positions as those of Mrs. Langer and Sir Tyrone.

More recently, Peter Brook, the renowned English director (Marat-Sade and other triumphs), had perhaps the right approach to the subject when he wrote:

In everyday life, “if” is a fiction, in the theater “if” is an experiment.

In everyday life, “if” is an evasion, in the theater “if” is the truth.

When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theater and life are one.

I do believe that this statement applies to the artistic experience in general, as it explains in simple terms the ambiguous relationship of art and life. The artistic experience is a phenomenon which stems from the ambivalence of the nature of art as a symbolic medium: its appearance and its meaning, a combination which often escapes from its creator and works on its own merits.

In the artistic experience art becomes an integral element of the participants’ personality: the creator’s, the performers’, and the recipients’. But this alchemy is possible only in a certain context, the proper psychological climate which has to be called “ritual”. “Illusion” is the superficial aspect of the artistic manifestation (the “if”), the physical form which is first conveyed to the mind by the senses and then is progressively translated into the emotions which impress the subconscious with permanent symbols. The artistic “if” becomes truth at a certain moment in time and space and remains truth in the subconscious, the truth of the meaning that the “if” symbols expressed.

To define art as “illusion” is to take a pragmatic stand inadequate for the study of a phenomenon which, in its subtlety, is the best concretization, next to prophetic revelation, of the mystery of the relationship of God and man at the psychological level of existence.

To gain understanding of the reality of this relationship which is implied in the Bahá’í principle, subject of this essay, we must turn towards the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, the divine light which illuminates life with a new clarity and places the present and the past in unforeseen perspectives.

Bahá’u’lláh says that Creation is eternal: “[It] hath had no beginning, and will have no end.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains Creation as a permanent and evolutionary process of which our world is only a part. Science confirms this revelation with its theories [Page 15] of cosmic, geological, and biological evolution; history demonstrates it through the evolution of civilizations, which, according to Bahá’í teachings, is directed by progressive revelations from God. In this magnificent scheme, man has a place and a role which make him a creative instrument in the midst of divine eternity.

Human destiny is clearly defined in the Bahá’í writings, where we learn that man’s reality is his thought, the seat of the elaboration of his cognition, which, as Bahá’u’lláh explains, is a gift of divine favor:

First and foremost among these favors, which the Almighty hath conferred upon man, it the gift of understanding. . . . This gift giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation.

MAN uses his cognitive gift in the exercise of his free will, which then becomes the instrument of his moral and intellectual maturity, in the context of a certain culture.

The message of a divine Prophet dominates a civilization, but men are free either to follow His teachings or to ignore them. Civilizations develop under the influence of religious and social-ethical systems, of scientific theories, of artistic tendencies—and of the political and technological currents which derive from them. “Science is the first emanation from God toward man,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, and in more than one passage the Bahá’í Writings teach us that the arts were inspired by God. But there, too, the free will of individuals and groups intervenes to determine the part that art and science can play in a society.

Civilizations rise and fall in the wake of human conflicts, but a certain continuity is discernible in these developments. Just as a divine Prophet acknowledges the Prophets who have preceded him and restates the fundamental dimensions of their teaching, so is there an interrelationship between peoples and cultures across the centuries. Humanity evolves as a whole through the accumulation of acquired knowledge, new scientific theories correcting the errors and superstitions of the past, and new artistic tendencies springing from established schools which punctuate the chapters of history. It is in this progressive march of humanity towards the widening of intelligence that we can see, adapted to the scale of our world, the unfolding of divine creation. This cultural evolution to which history testifies also demonstrates the fundamental principle of another Bahá’í teaching: the oneness of mankind, a oneness into which is integrated the reality of man, that “thinking and knowing” being.

The first emanation of God towards man was science, through which man learned to utilize the properties of fire and to supplement his hands with stone tools. But our ancestors, in the course of improving their material conditions, also turned towards the mysteries of life and nature, as testified by paleolithic cave paintings and carvings. It is assumed that even before any language existed [Page 16] men relied on audiovisual symbols to concretize their thoughts. Symbolism is the link between the spiritual, intellectual, and physical worlds; it is the natural medium of our subconscious, the oldest idiom known, common to all peoples, and the mode of expression towards which we always turn “to convey intellectual conceptions.”

Gestures, sounds, rhythms, pictures were created to express and communicate states of mind. But just as an idea born in the depths of the subconscious requires hours of reflection and meditation before it can assume precision, so does it depend for its form on the repetition of symbols whose line of continuity creates a psychological dimension perceptible to everyone—a dimension in which every one can identify and join his fellows. What started as the bond of one man to another, and then of men among themselves, became the bond between man and nature and, through nature, which in its turn was transfigured by symbolism, the bond between the Creator and man: Art and religion, then, are born of the same “ritual”. Symbolism is the language of the soul; but the creation and transmission of symbols necessarily involves the development of a rite—ritual being the form, the framework within which the symbol assumes its psychological value as communication and communion.

From the beginning ritual has been for man the means of survival, of denying solitude and death. It has been the cement binding the individual with his family, his clan, his tribe, and, later, his nation, thus making mortal man a cell in an eternal cosmic body. Symbols and rites recur in every facet of human culture, and they form such an integral part of our existence that we do not see them.

Beginning with his dreams (those symbolic lessons of the subconscious), man affirms his personality through the repetition of gestures and attitudes which become habits of thinking, living, and creating. He participates in the rites or “customs” which integrate him with his family, his society, his country, and has done so since that day when, his thought “doubling back upon himself”, it could be said of man that he “knows that he knows.”

An artist’s style, as it appears through the richness or even the eclecticism of his work, is his ritual: his signature in the common work of human culture. The artistic ritual is unfolded in a concert hall or theater when communion is established between the work, the performers who interpret it (in the manner of officiants or priests), and the audience who share in the emotion or the exaltation involved. In painting or sculpture, the rite is more subtle, unconscious, than in the performing arts, for, in his contemplation, the art lover puts himself in union with the artist’s style and “feels” it, sometimes even before understanding it. This is an exercise which becomes, unfortunately, more and more difficult for the busy man, and entirely foreign to the crowds hurrying behind a museum guide, trying to absorb in half an hour the thoughts of centuries. Still another ritual is the “pilgrimage” of tourists to the artistic vestiges of the past, scattered throughout the world.

Symbolism, and therefore art, is the universal language which knows no frontier of time or space; it is the bond which unites the human race across the centuries and makes of it an eternal whole. André Malraux has expressed this idea in his nihilist’s style:

[Page 17]

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

The universality of art is not only illustrated by its own history, but in our days we see a striking demonstration of it in the international cultural exchanges, characteristic of our era, which have become of prime importance in the relations between countries of opposing ideologies.

The spiritual, artistic, and scientific value of symbols and rites has evolved with the development of human intelligence under the influence of divine inspiration. Emerging from the terror and ignorance of archaic societies, man’s spirit soared to the rational comprehension of natural phenomena and the apprehension of the abstract concepts which define and create love and beauty. There have been prophets of whom no historical trace exists, Bahá’u’lláh tells us. But the time came when the human family was ready to receive the revelation of the true God—a God whose law imposed moral limits and moral discipline which made of the peoples which observed them the chosen ones, the élite of the human race.

Whatever remains of ancient civilizations —monuments, works of art—testifies to their grandeur and their decline, not to their origin. What we understand of them shows art as the instrument of a religion whose priests were associated with political leaders to form a governmental body. In Greco-Roman civilization, art was a part of a state religion. But the great spiritual dimensions of the Greek religion are not in the teaching that we call mythology, nor in the popular ceremonies. Its spiritual greatness lies rather in Greek drama, and in Greco-Roman literature and philosophy, the gems of our cultural patrimony. It is in the elaborate study of man and his environment, the lucid observations of the subtleties of the subconscious that we can see what the Greek thinkers had glimpsed in their contact with Oriental religions: Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and especially Judaism, as well as what Greek theater, dance, and satire exalted or attempted to suppress in symbolic and ritual creations expressed in terms familiar to the people.

The Greco-Roman religion became mythology and the Temple of Jerusalem lost it raison d’etre when the “mystical body” of Jesus replaced the sacrificial victim. The “sacrifice of the mass” is a symbolic drama representing the life and death of Christ. Christian doctrine, based on both the biblical revelation and Greek philosophy, encompasses and renews the myths and rites of the past.

For political reasons Christendom was divided into two factions. One founded the Byzantine civilization, whose religion was at the service of the emperors, and only survived them in a state of stagnation until the annihilation of the Muscovite dynasties. The other was the springboard of Western civilization.

At first the Church exercised a political influence which reached its apogee in the Middle Ages, after which it went into a steady decline lasting until the Reformation. The Reformed Church was the political instrument of a number of states until the revolutions of the eighteenth century, and marked, in the name of the Philosophers of the Enlightenment, the definitive divorce of human intelligence and the churches, a process already initiated by the scientific theories of the seventeenth century. The evolution of thought which preceded and brought about the political and religious evolution, born of the confrontation of Christianity and Muslim [Page 18] civilization in the Middle Ages, has never ceased its struggle for freedom of thought, even to our day. The Christians did not recognize in Muḥammad the successor of Jesus. But for six hundred years, in successive waves, the new ideas which originated in the Arab universities or were transmitted from the Orient by the erudition of Muslim and Jewish doctors, rose to assault European culture. The most spectacular of these intellectual tidal waves was the influence of Greek philosophy, which, by reason of the political schism between Rome and Byzantium, reached Europe by the twisting road leading through Jundishapur (Persia), Baghdad, Toledo, and Salerno, finally to flower in the Renaissance.

Formerly an instrument of religion, the artist now found himself, during this period of evolution, in the opposing camp. Protected by the sovereign, he enjoyed a privileged situation from which he could criticize the Church, the great ones of the earth, and society. From the eighteenth century on, he has been in the vanguard of revolutionary movements, and he is still “committed” to them, shaking and shocking the rigidity of conformity and complacency. Despite appearances, art has never ceased to be a religious ritual for the human mind, which, in the course of the last millennium, freeing itself from the limits imposed upon it by Christian doctrine, has affirmed its independence and urged the intellectual revolution.

Some humanists, such as Albert Camus or André Malraux, and even Jean-Paul Sartre, are called atheists because they oppose Christian theology and doctrines, although their works reveal high spiritual value through their preoccupation with elucidating the enigma of the human drama. Their anguish, as expressed by the symbolisms of the Absurd, has become the mark of our generation and calls for other solutions than those offered by the traditional organized religions.

The veil was removed from the mystery of Western civilization’s spiritual paradox in this page of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh:

The Prophets and Messengers of God have been sent down for the sole purpose of guiding mankind to the straight Path of Truth. The purpose underlying their revelation hath been to educate all men, that they may, at the hour of death, ascend, in the utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute detachment, to the throne of the Most High. The light which these souls radiate is responsible for the progress of the world and the advancement of its peoples. They are like unto leaven which leaveneth the world of being, and constitute the animating force through which the arts and wonders of the world are made manifest.

It is obvious that the divine creative power, thus relayed by the spiritual world towards the human world, is not exclusively addressed to the adepts of a particular religion: its beneficiaries are those who turn, from whatever direction, with a sincere heart to the quest for truth, beauty, and love, and who express these divine qualities to the best of their talent in the domain assigned to them by the Creator.

Men thus inspired do not always use their power in a spiritual direction: in the exercise of their free will, they choose the easy way offered by their society. Many artists, particularly in America, reject their role as educator, which they do not even dream of analyzing. Yet the prophetic role of the artist is recognized by some, as William Barrett, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, makes clear:

[Page 19]

The artists are the sensitive reeds that first vibrate to the new currents which flow into the historical epoch and give it precisely the feeling and exultation that it is new.

This sentence comes from a chapter on art and the social currents which have served as background to the development of the philosophic movement known as “existentialism”. In the same book, What Is Existentialism?, Mr. Barrett reminds us that the German philosopher, Heidegger, devoted years of study to poetry, which he considered the vehicle of revelation for our era.

It is also worth noting that the intellectuals, who since the end of the nineteenth century have taken over the atheistic or humanist movement in the world (especially in the communist countries), have knowingly replaced religion by the ritualistic power of art, a power denied to art by philosophers trained in the Christian tradition. In the United States, this ritualistic quality has been used in a negative way, most often for commercial rather than educative purposes —this is why the terms illusion and escape seem to apply to art. This state of affairs brings to light an alarming situation, for a society which considers art an escape rather than an integral, indispensable part of its way of life thereby demonstrates implicitly its ignorance of the spiritual needs of man and nourishes the germs of its own disintegration.

The tragedy of the last millennium, whose final stage we are attaining, is that of a humanity which against all obstacles affirms the grandeur of it spirit, and its right to justice, freedom of thought, and the joy of living. History teaches us that art has always preceded or accompanied the action of men, creating the symbols which have sustained them, raising up their hearts in the communion of beauty and love, evoking the hope of freedom or the exaltation of sacrifice. Some have erred in opposing human greatness to divine greatness, a normal reaction of the human mind against those religious doctrines which deny its competence.

The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh confirms the legitimacy of human aspirations and announces, in the name of God, the law of justice and intellectual freedom, a law which is to be established by the reason of the adult person rather than by the revolutionary violence of an immature humanity. Man is great; he is the perfection of the divine Creation; he is unique in his role as God’s instrument on the planet which is his domain. But this role cannot attain its ultimate realization unless its divine origin is recognized. For in denying the sacredness of his mission, man deprives himself of the psychological source which would raise him to the highest spheres of his creativity.

The religious world recognizes the divine origin of prophetic revelation; Bahá’í Scripture reveals that intellectual inspiration flows from the same bounty. I have tried to explain why spiritual dimensions are translated into concrete form through symbolism and ritual. The function of ritual is to create the psychological medium from which human actions take substance and work in a desired direction. In this process symbolism precedes action. It is for this reason that in the course of time ritual loses its potency unless it is fed with new or renewed symbols.

The structure of archaic religions consisted of a closely knit network of symbolisms of which Mircea Eliade makes a fascinating study in several volumes. The main ideas expressed in these symbols have found their fulfilment and realization through the evolution of civilizations in the form of progressively advanced religions, literatures, artistic [Page 20] creativities, and scientific achievements. Religious rituals have lost their psychological value because past religions have lost their quality of revelation; there are no new symbols to revitalize them, and, as they are based upon immutable doctrine, they become lifeless, like an empty shell. Yet, churches do not grant easily that the revelation of a divine prophet does not belong to the group which crystallizes around his name, but rather is addressed to humanity.

In The Art of Loving, the psychologist, Erich Fromm (who calls himself an atheist, but cannot forget his rabbinic training), draws upon the literature and symbolisms of all religions to demonstrate that love is the law of sanity for mankind. As the Son of God, by His life and death, Jesus wrote the law of life in human history. But the Golden Rule cannot remain any longer a tenet of religious doctrine, an ideal out of human reach: as a principle vital to man’s existence, it has become the imperative condition of our survival on this planet. Scientifically dissected by psychology for the past hundred years, exposed and exacerbated in contemporary art, claimed and chanted by the “flower people”, love is robbed of its mystery as a Christian symbol and assumes a different meaning for the rising generation.

Accompanied by the “rock” beat, the love symbols of the present wave of artistic creativity which we see as “nudity” and “sexual behavior” (of all kinds), expose the human predicament in its pathetic and appalling nakedness up to the point of the intended provocation: the necessary sublimation of our alienations. In this perspective, the love symbols allied to the apparent emptiness of some schools of painting, or the “wrapping-up” symbol of the sculptor, Christo Javasheff, are the answer to the revolt of Surrealism, to the vivisection of Cubism, and to the absurd/cruelty symbols of the former generation. Entranced by the African staccato of the jazz rhythm, the older artists put themselves in opposition to the vivid luminosity and dreamy nostalgia of an “Impressionism” that they accused of being estranged from the realities of our inhumane life. Born and spreading during the lifetime of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the so-called Impressionist style had its exponents or its parallel in every branch of intellectual creativity and, in expressing amazingly the spiritual message of the Bahá’í Dispensation, shook the foundation of Victorian conventions.

Thus once again the dialectic of art will have generated action and introduced the new civilization. Liberating man’s spirit from its shackles of puritanical hypocrisy and prejudice, art is actually giving a one-hundred-year shock treatment to modern society: the Oriental-Western religious ritual of some seven millennia must leave the temple, and its principles must be worked out on the world-wide politico-social stage according to the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh —a World Order which radiates such spiritual power as is presently upsetting all established foundations, individual personalities [Page 21] as well as social “establishments”.

Bahá’u’lláh has given to the Bahá’í Faith the means of avoiding the political shoal on which the organized religions of the past have been wrecked. He has also abolished the conventional religious ritual, which, based on symbolic knowledge to educate a humanity in its infancy, is no longer needed to sustain man’s progress.

Man is reaching maturity, and religious mysteries are replaced, in Bahá’í Scripture, by a knowledge expounded in clear and powerful words and by reliance on man’s innate ability to fulfill his destiny:

The potentialities inherent in the station of man, the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality, must all be manifested in this promised Day of God.

Eliminating the priesthood while emphasizing the quality of worship inherent in the exercise of one’s work or profession, in the pursuit of knowledge and science, and in the practice of art, Bahá’u’lláh has revealed human intelligence as the natural temple of divine inspiration and made of each individual life a religious rite: the fertile ground for higher creativities. This individual sacred mission, elevated to the scale of an eternal mankind, projects the psychological power of ritual to its proper place: the cosmic center of civilization, that invisible altar where scientists and artists serve and where is forever renewed, by the Kingdom of Death, the flame of the Divine Eternal Creation.

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Lumbini: Home of The Blessed Buddha

By KEITH DE FOLO

There is a strange affinity among all the places in the world which have witnessed the births of the Messengers of God. All are encompassed by a cloak of serenity, a veil of mystery, a beauty within the air and atmosphere.

The Garden of Lumbini, where Prince Siddhartha Sakya was born under a sal tree in the year 563 B.C., is unquestionably one of the holiest spots on this planet. No worshiper—regardless of rank, wealth, or name—who journeys to this tiny village of one hundred souls in a southern corner of Nepal will fail to fall under the spell.

An indefinable healing quality pervades Lumbini—not emanating only from the tall, green grass, or the ancient pillar raised by Asoka, or the coarse, toughened stone of the Maha-Maya, or the golden tower of Buddha Abhinawa Mandir, or the counseling finger of the child Buddha beneath the leaves of a bodi tree. The ineffability of Lumbini is felt most deeply in the hours of darkness. A Temple of Stars protects the world. Silence rushes through every atom of the living and of those to come alive. The night rains down upon the listening pilgrim the true meaning of Lumbini.

A little over two hundred years after the pari-nibbana of the Buddha, a royal worshiper rode by elephant to Lumbini Grove. He wanted to commemorate the ground that caught the first heartbeat of the Gautama, King Asoka of India inscribed these words in Pali upon a pillar of solid stone:

King Piyadasi, The Beloved of the Devas, in the twentieth year of the coronation, himself made a royal visit and worshiped here. Buddha Sakyamuni, having been born here, a stone railing was built and a stone pillar erected. The Bhagavan, having been born here, Lumbini Village was tax-free and entitled to the eighth part.

As time and memory passed, the pillar and other royal structures were overpowered by the jungle. The farmers, unmindful of the great Teacher who was [Page 23] revealed here, sacrificed animals before the pillar and the Maha-Maya. Finally, the place was lost even to the villagers. It was not until 1896 that a German explorer, Dr. A. A. Fuhrer, discovered the lightning-cracked Asoka pillar.

News of the discovery sent a joyous vibration among the Buddhists of the world, who comprise one-fifth of mankind. Archeologists, curators, historians, scientists rushed to Nepal and began excavating, studying, recording. Further exploration led to the rich discoveries at Kapalavestu (Taulihawa), the ancient capital of the kingdom of the Buddha’s father and mother. Excavations are continuing today under the joint effort of archeological experts from Nepal and Japan.

Under the loving eyes of Bhikkhu Aniruddha Mahathera, the beauty and originality of Lumbini is carefully maintained. Like his father, who spent thirty-two years within the Gardens, Rev. Aniruddha, a tall, straight monk in saffron robes, warmly welcomes the weary pilgrims from Ceylon, India, Burma, Thailand, Japan, Laos, Vietnam, and the far West, who come by bus from the Indian border.

Keenly aware of the long-postponed action that is required to turn Lumbini into an ideal haven for pilgrims, Bhikkhu Aniruddha looks forward to the day when a museum, a library, and a suitable guest house will be erected at Lumbini. The Bhikkhu and U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, recognized the prime requirement: a broad, hard-topped road from Bhairawa, the closest airfield-town in Nepal, twelve miles to the north. Lacking this road, Lumbini is almost inaccessible to the majority of the Nepalese, countrymen of the Blessed Buddha.

As pilgrims now travel to Lumbini by foot, bicycle, horse, ox cart, elephant, rickety bus, the day is coming when the followers of Gautama Buddha will surely arrive by motor car, train, and jet airliner. At last, the whole world will be able to see and feel the glory and power of the incomparable Teacher who was born here, the One who said:

“He honors me best who practices my teaching best.”

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The Meaning of Worship

By HORACE HOLLEY

[Page 25]

THE ACT OF WORSHIP is the supreme achievement of man in this world. All noble deeds, all useful deeds, proceed from this act. For by worship is meant the attainment of that true humility which recognizes a higher Power and submits the soul to its pure influence.

It is through worship that men release their spiritual qualities and become organically unified beings. Through worship men rise to awareness of their divinely created nature, grow conscious of the purpose of their existence and attain to a new life in a Kingdom beyond space and time.

The term “worship” has however been applied to many different attitudes and aims.

Among primitive and childish peoples worship can be appeal for help in meeting an entirely personal need. They pray for health and strength, for material benefits, for good fortune in their affairs. In this condition God is the supplier of personal wants. What God may will for them or expect from them is unknown and ignored. Such personal supplication can be entirely sincere, but it subjects the higher Will to the lower, the Creator to the created, and measures the Ocean by the cup. God and Nature are perceived as two parents, and what one parent withholds the Other is implored to bestow.

The tribal concept of God as its own exclusive Father and Protector has inevitably conditioned public worship. Public worship through the ages has been associated with the particular and exclusive conception of God evolved within a people by its own dominant religion or by its contending faiths. It has assumed that the community or group is a larger social personality of unique value, and therefore the divine response to worship would be directed to the benefit of this social personality through its own traditional channels of culture and understanding. Public worship has recognized the existence of God, but a God primarily concerned with the welfare of that group, a welfare which the group itself has defined.

In times of general distress the divisions between adjoining groups may be weakened or temporarily broken down. In anguish the people feel a mutual dependence and at least a temporary bond. The solution of their common problem, the alleviation of their general woe, eventually restore the influence of those institutions primarily concerned with the maintenance of boundaries and divisions. The God of humanity has been only occasionally glimpsed through the clamor of an interminable struggle for existence.

The essence of worship, personal or public, is a humility so profound that prayer and supplication carry no sense of special privilege but rather a willingness to know and to obey the divine Will.

Not until the soul of man becomes imbued with the emanations of the Holy Spirit can it soar above self and enter a purer world where God is supreme. That is why, whenever the Holy Spirit finds entrance into human souls, they attain an identity of being and of destiny, even though as personalities they stand apart by reason of their race, their class, their nation or their creed. That is why, when the Holy Spirit has not found entrance, the groups of worshipers, if we could observe them, would be seen to pray for and expect incompatible and irreconcilable responses from the one Creator of humankind.

WHAT CONFERS HUMILITY? Under what condition does the Holy Spirit enter the heart and imbue it with new life and light?

Conceptions of God which groups formulate [Page 26] by the operation of human powers —these are not God the Creator, the Lord, but images projected from within upon the screen of conscious self-awareness. Their power to impress individuals derives from the power of the institution which sponsors the concept and from the opposition of other concepts evolved by competitive groups. In reality there is no real distinction between worship of an image fashioned by hands and worship of an idea wrought by the mind. It is not within human power to capture and contain the Omniscient, and Omnipotent God. Mass illusions may persist for centuries, but all man-centered psychic indoctrination comes to an appointed end.

For God is not comprehended. In His infinite mercy and for His eternal purpose He reveals Himself to man. The action is from the higher Power.

Religion begins, and worship is inspired, when the Prophet sent from God is recognized, revered and obeyed by human beings. Through Him they are offered the grace of God. He creates the spiritual Kingdom which is the home of the souls of men.

This supreme mystery of existence has been made clear in the Bahá’í Sacred Writings. “Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, (God), through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him—a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation. . .

“These energies with which the Day-Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may he obscured by worldly desires even as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never he ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.”

“He who is everlastingly hidden from the eyes of men can never be known except through His Manifestation. . . .

“As a token of His mercy . . . and as a proof of His loving-kindness, He hath manifested unto men the Day-Stars of His divine guidance, the Symbols of His divine unity, and hath ordained the knowledge of these sanctified Beings to be identical with the knowledge of His own Self. Whoso recognizeth them hath recognized God. . . . Every one of them is the Way of God that connecteth this world with the realms above, and the Standard of His Truth unto every one in the kingdoms of earth and heaven. They are the Manifestations of God amidst men, the evidences of His Truth, and the signs of His glory.”

Human history itself is the arena in which this mighty drama, the intervention of God in the life of man, has been visibly and publicly played.

Though we have not seen the whole design, but only portions of it, the historic evidence is complete and irrefutable that faith is inspired in men from a higher Power, that faith is born at times of most complete moral and social crisis, and that the foundation of human civilization is a revealed religion. Reborn from the life of nature to the life of the spirit, the followers of the Prophet have demonstrated the power of faith to establish a new society upon the ruins of an order fallen into [Page 27] decay.

Though a decadent society confers its powers, its authorities and its forms of prestige upon worldly leaders committed to the maintenance of tradition, it has never been able to prevent the ultimate victory of the new and higher vision of the purpose of human existence.

The condition of humility, in which human personality receives spiritual reinforcement, exercises decisive influence in this world. No power nor combination of powers compares to its effect. Its operation created a new society inspired by Moses, a new society inspired by Christ, and a new society inspired by Muhammad.

As this humility lessens, the capacity for civilization becomes weakened. Eventually the condition of crisis returns, and the cycle of the dispensation has run its course.

The experience, however, is not repetition but a progressive evolution in man’s being and in his social order. The attitude that the later Prophet founds a religion essentially different to and in opposition with the former religion has been the source of all human division, and the ultimate cause of strife.

THE PRINCIPLE of progressive revelation as expounded in the Bahá’í teachings proceeds from the unity of the Prophets in their mission and purpose. “Beware, O believers in the Unity of God, lest ye be tempted to make any distinction between any of the Manifestations of His Cause, or to discriminate against the signs that have accompanied their Revelation. This indeed is the true meaning of Divine Unity. . . . Whoso maketh the slightest possible difference between their persons, their words, their messages, their acts and manners, hath indeed disbelieved in God, hath repudiated His signs, and betrayed the Cause of His Messengers.”

These are strong words. They are words which could not be used in any previous age. During the era of isolation cultures developed separately. Men lived in localized communities which gave a particular stamp to moral and religious truths. Humanity did not inhabit one earth and one world, but races and peoples dwelt each in its own area and found its own way to survive. Differences of language, of custom, of color made each people alien to the others.

The teachings of Bahá’u’lláh are strong words because a mighty power is needed to open our eyes to the sudden and unexpected destruction of all the conditions which made for separateness and division in the past. Religion today must be spiritual preparation for life in a unified and interdependent world. It is too late to appeal to a partisan, tribal God.

The Bahá’í Temple was conceived and has been constructed for worship of a Supreme Being independent of our notions of race, nation, class or creed—the Deity progressively revealed, the Lord of human destiny. That is why its services of worship offer selections from the various Sacred Writings and not from sectarian literature. Nothing is permitted which might obscure the universality of Divine Revelation. Until we become humble for the sake of the God of humanity we cannot accept nor deal with our fellow men in the spirit of unity, justice and truth.

The real crisis of our age is here: that people substitute political and economic formulas for divine laws, and deal with competitive social organizations rather than with mankind.

True worship leads to the discovery of the spiritual self and its dependence upon the grace of God. True worship leads to the discovery of mankind. Men who unite on the level of worship can and must unite in the realms of feeling, thought and action.

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The Mountain of God

By E. S. STEVENS

Introduction

IN THIS ISSUE and the next, WORLD ORDER offers its readers a special treat: excerpts from a forgotten novel by a forgotten author. The Mountain of God was published in London in 1911. It was noticed in the press and, having been greeted, it seems, with deep public indifference, quickly disappeared from sight. When the editors of WORLD ORDER came upon the book and tried to find out who the author, E. S. Stevens, was, they discovered that the name was not listed in standard reference works on English writers, and that even Yale’s Sterling Library, famous for its collection of English novels, had not one of Stevens’ books.

If read as a work of literature, The Mountain of God is bound to disappoint. The story is melodramatic. The crippled Englishman traveling for his health, the idealistic Turkish officer with a German name who is involved in the Young Turk movement, his trusting “Oriental” wife, these and other dramatis personae are so familiar that one has a feeling of having read about them before. The plot is slow and not particularly exciting. The situations are quite predictable, the characterizations weak, and the writing hackneyed. Why then should WORLD ORDER want to resurrect this book from long oblivion?

Some books survive as works of art, read for their own sake; others for some extraneous reason. The Mountain of God turns out to be a significant historical document. E. S. Stevens, whoever he or she was, had spent considerable time in Haifa and ‘Akká before 1911, met the small group of dedicated Bahá’ís resident there, among them the great calligrapher Mishkin Qalam, and attained the presence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This unforgettable experience is recorded in the pages of The Mountain of God.

The title refers to Mt. Carmel, and the story unfolds on its dry, stony slopes. Robert Underwood, the partially paralyzed young Englishman who comes to Haifa to spend a few months; Mrs. Greville, a slightly eccentric Englishwoman in love with a Turkish [Page 29] officer Schmidt Pasha; Schmidt himself; Gerald Whitby, an Orientalist from Oxford —they all become involved with the Bahá’í exiles on Mt. Carmel. The exiles seem to possess a secret knowledge which gives them peace, happiness, and a radiance that is visible to any but the most superficial observer, or one whose mind is so totally out of tune with things of the spirit that it cannot see the brightest light even while looking at it directly. Whitby is a Bahá’í; Schmidt Pasha becomes one; Underwood, in spite of all his fine sensitivity, makes no commitment, though he is deeply affected by his Persian friends. Only Mrs. Greville is unmoved.

The Persian Bahá’ís as drawn by E. S. Stevens are true to life. Mishkin Qalam, of course, is no fictional character. Others may also be recognized as real persons. Their conversations ring true. The atmosphere in which they move is real. Every one of them is guided, motivated, and inspired by the Master, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He appears in the novel but once, yet dominates it from beginning to end. The encounter between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the fictional Underwood is brief and inconsequential. What fascinates a Bahá’í reader today is the accurate description of the Master, and the report of the effect He made on all those who came within the orbit of His personality.

The editors of WORLD ORDER do not know whether E. S. Stevens ever became a Bahá’í. Internal evidence drawn from the novel itself appears inconclusive. However, the author had seen ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and reported the experience as accurately as the pen would allow. The report is precious to the Bahá’ís who read it today. It will become even more precious in the future when the last survivors of the Heroic Age of the Faith will have left this world. Here lies the value of The Mountain of God and here lies the guarantee of its survival through the centuries.

The text of the novel is reproduced exactly as it appears in the 1911 edition. We have not changed the spelling or added diacritical marks to transliterated Arabic and Persian words.

[Page 30]

PREFACE

I WISH to make this preface primarily a vehicle of apology to Abdul Baha, for having used his name and person, however sparingly, in a piece of fiction. It was, however, almost impossible to draw any kind of picture of the Persian exiles without doing so. Similarly, if I have offended in any way against good taste in my portraiture of certain Bahais in Haifa and Akka, I am certain that their knowledge of my deep respect for, and sympathy with, the cause to which they have devoted their lives, will make them lenient to what I have written, and convinced of my honest intention. For the sake of those who may be confused by the Bahai nomenclature, I append a brief explanation and outline of the Bahai movement.

My warmest thanks are due to the Persian colonists for their endless kindnesses and warm reception of a stranger when I was in Haifa; to Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Skrine and to Dr. Fallscheer of the German Colony for their helpful criticisms of this book; and lastly, to Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son, whose excellent arrangements in the Levant I found of great service to me during a prolonged stay.

E. S. STEVENS.

[Page 31]

TO

ABDUL BAHA

IN GRATITUDE, RESPECT AND AFFECTION

ALL THAT IS GOOD IN AN IMPERFECT BOOK

IS DEDICATED

[Page 32]

“This mountain is a holy mountain: it has always been sanctified. The prophets have always loved it. Christ has trodden on its paths; Elijah lived upon it. The wind is sweet on it, the flowers are many, the view is wonderful. When you come up the mountain many fragrances reach you; the pure air gladdens you; the beauty refreshes you. So the mind is made single, the thoughts are purified; the spirit turns to God.”

(In a conversation with AbdulBaha.)

“Where are you going?” she inquired, after a moment, with cheerful naturalness.

“To Haifa.”

“So am I! For long?”

“For a week or two—to pick up.”

She considered him gravely.

“And you?” asked Underwood, feeling that he might exchange the rôle of catechised for that of catechist.

“I? I don’t know how long I shall stay. Perhaps a long while.” Her eyes were serious. “I have business in Haifa.”

“Really,” he said, awkwardly, to fill in the pause which ensued.

“Yes,” she continued. “It’s about some property there, on Mount Carmel —you know, where Elijah sacrificed the prophets.”

He masked a smile, for it was said unconsciously.

“It’s still thought a holy mountain,” she went on, “by every one—the Mohammedans and Jews as well as the Christians. There is something in the air, they say, which makes one able to understand hidden things— something which awakes the spiritual nature. My mother used to tell me that. But from what I know of the people who live there, I should think that that was a piece of sentimentalism, and that it really is a hotbed for cranks. However, they call it the Mountain of God.”

As Mrs. Greville had prophesied, it was to the German hotel that Underwood had been consigned by the Omnipotent Cook. There was, in fact, little choice. As he was bumped over the uneven main road of Haifa, through the unclean Syrian town, with its crowds of semi-Europeanised [Page 33] natives, he saw no other caravanserai, except an uninviting native locanda near the quay. A few dogs lay about the streets on rubbish heaps, where such were available, with the air of pashas, to cringe away with a yelp if a passer-by touched one inadvertently with his foot. In the public square, near the entrance to the native bazaar, though it was not more than eight o’clock, the fishmarket was busily in progress, and close by outside a native café, men whose yellow-embroidered kerchief bound around the fez proclaimed them Moslems in spite of their slovenly European dress, sat idly smoking argilehs. As they drew the smoke through the bubbling water they talked little, and regarded the world with indifference and dignity, the traveller included.

Underwood was tired. He had scarcely slept; he had endured one of those nights of physical and mental torture that left him exhausted afterwards, as a demoniac from whom the evil spirit has departed. He was glad when he was alone in the room which had been engaged for him, and glad that the necessity for effort was for the moment over. At Magner’s insistence, he allowed himself to rest on the high white German bed, with its mosquito curtains drawn canopy-wise. The room had many windows, and though the careful Magner had pulled to the persiennes to exclude the brilliant Syrian sun, he could hear the sea breaking rhythmically against the shore below the hotel, and the spring breeze in the pine trees just outside, pulsing and purring through the green needles, and bringing into the room the resinous smell and the perfume of other growing things in the garden—citron blossom perhaps.

At half-past eleven Magner appeared with some hot water, and several letters. Underwood had almost fallen asleep, but he roused himself, washed, and opened his correspondence.

“DEAR OLD MAN”—began the first—“I hear you’re going to Haifa sooner or later, and so I’ve asked Gerald Whitby to call on you—he lives there, I believe, or makes Haifa his headquarters. He and I were at Magdalen together; he’s a good Orientalist, rather a queer little chap, but a thoroughly good sort. Please drop him a line, care of the Ottoman Bank, when you arrive, and he’ll do all he can for you, I know.

“DEAR MR. UNDERWOOD,—I shall be in the Colony to-morrow and will call on you at nine o’clock, unless you are otherwise engaged.—Yours sincerely,

“GERALD WHITBY.

“P.S.—I mean 9 a.m.”

[Page 34]

This note had been brought to Underwood the night before at dinner. He was slightly astonished, as he had not yet written to announce his arrival; however, it was possible that Whitby had heard from Cook’s agent. He had been in Haifa several days, and had got rid of the fatigues of his journey. His naturally fine constitution gave him wonderful recuperative power. He was able to practise walking a little daily with the aid of his crutches as the Viennese doctor had ordained, and felt an increase of strength as if the air of the place suited him. It was this very persistent strength of his which made him impatient and tortured him beyond knowledge. It was as if he were battering against an iron door, which could never be opened.

With Magner beside him, he swung himself slowly up the main road which led through the German colony; the two sidewalks bordered on either side with olives, pines, carobs, pepper trees, cypresses, and fig trees; the last white and leafless as yet, though it was as warm as an English May. In front of every house, whose wide cool porches were made to combat the heat of the summer, was a garden, trim and gay; divided, but not hidden, from the passer-by by a low wooden fence. In these little gardens vegetables and flowers grew together in harmony, and as he passed along the shady walks he could see the women of the colony sturdily at work with hoe and rake, kerchiefs tied around their heads, and their skirts tucked up above their thick ankles. These uncomely but good-tempered German matrons were the mothers of large families, from big-boned, undeveloped-looking elder daughters and their brothers, to the pretty flaxen-haired little children who played at giant’s stride outside the sunny schoolhouse and dropped him shy curtseys if he spoke or smiled to them. They ran about barefoot for the most part, healthy as the Bedouin children who pattered along the Jaffa road at the foot of the colony beside their father’s asses.

The Jaffa road, which Underwood could see from his window, was a constant source of amusement to him. Groups of Bedouins, their puce-colored keffiyehs fluttering behind them, paced past on the highway with their cattle, or rode magnificently mounted on horses of varying degrees of breed. Long strings of camels, led by an Arab on a donkey in front, and an Arab with a forked goad on another donkey behind, and laden with unknown merchandise, plodded dustily along it till they disappeared in the bend of the road between the sub-tropical gardens of the German colonists, towards the point where Mount Carmel sloped abruptly down to the sapphire sea.

Mount Carmel was the presiding genius of the place. The town lay nursed in her mighty lap, her long flanks stretched away to the sea on the north and south and west, the sun disappeared behind her long ridge a full hour before the sunset rosied the sky and set the snows of Mount Hermon, her far white sister, on fire on the other side of the bay.

The sides of the mountain were thinly clothed with green and shrubs— here and there rocky and bare, here and there interspersed with olives and low pine trees. Houses occasionally dotted its surface, and, in patches, its [Page 35] sides were scarred with brown where the vines, still barren in their winter sleep, gave promise of the autumn vintage.

In the wonderful clearness of the air and intensity of the light, every detail stood out with astonishing clearness. Underwood found that his eyes wandered constantly to the mountain. Mrs. Greville had called it the Mountain of God, and the name had an odd fascination for him.

He had seen or heard nothing of her since his arrival, and it was with a lonely man’s gladness that he received Whitby’s brief note. It was only due to his own negligence that he had not made the first advance.

At nine Whitby was shown into the upper balcony where Underwood was sitting. He proved to be a slightly made, insignificant-looking man on first sight; he wore a beard, and his thin face was very sunburnt. For the rest he had a courteous manner, a diffident, slightly detached and apologetic air—not uncommon in scholars. Underwood noticed his extremely beautiful hands.

“I am disturbing you too early,” Whitby said, looking at the breakfast-tray on the table beside Underwood’s chair.

“No, no; I have finished. I was expecting you.”

“We are early risers here—I should have remembered that you are accustomed to European hours.”

“Mayn’t I offer you some breakfast?—a whisky and soda?”

“Thanks, I have sworn off alcohol, and I had my coffee at five.”

“How did you know I was here? I have been meaning to write, but—”

“I saw you. But as I was occupied at the time with some important business, I could not come to you as I wished. Of course Prothero told me you were coming.”

“You and he were at Magdalen together.”

“Yes; and we have kept up a desultory correspondence ever since. He told me about you—and your accident.”

“It was kind of you to look me up.”

“I hope I can be of some use to you. Unfortunately I am leaving Haifa in a few days.”

“For long?”

“I don’t know. . . . I am not my own master.”

The phrase suddenly reminded Underwood of Mrs. Greville when she had said, “I am not my own mistress.” But Whitby spoke with a dreamy seriousness, his eyes filled with an expression that conveyed to Underwood the impression that something of immense importance to the little scholar lay behind the words.

“The most I can do,” Whitby went on, “is to introduce you to a few people here. Do you know any one yet?”

“I met a Mrs. Greville on the way out.”

“Mrs. Greville?” Whitby repeated. “I seem to know the name.”

“She has some property on Mount Carmel.”

“Ah yes; I have heard of her. But she doesn’t live here?”

“She has just come out. Then, at table d’hôte and so on, I have more or [Page 36] less picked up acquaintance with some of the Germans here—and some Russian Jews who are apparently staying at the hotel until their house is completed.”

“There is a growing Zionist colony here.”

“So I hear.”

“And have you met Schmidt Pasha?”

“No—at least not to my knowledge.”

“He usually stays here when he is in Haifa. But he comes and goes—no one knows his movements. But he knows England well—has stayed there a long time. There was a good deal about him in the papers at the time of the Counter-Revolution. He is a powerful member of the Committee of Union and Progress.”

“What nationality?”

“A hybrid. But he is not a Levantine and not a Jew. He is Turkish to all intents and purposes.”

“And the ‘Pasha’?”

“It’s an hereditary title, I believe; or, at any rate, his father was a pasha too. The father received it for services rendered to Ismail Pasha in Egypt. He also has a considerable interest in the Hedjaz railway, so he is a rich man. He is very able, and speaks English well. But you talk German?”

“I understand it. But I prefer my mother speech. I have not the gift of tongues, like yourself. Prothero tells me you are a great Orientalist.”

Whitby’s fine hands moved in a gesture of disavowal, almost discomposure.

“I have studied Arabic; but I have difficulty in speaking it. Persian I know fairly well.”

“The language of Omar Khayyam. I should like to read that fine old cynic in the original. And Hafiz and Sa’adi, and the rest. What a pity one can’t be inoculated with a language by mechanical means. I mean, if one could only insert a tiny portion of brain matter containing the complete knowledge of a language!”

Whitby smiled. “It is a pity. But a time will come when languages will become as obsolete as dialects. And the universal language will be so flexible, so expressive, that none of the classics of the Old World will lose in translation into it—perhaps they will even gain.”

“You are an Esperantist?”

“In a sense. But in living Esperanto which will have vitality because it has developed naturally through a process of evolution. Think of the immense barrier which language offers now. It is the cause of half the hostility and misunderstanding between nations. A man who can speak the language of another nation really well, must necessarily get into sympathy with the soul of that nation.”

“And conversely, to speak the language of another nation well, one must first get into sympathy with that nation.”

“That first.”

“And you really think that that would be desirable? To my mind it has [Page 37] something of the horror that the visions of Socialists call up before you. To replace defined characteristics and the picturesque mysteries and noncomprehensions, the mountains and valleys and mysterious caverns, by one flat, perfectly illuminated plane.”

“You are counting without your host.”

“Which is?”

“In this case Nature. Does Nature ever allow a dead level? Isn’t she always the artist, careful of her lights and shades, her mixing of colours?”

“That is true,” Underwood replied. “But artificiality may spoil her work. Isn’t civilisation, as seen in our big towns, ugly enough?”

“It is civilisation in a state of evolution. The dirt, the sordidness, the ugliness, are what remain from barbarism. Civilisation is still in the workshop.”

“But man is a bungling workman. How do we know that ugliness will not be the end as it was the beginning?”

“Because God is the master workman, and the end must be perfection.”

Underwood looked at him sharply. There was an abrupt change in the other’s voice, as if he were against his own will saying something intimate, something personal. Underwood suddenly realised that God to this man was in some way a reality, and not a form of speech, and a curiosity to see into Whitby’s mind arose in him.

Then Whitby said, as if to change the subject—

“I should like to introduce you to a Persian friend of mine here, by the way; he will do anything for you that he can. I have asked him to be at your disposal.”

“How is it that a Persian is here in Syria?”

“There are many.” He spoke with a certain reserve.

“Many? But why?”

Whitby paused, and then replied: “The Bahai exiles were sent to Akka, just across the bay.” He pointed to the sea visible through the pine trees.

“The Bahais,” Underwood repeated. “I seem to have heard of them. Ah, I remember! Didn’t some chap at Oxford write a book about them? I know they were talking about it one night at dinner, when Digby, who’d been attaché at the British Legation at Teheran, was there. Some Persian or other called himself the Gate or the Door, or something, and he was shot; and there was a wholesale slaughter of his followers.”

“That was the Bab,” said Whitby. “Did you never read the history of him? It has been translated into English, and was written by a poor Persian prisoner. . . .” His eyes strayed to the mountain. “Do you see that big brown building on the hill?” he asked. “Straight before us. The sun is on it. There are cypresses beside it.”

“Yes,” said Underwood, following his gaze.

“He is buried in that place.”

“Who? The Bab? But he was killed in Persia. How did they get the body here?”

“Don’t you remember what Turner said when they asked him how he [Page 38] mixed his paints? He answered, ‘With brains.’ So to your question, how did they get the body here, I reply, ‘With devotion.’”

“But they were a proscribed sect, weren’t they? It must have been difficult.”

“It was difficult,” Whitby answered, with a smile.

Underwood was searching his memory.

“Yes,” he went on; “and Digby said that one of them declared that he was another Mohammed, or another Christ, or whatever it was. These are the people, then? But he didn’t call them Bahais, but some name rather like it.”

“Yes,” Whitby answered. “These are the people. Before the declaration of Baha ’Ullah, they were called Babis. But as they saw in Baha ’Ullah the manifestation of Divine Wisdom that the Bab had foretold, they became known as Bahais.”

“And is this Baha ’Ullah living now?”

“He died in prison in Akka.”

“Then they are without a leader?”

“No; they have a leader.”

“Where?”

“Here. The son of Baha ’Ullah.”

“So there were really three generations of prophets—the Bab, and the manifestation person, and the present leader?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean that he is here in Haifa?”

“Till last year he was a prisoner in Akka. Since the Constitution he and his family have been given freedom.”

“Then why the deuce don’t they go back to Persia?”

“He—they—do not wish to leave Mount Carmel.”

“The Mountain of God,” supplemented Underwood involuntarily.

Whitby’s eyes became again alive with the strange look of intimacy which Underwood had noticed before.

“Yes,” he repeated. “The Mountain of God.”

His eyes, still on the mountain, were peopled with thoughts which he did not share with the other man.

“I can’t think why Carmel should be called the Mountain of God,” said Underwood, following his gaze. “Hermon, across the bay, seems to me infinitely more beautiful, more mysterious. It lies distant, it is veiled by clouds, there is something of the beauty of unapproachableness about it; its eternal snows, its height, its power of appearing and disappearing according to the weather, make it far better adapted to the name. Carmel is scarcely more than a hill; it is so devoid of mystery that in this atmosphere you can see almost every blade of grass, and there are no shadows or mists upon it.”

“Why should God be expressed by a mist and indistinctness?” asked Whitby, smiling slightly. “Don’t you remember the Jewish conception of Him?—‘the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness nor shadow of [Page 39] turning.’”

Underwood raised himself a little painfully to another position.

“You believe in God—the Jewish God?” he asked abruptly.

“Why give Him a nationality?” Whitby asked pertinently.

“Well, then, a conscious deity—not merely an indefinite and metaphysical First Cause?”

But Magner appeared at this moment.

“Mrs. Greville to see you, sir.”

“Ask her up,” said Underwood.

“I have asked myself up,” said Mrs. Greville, behind him. “Wasn’t that rude of me? But I saw you on the balcony from below, and thought that you were alone.”

Her eyes, always full of a friendliness that was almost flagrant, went from one man to the other. Underwood introduced Whitby.

“Mr. Whitby?” she echoed. “Surely I’ve heard—ah yes, in connection with this Persian . . . ” She paused, as if she were afraid to enter upon a subject, and then in the infantile, airy way which women of the world adopt when they wish to appear ingenuous, she went on: “They tell me he is a delightful person. The French Consul yesterday talked a long time about him—and this movement of his, or religion—which would you call it?” Underwood saw her eyes quickly absorb Whitby, and guessed that she had an avidity for brushing, with butterfly lightness, the intimate side of every human being with whom she came into contact. She had divined that in this man’s interest or connection with the Persians, then, lay an intensely vital part of his nature, and she plucked at the strings of this knowledge like a child. Again, he disliked her for it.

“I should call it both,” Whitby replied, unperturbed. “It couldn’t very well be a religion if it weren’t a movement.”

“How about your contemplative mystics, then?” she asked, seating herself.

“They’re the drones in the hive,” he answered, reddening a little, as he arranged a cushion behind her. “Personally, I think that religion was meant to be used, not locked up in a cupboard and looked at.”

“Admirably said,” she remarked. “And unlike most men you’ve arranged the cushion just in the proper latitude for my back.” She sank back against it.

“What a lovely day,” she continued, under her breath, as if speaking more to herself than to them. “How exquisitely clear the air is! I love Carmel on a day like this. Have you noticed yet, Mr. Underwood, how different the sunlight is here? It does not dazzle you, as our July sunshine does; on the contrary, it is something so transparent, so lucid, so intense, that you seem to be in another element. Our sunshine seems so muddy, and, well, almost fat, beside this thin magical light. It takes my breath away.” She smiled lazily, at her own choice of words.

“We were just talking of Carmel, before you came,” said Whitby.

“And of God,” said Underwood mechanically.

“Of God? Then you are getting the infection. Every one in Haifa talks of [Page 40] God—as if He lived in the next street. The missionaries talk about Him, stupidly for the most part, because conventionally. Then the Templars, the Germans, talk about Him, rather impertinently, I think; because they infer that they have the monopoly of Him, so to speak. Then there is your delightful Persian prophet, Mr. Whitby; and the Carmelites on the mountain, and the nuns by the sea; and the Mohammedans who are almost indecent with their immodest habit of praying in public. And several small sects, on their wild lones.”

Both men laughed, and she laughed too, an engaging natural laugh.

“Well,” said Underwood, falling in with her tone, “why shouldn’t one?”

“You know very well that in England you apologise if you happen to get on the subject of religion with people who are at all conventional. God is a backstairs and attic subject. But here they keep it in the dining-room—even at table d’hôte.”

“And you?” asked Whitby, in the tone of one who speaks to an amusing child.

“I hate talking about anything which I don’t understand.”

“Then you understand everything you talk about?” asked Underwood maliciously.

“How unkind of you, Mr. Underwood! You’ve caught me out. But tell me what you were saying—about God! I’m sure Mr. Whitby will know. He’s hand and glove with the Persian prophet here. What is his idea of the Deity?”

She looked at Whitby with a bright, intelligent curiosity, like that of a bird. “It sounds like a debating society.”

Whitby looked embarrassed. He was conscious of the loneliness in the one soul, the frivolity in the other.

“I don’t know what to answer,” he replied simply. “How can one have an idea of God? You can only be conscious of Him—as you are conscious of the sun, as you are conscious of fate.”

“Is that what your Persian prophet says?” Mrs. Greville said. “That’s very vague. Now, I should like to have an image to worship. Frankly. Think of the days when the temple of Baal stood up on the mountain. There he was—an awful image, grim, solid—a symbol of inexorable Fate. One didn’t merely go into a church and murmur polite and fulsome prayers to him; one brought one’s children, and placed them into his red-hot arms. That was something like a faith. I can imagine the abandonment of immolation, the ecstasy that a mother felt when she had burnt what she held dearest in his honour. You see, Carmel was a Mountain of God even in those days.”

“But that was barbarous, horrible,” Underwood said, his eyes on Carmel.

“Aren’t most strong things barbarous?”

“Christianity wasn’t barbarous,” said Whitby; “and yet it has become one of the strongest forces in the world.”

“Not until the healthy part of paganism had been engrafted on to it,” she replied. “Do we turn the other cheek? Do Dreadnoughts look like that? Do we do unto others as we would that they should do unto us? Not a bit of it. [Page 41] Ours is the morality of common sense, not of Christianity. We walk so as not to tread on other people’s toes, because we know they’ll tread on ours if we don’t.”

“Whitby looked at her with a kind of gentle horror. Mrs. Greville, vivid, talkative, specious, belonged to a world which he had scarcely known even in his studious Oxford days. She, always sensitive to criticism, turned to him with a frank smile, the instinct to please uppermost.

“You don’t like to hear me talk like that, Mr. Whitby. I’m not sure that I mean it, either. And I have shocked you.”

“No, no,” he replied shyly. “I think you are right—we have wandered very far from the teachings of Christ, of course.” He hesitated, and then went on: “It was time that the law of love should be proclaimed again—the world was never so ripe for it.”

“And is that the message of your Persian prophet?” she asked pertinaciously.

“Of Baha ’Ullah?” he repeated. “Yes.”

“The law of love! It sounds delightful, don’t you think so, Mr. Underwood? To love your neighbour as yourself! What could sound nicer, and what be more difficult—especially when the neighbour’s wife is there to be loved too, and complicate matters. No—Mr. Whitby, a thousand prophets will never preach the law efficaciously. Nature forbids it. She has built her species on pitiless wars. Competition is the mainspring of progress.”

“We are not animals,” Whitby said. “If we were entirely governed by the law of self-preservation—what of the men who have sacrificed their lives in fighting disease—this doctor who died from his experiments with X-rays, for example? And the Frenchman who received Mass before he started in his flying machine last week, for the last time? Those men willingly took their lives in their hands for the sake of progress. We are going to have a humanity who will do no less.”

“But they were working—your cases—for a very definite aim. A man will sacrifice a great deal for a definite aim, whether it’s the conquest of an invention, or the conquest of an element, or the conquest of a woman. But your law of love is an indefinite idea. Why should I love my neighbour? Is he lovable? Very rarely. I’ll love him when he is, and not before.”

“Yes, but you are counting without one thing,” Whitby said, his eyes alight, as if in spite of himself. “The motive force.”

“And that is?”

“The love of God. The love of man is only possible through that.”

“Ah,” she said. “Now you’re talking Algebra.”

“Algebra?”

“God is the Unknown Quantity, isn’t He. Why love Him? It seems to me, one might just as well talk of loving electricity.”

He smiled.

“Tell me, frankly, do you really love God?” she persisted, with mischievous naïveté.

“And if I answered ‘yes’?”

[Page 42] “Really, I shouldn’t believe you.”

“Then I won’t answer,” he said.

“Yes, you shall—but another day. I’ve got to go—I’m a quarter of an hour late for an appointment as it is. But it is so novel to talk theology. Can’t you both come to tea with me to-morrow? It will be rather a picnic tea—the house is in great disorder as yet.” She looked at them both inquiringly.

“With pleasure,” said Underwood.

“If I am here,” said Whitby.

“You are going away?”

“Yes.”

“Back to England?”

“No—to Teheran.”

“Take me with you!”

“Why?”

“How ungracious you are! Never mind, I won’t come. If you haven’t gone, then—to-morrow. My house is on the monastery road—any one will show you the way.”

She gave each her hand in turn, and went away, smiling, self-content.

It was on Sunday afternoon that Underwood saw Whitby again, for the latter had sent a message that he could not come to the appointed lunch. He was announced at about four o‘clock, and was brought up on to the upper terrace where Underwood was lying. Behind him came another slighter figure—a young man with a red tarbush on his head. Underwood wondered who he was for a moment, until he remembered that this was probably the Persian friend of whom they had spoken.

Whitby introduced his companion as Mirza Noureddin.

“You speak English?” Underwood asked.

“Yes, a little.”

His voice was melodious and his pronunciation careful. Underwood looked at him as he sat down on the chair which the waiter brought for him. Mirza Noureddin was clean shaven, and this added to his look of extreme and graceful youth. His eyes were unlike anything that Underwood had ever seen. They were the true Persian eyes, disproportionately large in his face—dark as pools of marsh water, fringed with long lashes which were coal-black and silky. Added to this, there was a velvety bloom over them like a curtain, which seemed to veil the inward thought which lies hard as a fig stone in clear water at the bottom of a European eye. Yet he lifted them [Page 43] ingenuously, with movements that were gentle, modest, and furtive as a young girl’s.

Underwood’s attention was caught by the youth’s appearance, he knew not why.

“Where did you study it?” he asked. “You have a good accent.”

“I studied it in Akka.” His lashes swept upwards, and with a gesture he indicated the little town across the bay, white as a seagull’s breast where it lay against the long coast-line.

“One can see Akka well to-day,” said Whitby. “We must take you there one day soon.”

“I will take him to the Rizwan,” said Noureddin, in his soft voice.

“What is the Rizwan?”

“That is our garden—it was made by the believers.”

“By the believers?”

He explained himself without haste.

“For the Bahai. They made it for the Blessed Perfection.”

Whitby was gazing across to Akka with his dreamy scholar’s eyes.

“The Rizwan will be at its best in a month or two, when the lilies are out, and the mulberry trees by the river are in leaf,” said he. “You should spend a whole day there.”

“I shall certainly have to go,” said Underwood, wondering what pleasant and secret madness enwrapped these two people. He continued—

“There’s a much better view from here than on the balcony, isn’t there, Whitby? One can see all the sea. By Jove! what a glorious sweep of bay! I should like to have my little red-wing here to do some yachting.” He had ceased to remember for the moment that yachting was of the past, and added, with a short laugh, “Confound it! I forgot that that’s knocked off too. I shall have to try to sell her.”

Noureddin listened with a slightly mystified expression.

“I forget that I’m off the active list, sometimes,” Underwood remarked to him, in explanation.

“Pardon,” said Noureddin, with a diffident smile, “but what is a red-wing”

“It’s a small yacht with scarlet sails,” Underwood said.

“Ah, you see my English is bad,” he returned, with sadness. “Also the English is different to the American, though in books it is the same. But I am always learning. I should like to be able to write in English as I write in Persian. And this list you spoke of?”

Underwood explained. “I’ve lost the use of my muscles, more or less.”

Noureddin’s eyes filled with pity like a woman’s.

“That is bad,” he said, like a child.

“I’ve been giving Mirza Noureddin lessons for the past year,” said Whitby; “but I’m afraid the English I’ve taught him has not been very colloquial. We’ve been doing some translations together.”

“Translations of what?” asked Underwood.

He hesitated slightly. “Of—some of the Bahai manuscripts.”

[Page 44]

“I almost feel inclined to take Persian lessons,” said Underwood? with a smile. “Only I’m such a frightful duffer at languages, and one ought to get at them young, at the same age that we stuff Latin and Greek.”

“That is true,” remarked Noureddin gravely, in his musical voice. “When one is young the brain is like butter—a fly can leave a mark upon it. And when one is old it is as iron. But you are not old yet. You are quite young. I will teach you.”

“Yes, why don’t you study a little Persian, Underwood?” said Whitby. “You’ll find that time will hang heavily here in Haifa if you haven’t anything to do.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Underwood. “At present I am enjoying a lazy peace. For instance, I came up here to write a letter this afternoon, and found myself staring at Carmel for a whole hour together, without writing a word. There’s something fascinating about it, though it’s scarcely more than an insignificant little hill.”

“I wish you could go upon it,” said Whitby simply. “The wild flowers are wonderful now, and still more wonderful later. A botanist once told me that he had picked a hundred and thirty different species of wild flowers on Carmel in one day.”

Underwood looked at the mountain wistfully.

“You’ve made the carriage drive up to the Carmelite monastery, I suppose?” Whitby asked.

“Not yet. But I will.”

“You get a good view from the plateau of Notre-Dame de Carmel. If you like, I’ll give you a card to one of the fathers—an Irishman—a friend of mine. You’ll like him, and he will be glad to see you.”

He drew out a worn pocket-book, and extracting a card, wrote upon it: “Ask for Father Patrick.”

“Thanks awfully, Whitby. You’re acting sponsor for me all round.”

“Not as much as I should like. But Mirza Noureddin and his people, and Father Patrick, are my best friends here, and I’m handing them on to you, or rather you to them. I’m sorry you didn’t come a month earlier.”

“When do you leave?”

“I don’t know yet,” Whitby replied.

“But surely you have an idea?”

“It is not in my hands,” he answered.

Again Underwood felt excluded from some secret which Whitby held like a jewel in his soul. His friend had the look of a lover who guards in his heart a newly won happiness. He glanced at the young Persian. His face, too, was grave and serene, as with an inner knowledge.

“I see,” said Underwood.

“And you must command me, if you want anything,” Noureddin added, with sincerity in his dark wide eyes. “The friends of Mr. Whitby are our friends. I will come to you often, if you wish to see me. You will come to our house, like Mr. Whitby. If you wish to go to Akka, or to any other place, I am ready.”

[Page 45] Underwood answered with a smile. He felt attracted to the youth, as he would be attracted to a graceful and beautiful wild animal with gentle manners.

“Come often, if you have time.” he said. “I’m a lonely brute.” He spoke almost as he would have spoken to a woman.

“So Mr. Whitby has gone,” said Underwood.

“I have just come from the steamer,” Noureddin replied. “He sent his love—his regards—to you, and told me to say many things. I shall be as your brother, he said.”

It was naively uttered, and the liquid eyes of the young Persian were wells of childlike truth and affection as he gazed at Underwood. How much of it was sincere?

“That was very kind of him,” said Underwood, “and very kind of you,” he added.

“And he gave me a little letter for you,” continued Mirza Noureddin flutily, drawing it from his pocket. His dark eyes fluttered up to Underwood’s.

Underwood understood that he was to read it, and opened it.

It was written in pencil on steamship paper—

“MY DEAR UNDERWOOD,—Noureddin will bring you this. I find that I have ten minutes’ grace, and employ it in writing to you. I had hoped to come in and say good-bye, but I was sent for at the last moment, and stayed so long that I was unable to get as far as your hotel. I made a thorough search for a room in the German colony, but could not find one. If it seems advisable, Noureddin will put another proposition before you, which you can accept or not, just as you like. Do not tell him that I have mentioned it in this letter; he will probably speak to you of it himself. With regard to the Persians, don’t hesitate to accept any kindness they may offer you. I would like you to experience the disinterestedness and devotion of the Bahais here, as I have done. Their ideals of love and fraternity do not merely exist on paper; they are carried out in the most literal sense of the word. Don’t be put off by the surface differences between Oriental and Occidental life that will strike you at first, as you see with fresh eyes, or that miserable aphorism that ‘East is East, and West is West,’ and so on. It was invented by the stupid and masculine West. The feminine East has more intuition. It is true she hates the West with the repulsion of a woman for a brutal conqueror, but in her heart there is the knowledge that there is the miracle of love to [Page 46] be accomplished, so that what is begun in lust and struggle may end in a union which shall be happiness for both. Sympathy and intuition are the keys. While we are busy reiterating that stupid ‘East is East’ refrain, we shall never put our hand to the keys. Just as love provides understanding between a man and a woman, love will provide understanding between the races. At present we are like the annoying pedagogues of a generation ago, who wished to prevent the education of women by reiterating that their brains weighed lighter.

“Noureddin is waiting, so I must finish this quickly. I want to say something personal to you, and I am so cursedly English still that it is almost impossible to say it as I wished. Noureddin would say it to you as easily as a child who asks for jam on the top shelf; but I’m not Noureddin, and we’ve both got our English hatred of ever talking to others on vital facts. But I am going to write it, all the same. I envy you. Your Kismet has brought you up to a blank wall. You said as much to me the other day. It has taken the world away from you—you have not had to leave it. I was brought up against the blank wall too, but in a different way, along the road of a good many useless mental struggles.

“I have said I envy you; because, if you only knew it, the wall isn’t solid at all—and there’s all the universe on the other side! God grant that you will know what I mean—you must know what I mean sooner or later—because for you there is no escape. You will probably wonder what I am blithering about.

“Well, good-bye, and good luck. Forgive me for what will seem maniacal and presumptuous ravings, and believe me, yours sincerely,

“GERALD WHITBY.”

Underwood looked up to find Noureddin’s grave eyes fixed on him.

“I think Mr. Whitby wrote very much?” he said.

“Yes, it is a long letter, not a little letter,” said Underwood.

“I came to ask,” said Noureddin, “if you would come to our house to-day to drink tea. My father will like to see you. I have a carriage outside, if you will come.”

“Thanks,” Underwood replied, “I’d like to. I’m looking forward to meeting your people.”

But he was still thinking of the odd tone of the letter, of its air of sincerity—the interest it displayed in himself. How had Whitby guessed at the psychical Sahara through which he was passing, at the Gehenna of burning dreariness which scorched his soul? He was against a blank wall, it was true. But Whitby’s air of optimism, of “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world,” roused in him a spirit of bitter laughter. If he thought of existence dispassionately, nakedly, as he knew it, now that the rose-coloured spectacles of health and youth had been removed from his vision, it seemed to him terrible and God a relentless being, more callous than any blinded Destiny ever conceived by man’s imagining. What could Whitby, wrapped up in his mystical dreams, know of the bare and ugly view of facts which [Page 47] comes to one robbed of his illusions and the comfortable fictions of physical security?

Meanwhile, he allowed Noureddin to help him to adjust his crutches, and to assist him into the carriage. The young Persian’s hands were as gentle as a woman’s.

They drove up the straight road of the German colony, discoursing of various subjects—the tourist season, the new hotel in building, the German colonists. Then they turned a little to the left and drew up before a small, new-looking house, set a little back from the road. A path led up from the iron gate upon which a bell jangled as Noureddin jumped down and opened it. On either side of the path flowers were planted—rose bushes, geraniums, and frisias; while pebbled paths divided the beds. Wild flowers and vegetables grew together farther back, as if a generous Nature could afford nourishment to all her children in this rich soil. An old man was bending over a freshly planted shrub, which he was securing with a string to a stick. Its limp leaves and flaccid stems needed support. He had evidently been watering it, for a rusty petroleum can, half filled with water, stood beside him.

He wore a loose and voluminous djebbah of brown cloth which reached almost to his feet; a snowy turban was coiled about his fez. A simple white garment, buttoning close to the throat, and a sash wound about his body were apparent when he turned and straightened himself at their approach.

“This is my father,” said Noureddin—“Mirza Amin ’Ullah.”

The old man smiled, touched his forehead, uttered a Persian greeting, and held out his hand with a slight awkwardness that spoke of lack of habit. His hair was grey, and a short grizzled beard grew on his chin, but there was something indomitably young about his eyes, and a kindly gaiety, as it were, that contradicted his wrinkles.

“He says that he is very glad to see you,” translated Noureddin, “and that he loves all the friends of Mr. Whitby.”

Underwood replied that the pleasure was mutual, and a translated conversation ensued.

“He says he hopes you are well.”

“I am well—as well as I can be.”

The old man spoke again. The Persian sounded soft, the inflection seductive.

“He says: ‘If the heart is well, then all is well.’”

Underwood smiled. “The heart cannot be well when the body is sick.” Unconsciously he was adopting the simple phraseology of Noureddin to express his own sardonic thought.

“He says: ‘No, no,’ Noureddin said, with emphasis. “That if that were so, the king would serve his slave.”

“If the slaves revolt, the king is no longer a king.”

“But the king is stronger than the slave, because he is immortal,” translated Noureddin. And the soul is always strong because its strength is God’s.

[Page 48] Mirza Amin continued to speak—

“He says that my grandfather was tortured to death in Teheran,” said Noureddin—“that they fastened lighted sticks to his body—do you say torches?—and that all the time he said, ‘God be praised, this is my happiest day. Never have I known a delight like this.’ My father was with him and saw his words and witnessed his joy. So that if the heart is well, the body is a small thing.”

Underwood experienced a slight shock. The old man’s eyes were as untroubled and gay as ever. His tone was the simple, mater-of-fact tone of reasoning. Yet he had witnessed the dying agonies of his father by slow degrees, the tragedy of death by torture. Such a remembrance could be spoken of with a smile! Was it Eastern disregard of death, or something else?

Mirza Amin led the way to the house up the sunny gravel path, and then, mounting a few steps and opening the door a little, called out in Persian. Underwood realised that he was giving the women of the house time to make their disappearance. He had seen the flutter of a black garment disappearing behind the house as they opened the gate.

Then Mirza Amin threw wide the door, and Underwood, aided by Noureddin, ascended the steps with some difficulty and entered.

He found himself in an airy room. The walls were white, and there were four large windows, so that it seemed full of lightness and whiteness to Underwood after the confined and dark rooms of the German hotel. Three doors, besides the entrance door, communicated apparently with other rooms or parts of the house. The floor, tiled with black and white stones, was partly covered with fine Persian rugs. Two large divans ran down each side of the room; they were covered with white linen with a fringe of crochet. The cushions, too, were plain white. On the table stood a vase, full of wild flowers, marigolds, anemones, and campions. On a second and smaller table stood some Persian books, an English dictionary, and a japanned and painted case of Persian design. There was no ornament of any description, and through the windows came a fresh breeze from the sea.

“Sit by the window,” said Noureddin, arranging the cushions deftly, so as to make a support for Underwood’s big helpless body. “Mr. Whitby always sat at this end of the divan, because one can see the sea and Akka.”

He himself sat carefully, in the European style, on the edge of the divan. Mirza Amin, on the contrary, who had slipped his shoes off at the door, sat on the divan opposite to them, cross-legged, in the Oriental fashion. He looked at them tranquilly, happily.

“Tell me something about your father’s history, Noureddin,” said Underwood. “Your grandfather was one of the Babi martyrs, then?”

“Yes. My father was little at the time, and he cried very much when he saw my grandfather killed, but he was very proud. And as soon as he was fourteen, he ran away from his aunt, who lived in Isfahan and took him into her house after my grandfather and granduncle had been killed by the Government; and he went to join Baha ’Ullah in Adrianople. Some day I [Page 49] will tell you of his adventures—because he had no money, and it was a difficult journey. When the Blessed Perfection came to Akka, he came too.”

“Then you were born in Akka?”

“Yes. We lived there until lately. We have only inhabited this house a little while. We received permission to change a year ago.”

“From the Turkish Government?”

“Their permission was already given. No, from the Master.”

“The Master?” repeated Underwood vaguely.

“Yes, the Effendi—Abdul Baha (the Servant of the Radiance), the son of the Blessed Perfection. We call him the Master—did not Mr. Whitby tell you?” He spoke with simple reverence, as if of something unearthly and sacred, yet which had passed with him into the realm of ordinary and accepted fact.

Underwood remembered his conversation with Whitby. He had not paid much attention to it at the time, but it came back to him. This “Master” to whom Noureddin alluded must be the “delightful Persian prophet” of whom Mrs. Greville had spoken—the present head of the “movement.” The astounding fact remained that Whitby, a young man, not by nature a crank, who was considered one of the most promising men of his year at Magdalen, should go to the other end of the earth at the bidding of an obscure political and religious refugee. Was this merely the call of the East that drew men as inevitably as a magnet? Or, again, was it something else? Was it the personality of this man mysteriously designated as the “Master”? or was it the impulsion of some secret doctrine such as that imparted by learned lamas in their fastnesses in Tibet? Such theories as the last were purely fantastic. He was inclined to regard the lamas as mythical, and the Westerners who professed to have received from them elaborate theories about the Universe as charlatans, or, at most, self-deceived neuropaths.

In the American phrase, he was “up against something” which he could not understand. It pervaded this place, there was a subtle indication of it, the air seemed full of secrets, and among these Persians, especially, he was conscious of an enchantment, like a mortal who has strayed into a garden inhabited by fairy people, who knows that he is seen by eyes which are invisible, and listens to music which his straining ears cannot hear.

“Where is he—the Master?” he asked, involuntarily expressing his curiosity.

“He has come to Carmel. He lives in the new house on the hill, just to the left, above ours,” answered Noureddin.

The answer was so matter of fact and prosaic that Underwood almost smiled. But Noureddin was adding something in Persian to himself, which sounded like a blessing or a prayer.

“Where is Abdul Baha’s house?” asked Underwood suddenly, as he settled his big limbs in the carriage. Noureddin pointed to the left.

“There. You can see the roof. And you see those Persians? They are going to see him—they are pilgrims from Teheran and Isfahan.”

[Page 50] A dozen men, in Persian dress, with the black sheepskin cap on their heads which contrasted funereally with the gay scarlet tarbush of the Syrian driver, were moving up the hillside road. They walked slowly, and Underwood saw that the reason was that a very old man, bent almost double with age, was in the midst of them. Two younger men supported him on either side. Presently he paused, as if his breath failed him, and they paused too. The old man lifted his face, and Underwood saw it, though he was looking, not at him, but towards the house which Noureddin had indicated. And the old man’s tired face smiled. It was the same smile of eternal youth that Underwood had seen on the face of Mirza Amin. It was a very heavenly smile.

“To the hotel,” said Noureddin to the driver.

“The charm of Carmel is growing on me,” said Underwood politely. “I confess that at first it looked merely an insignificant hill.”

“He says,” translated Noureddin, over a mouthful of pilau, “that you are English, that you are a Christian. The Christians think the mountain sacred as well as the Mohammedans and the Jews, because Christ walked on this mountain.”

“Did He?” said Underwood, whose Bible history was shaky.

“He says, ‘Because of that, the paths should shine,’” said Noureddin, his dark eyes gleaming in the flicker of the candlelight.

“I’m afraid I’m a bad Christian,” admitted Underwood, with a rueful smile.

This seemed to arouse the old man’s sense of humour when Noureddin conveyed it to him. He gave a deep chuckle within his beard. In the East to confess a difference of creed is a delicate matter enough, but to blandly confess disloyalty to one’s own is a piece of honesty in which an Oriental would rarely indulge.

“Then we must convert you to be a good Christian,” translated Noureddin, when Hosseyn had spoken, joining in the merriment.

“Or a Bahai,” smiled Underwood.

Hosseyn’s eyes grew deeper and more serious.

“He says, ‘To be a Bahai you need not leave your religion.’”

“How so?” Underwood asked, with some surprise.

“Because the Kingdom—the Malekoot—is the same—for all it is the same.” He spoke with a mystical fervour, as if the word “Malekoot,” like that “blessed word Mesopotamia,” held a spell.

“The Malekoot?” Underwood repeated, for the word pleased him too.

[Page 51] “He says, if you are of the Malekoot, religions become to you like the coloured glass through which the light shines in a mosque. There are many coloured pieces, Mohammed, Christ, Baha ’Ullah, and others, but the light is the same. You do not give attention to the window, whether it is of red or blue or green glass, but you give attention to the light that shines through it.”

“It is a convenient theory,” said Underwood. “But what are we to understand by the light?”

Noureddin turned his great eyes on him with naive sincerity.

“He says, the light is knowledge of the Unity of God. And when one has that knowledge, one knows God, and when one knows God, one must love Him, and when one loves Him, one must love everybody, whether he is of Islam or a Christian, so that everybody is your brother and you love him very much.”

“And do you love everybody very much?”

“Of course I do,” said Noureddin, opening his eyes.

“But that’s Christianity,” said Underwood—he corrected himself—“as it was before it became respectable.”

Noureddin looked at him in a puzzled way.

Mirza Hosseyn leant forward and pushed his plate away from him.

“He says he will tell you a story about the Bahai,” translated Noureddin.

Underwood signified his attention.

The old man made a belching sound in his throat, lifted his glass to his mouth, as if he enjoyed awakening his hearers’ interest, and began, Noureddin translating sentence by sentence—

“Four men—a Turk, a Persian, an Arab, and an Englishman—were walking towards a certain town. As they were travelling on the same road, they made friends, though they could only speak a few words of the others’ languages. Presently the discussion fell on what they should buy in the town for supper. The Turk said: ‘One thing I shall need after this thirsty journey, and that is uzum.’ ‘No,’ said the Persian, ‘we must buy angùr, and no strange thing.’ ‘I will eat neither,’ said the Arab; ‘my whole soul craves for eynab.’ ‘You are fools,’ said the Englishman; ‘it is the season for grapes—why not refresh ourselves with them?’ From discussion they fell into a quarrel, and from quarrelling they came to blows. Then a stranger came up and said, ‘Oh, my friends! why are you disputing among yourselves?’ They told him of the subject of their quarrel, and he said, ‘Do not heat yourselves by fighting, but come into my garden hard by, for I have all the fruits which you mention.’ So they went, and presently he brought them a large dish full of bunches of grapes. ‘There,’ said he, giving one to the Arab, ‘is thy eynab; and there,’ to the Turk, ‘thy uzum; and there,’ to the Persian, ‘thy angùr; and there,’ to the Englishman, ‘thy grapes.’ That man is like the Bahai.”

The old man drained off the rest of the water in his glass, and looked at Underwood, with an air of smiling triumph.

“He says, what do you think of his story? Does it not put the matter in the palm of one hand?” asked Noureddin.

[Page 52] “By Allah! It is well said,” interjected Mirza Amin.

“It is a story full of meaning,” said Underwood.

The aged Bahai beamed on him cordially, his child’s soul in his eyes.

A luxurious feeling, as if he had been transported into a fairy-tale in the Arabian Nights, was creeping over Underwood. The young Persian, his rapt eyes and girlish beauty, the old man uttering parables in his sonorous voice, the sober robes and turbans of both old men, carried him into another age. Only his own European dress, and Noureddin’s, and the modern clock ticking in the corner reminded him that they were in the twentieth century. The spirit of leisure was present, the serious, discursive spirit of the wise East.

[Page 53]

Thrones of St. Peter

A review of The Three Popes: An Account of the Great Schism—When Rival Popes in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa Vied for the Rule of Christendom by Marzieh Gail (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 320 pages

By FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

FOR DECADES the popes had resided at Avignon. The kings of France managed to elect their subjects to the throne of St. Peter, and French pontiffs preferred the Rhone to the Tiber. Yet Christendom did not accept the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church. In 1376 a girl of humble birth, Caterina from Siena, persuaded Gregory XI to go back to turbulent Rome. Two years later, when Gregory died, a mob incited by noble factions rioted in the streets, demanding the election of an Italian, since another French pope might return to the relative comfort and security of Avignon, leaving Rome to stagnate in parochial isolation.

The cardinals could have voted their conscience and joined the long roster of Christian martyrs; instead they elected Bartolomeo Prignano, the Archbishop of Bari, a prelate notorious for his many crimes. No sooner had they done so and escaped the fury of the mob than a majority regretted the action. They met again, certified that the initial conclave had been held under duress, which made the election of Pope Urban VI, the former Archbishop of Bari, canonically invalid. They voted again, this time in favor of Robert Cardinal of Geneva, also known as the Butcher of Cesena for a massacre of that town’s inhabitants perpetrated by papal troops under his command and during which Robert himself was seen running and shouting, “I want blood! Blood! Blood! Kill them all!” Was there a touch of irony in his assuming the name Clement upon becoming an anti-pope? Was he an anti-pope? Indeed, who was the legitimate pope? Both elections had been so confusing, so full of procedural errors, that the most skilled canon lawyers, the most conscientious historians, the most sincere believers, could not agree on their validity. Was either Urban VI or Clement VII legitimate? Was there ever again a legitimate pope?

Western Christendom was plunged into a schism as deep and as damaging as the one that separated Rome from Constantinople three centuries earlier. Rulers and nations chose sides, adopting Urbanist or Clementine obedience. When Urban died, his cardinals, fourteen of whom had been created by himself, elected another Italian. Clement in turn was succeeded by Cardinal Pedro de Luna as Benedict XIII, one of the most remarkable individuals of his age and, predictably, the central character of the book under review.

Pedro de Luna, a Spanish nobleman and prelate, had intelligence, ambition, stamina, and an indomitable will. He had been present at the election of Urban VI which he later repudiated to join the opposition and lead the schism. As Benedict XIII he fought for his cause with incredible tenacity, frustrating all attempts at compromise solutions, keeping his numerous enemies at bay, and further deepening dissension among Christians. He died in extreme old age, an exile not only from Rome but from Avignon as well. With his death the principal obstacle to compromise was removed. Various European monarchs and clerics at last succeeded in reestablishing unity.

However, the wounds inflicted by the [Page 54] schism could never be healed. The legitimacy of the papacy was now open to question, dogmas were doubted, institutions fell into disrepute, and sincere Christians began to seek salvation in personal religion and justification in faith alone. The political consequences of the schism were no less severe. They weakened the already diminished papal power and hastened its transformation from a pan-European supra-national authority to an Italian state.

Marzieh Gail is no newcomer to the history of the late middle ages. She explored the Babylonian captivity of the Roman Church in an earlier work, Avignon in Flower, which was highly praised for its readability, vividness, and flair. The same qualities are evident in The Three Popes. The pace is fast, the story dramatic and highly personalized. Mrs. Gail is especially skillful at recreating the atmosphere of the past and bringing back to life personages who were only names in technical monographs and dull encyclopedias. Such skill, unfortunately, has its drawbacks. It leads the author to concentrate too heavily on personalities and to neglect the larger forces which shape the history of an age. While most contemporary historians sin on the side of depersonalizing the past and even ignoring the individual, Mrs. Gail concentrates on the individual to the exclusion of almost everything else. National interests, larger problems of European politics, institutional evolution, economic change—these and other areas of inquiry are left out.

Though professional historians will comment unfavorably on the insufficient use of primary sources, imperfect documentation, etc., they too ought to be impressed with the freshness of Mrs. Gail’s approach. The Great Schism has been discussed and debated for centuries. It would seem that there was not much one could add to the millions of words written about it. Yet Mrs. Gail manages to do exactly that. It is refreshing to see a chapter on papal legitimacy open with a couplet from Sa’di. It is good to see a moral position confirmed or condemned with a quotation from the Qur’án. Mrs. Gail’s Persian culture works its subtle and enriching influence upon everything she writes. Moreover, as a Bahá’í she achieves something that might be styled paradoxically as non-partisan commitment. In writing about the Church she is neither an indifferent outsider nor a sectarian champion. She sees the divisions within Christendom and the whole problem of the authority in religion from the vantage point of a Faith which provides a coherent interpretation of the religious history of mankind.

If Mrs. Gail plays any favorites, her preference is for Pedro de Luna, “The Lion of the Rock”. It is the man, the overwhelming personality, that fascinates her and evokes her sympathy. The sympathy grows stronger as Benedict’s fortunes wane. At the end, abandoned by all, a virtual prisoner at Peniscola in Spain, the ninety-five-year-old fighter assumes heroic dimensions. His very death strikes one not as a defeat but as a triumph. He had outlived all his initial rivals, had maintained his position against impossible odds and borne eloquent testimony if not to the righteousness of his cause, then to the power and majesty of human will.

[Page 55]

[Page 56]

Authors & Artists

KEITH DE FOLO, a graduate of Stanford University, is a freelance journalist and photographer. He has been a staff writer for Forbes Magazine, Time, and the Christian Herald. His photographs and articles have appeared in the Rotarian, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in various travel magazines. Readers of WORLD ORDER will remember his informative article “A Westerner Views Buddhism in Ceylon” in the Spring 1967 issue. Mr. de Folo is at present in Nepal, continuing his studies in Buddhism and writing for newspapers and magazines.

ROBERT L. GULICK, JR., who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, has been, since 1964, Dean of Admissions, Registrar, and Professor of Area Studies (North Africa and the Middle East) at The Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona. Dr. Gulick has written many articles for Bahá’í publications, including WORLD ORDER and the introduction to Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys. In addition he has authored Muhammad the Educator, American Higher Education: Uncertain Trumpet?, and World Peace and World Plenty.

HORACE HOLLEY, who died before WORLD ORDER was revived in 1966, was one of the founders of our magazine. Bahá’ís throughout the world remember him as a totally dedicated servant of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh. He was a magnificent teacher, speaker, and administrator, as well as writer, poet, and thinker. “The Meaning of Worship” was originally brought out by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust as a pamphlet. It is as fresh and significant today as it was almost two decades ago.

ELIANE A. HOPSON was born and raised in Southern France. She was associated with Jean Vilar’s Théatre National Populaire, a group dedicated to the education of the masses through art, drama, music, and film. Having moved to the United States more than ten years ago, Mrs. Hopson has continued to concern herself with vital questions of art, culture and religion. Her article which appears in this issue of WORLD ORDER was translated from French by a member of our editorial board, Howard Garey.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is a Professor of History at Yale, and editor of WORLD ORDER.

ART CREDITS: p. 3, photo by Jay Conrader; p. 6, drawing by Cecil G. Trew, from a private collection; pp. 10, 13, 21, drawings by Mark Fennessy; p. 24, photo of Bahá’í House of Worship, courtesy National Bahá’í Public Information Office; pp. 28, 29, 52, drawings by Mark Fennessy; p. 55, photo by Jay Conrader; back cover, photo by Jay Conrader.

JAY CONRADER, a freelance writer and photographer, contributes photographs regularly to WORLD ORDER.

MARK FENNESSY has displayed his drawings in the last two issues of WORLD ORDER. He graduated with honors from Yale University where he as a Scholar of the House in sculpture and drawing.