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World Order

SUMMER 1970

THE CASE FOR PROPHETIC HISTORY

David F. Trask and Glenn W. Hawkes

OBSERVATIONS ON INTERRACIAL ADOPTION

John F. Dumbrill

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ

Allan L. Ward

THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD

E. S. Stevens

ART IN APOCALYPSE

Gary and Gayle Morrison

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 4 NUMBER 4 • 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 (Student, $2.50); 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 Bones about World Oneness

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

6 The Case for Prophetic History

by David F. Trask and Glenn W. Hawkes

19 Notes from No-Man’s-Land: Observations

on Interracial Adoption, by John F. Dumbrill

23 Prayer for Unity

by Bahá’u’lláh

24 Abdu’l-Bahá: Child of Light Amidst the

Children of the Half Light, by Allan L. Ward

32 The Mountain of God

a novel by E. S. Stevens

52 Art in Apocalypse: Some Reflections on

Recent Fllms, by Gary and Gayle Morrison

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in this Issue

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Bones about World Oneness

EDITORIAL

COALSACK BLUFF. It’s not exactly the sort of name one expects to find attached to a significant scientific discovery. Yet the bluff—4 miles long and 800 feet straight down—is associated with the exciting and conclusive bit of evidence confirming that Antarctica was once in fact attached to Africa, South America, India, and Australia (see Saturday Review, Feb. 7, 1970). The idea of a protocontinent is an old one. But it was not until the 1950’s that scientific evidence began to accumulate which would warrant taking seriously the theory of continental drift.

Even so, the theory was not easily accepted. Scientific data, however, suggesting a protocontinent which had drifted apart continued to be uncovered. And in 1967 a fragment of the skull of an amphibian common to all the southern continents about 200 million years ago was discovered in Antarctica. Still that was not enough to satisfy the cautious. A reptile bone was needed.

The bone—and the confirmation of the theory of the protocontinent—came in late 1969 with the discovery of a lystrosaurus tooth in a remarkable fossil find on Coalsack Bluff in Antarctica. The man who quarried the tooth remembered finding one like it at the foot of the Andes in Argentina; the man who examined it and made positive identification had picked one up in Africa.

Thus, once again, mankind has discovered by scientific means a physical reality which has already been promulgated as a spiritual reality. Bahá’u’lláh the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, declared in the middle of the nineteenth century that, “The world is but one country and mankind its citizens.” His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in explaining the ramifications of world unity, recognized the obvious geographical divisions between continents and peoples. He stressed, nevertheless, that not only had the day for material unity come but also for the more important spiritual unity:

“In cycles gone by, though harmony was established, yet, owing to the absence of means, the unity of all mankind could not have been achieved. Continents remained widely divided, nay even among the peoples of one and the same continent association and interchange of thought were well nigh impossible. Consequently intercourse, understanding and unity amongst all the peoples and kindreds of the earth were unattainable. In this day, however, means of communication have multiplied, and the five continents of the earth have virtually merged into one. . . . In like manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly [Page 2] interdependent. For none is self-sufficiency any longer possible, inasmuch as political ties unite all peoples and nations, and the bonds of trade and industry, of agriculture and education, are being strengthened every day. Hence the unity of all mankind can in this day be achieved . . . .”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá goes on to explain that among the candles of unity destined to unite the world in this age is the candle of “the unity of nations—a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland.”

Coalsack Bluff. An odd name, to be sure. But one which future scholars will undoubtedly mention in tracing the slow history of man’s proving to himself that this world is—in more ways than he ever imagined—one world.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

BAHÁ’ÍS are acutely interested in the problem of language in world communications. WORLD ORDER has published two articles on this subject in recent years (Jeff Gruber, “The Selection of an International Auxiliary Language”, Spring 1967, and Evelyn Hardin, “Problems of Selecting a World Language”, Summer 1967), and in the Winter 1969-70 issue we printed a letter to the Editor by Leo G. Davis, promoting a simplification of English which he calls Inglish. And now we have received several interesting letters in response to that of Mr. Davis, of which we excerpt one in the Letters section below.

The only official or authoritative declarations which have been made in the name of the Bahá’í Faith on this question have been to the effect that an already existing language or one not yet in existence should be chosen at some time to be taught to every one in the world (if it is not already his native tongue) so that all will be able to converse together, in speech and in writing, in what would be for most (or for all) a second language. This language would be the official medium of international organs and of any future world organization or government. But it is clear that at this moment no such choice has been made.

Jeff Gruber makes a very interesting point in his article: he urges caution in the adoption of an artificial language, since linguistic science is currently making basic discoveries in the mechanisms of thinking and the relation of linguistic structures thereto. Until these problems have been worked out, any decision, especially one concerning an artificial language, would be premature.

Evelyn Hardin’s article is best understood, it seems, in the light of Gruber’s point. She recommends Mario Pei’s suggestion that an international commission be created whose members would have no prior commitment for or against any particular language or languages and which, after necessary deliberation and experimentation, would decide on a universal auxiliary language, the governments having previously agreed to adopt as a universal language that language, natural or constructed, which the commission would finally recommend.

In view of the rather high degree of civilization which such an agreement on the part of the nations of the world would evince, a degree to which they do not seem to have attained at this date, and in view of the primitive state of basic linguistic knowledge which has just been reached, the wisdom of the Bahá’ís in postponing a decision to champion some particular language until scientific and social conditions are appropriate is manifest.

To the Editor

WORLD LANGUAGE

. . . English has these points in its favour [as a world language]: 1. It has the largest number of speakers in the world’s largest lingual family (i.e. Indo-European). 2. It is more widely distributed across the globe than any other language. 3. It is grammatically simple. 4. It has a large concise vocabulary. 5. It has more printed material in past or present output than any other language 6. It uses the world’s most common alphabet: the Latin.

However . . . the following points . . . stand against English as a world language: 1. It has forty-five basic and different sounds to its pronunciation. 2. It has no grammatical rule for [the place of stress] in the pronunciation of words. . . 3. It is not written phonetically. 4. It is not an easy language to pronounce. 5. It has a confusing vocabulary with an innumerable variety of meanings for similar-sounding words (e.g. “run” has 172 meanings; “cross”: 61; “make”: 75; . . .). 6. Its grammar, though [Page 5] simple, is irregular, especially the verbs. 7. It has a huge supply of idioms, localisms, dialects and slang, which enhance a national language, but hopelessly confuse an International language. 8. It has been altered beyond understanding in some areas (e.g. Jamaica & the Caribbean; West Bengal, Kerala & other Indian states; . . .). 9. English is losing its hold in Asia. In some areas English has lost its official status (e.g. Malaysia and India) and in others it is becoming an elective instead of a compulsory subject in schools (e.g. China and Japan ). 10. It is considered by many to be a “colonial” or “conquerors’” language. In my own opinion this is not a valid factor, however if the world chooses an International language while prejudice is still a force to be reckoned with it could actuate the outcome.

In my estimation therefore English has small chances of becoming the “World Lingo”. I think a constructed language, be it Esperanto or a new or perfected version of it, would be a better choice. It is well worth anyone’s time to learn Esperanto. The recent superb publication of the Koran (with text in both Esperanto and Arabic, side-by-side) in cooperation with UNESCO is proof enough that Esperanto is very much alive.

By a united effort of exploration, study and invention AND SPIRITUAL FERVOUR this country, called the world, and its citizens, called mankind, shall be united in tongue as well as in spirit!

D. S. WESTGAARD

Prince George, B.C., Canada

ALIENATION

The first thing I read in the Winter ’69-70 issue of WORLD ORDER was the editorial “From Alienation to World Peace.” It is excellent and most relevant. And I have read it several times since. So here are a few thoughts I had as a result of it. . . . One of the unfortunate effects of alienation is lack of respect for an individual human being, oneself included, as anything other than a part of a group. which manifests itself in the obsession to convince the other guy that he must surely see how wrong and despicable his idea is, and how right “mine” is. And it surely need not be pointed out that this is merely a sign of one’s own insecurity. In a non-alienated society, where the three basic goals of universal mental health [freedom, spontaneity, and genuine expression of self] were attainable and an individual had come somewhere near to reaching them, this individual would respect his fellow man enough to let him make his own choice, and would need neither agreement nor to degrade the other person’s idea and belief.

There must be constant interaction—with all kinds of people, whether they agree or not. Everyone with a vague idea of human psychology knows you cannot interact constructively with someone for whom you do not have at least a certain amount of basic respect. Much less can you feel any kind of love for someone without first having that basic respect. Love is the most spontaneous of all responses, totally impossible in an individual so insecure in his own choice he must downgrade all who do not make the same choice.

I cannot help but refer here to a short statement made by John Huddleston in “A Letter to My Friends” in the same issue of WORLD ORDER, which really—as they say—“turned me off”. It is on the bottom of the first page and reads: “I should add, however, that I never became so arrogant as to assert that there was no God. Rather, I preferred to get along without thinking of the idea.” These two sentences, the first in particular, really sort of helped crystallize my thoughts on the editorial and gave them a focal point, so to speak. First of all, it is debatable whether it is preferable to totally reject the kind of God whose image has been created and used by many people to support their particular prejudices and give them substance, or not to think about it at all. If nothing else, the rejection of such an image of God is a positive stand. And then, for some it is necessary to totally reject one idea so they may feel free to investigate others. I respect Mr. Huddleston’s struggles, and his choice. But I reject his arrogance in not showing others the same respect for making their choice —which may not be a final choice at that. I might recommend he read an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre in a recent issue of the New York Review. Some of Sartre’s basic ideas have much in common with those of Bahá’u’lláh, even though one is an atheist of long standing, the other considered a Manifestation of God.

RUTH S. PERRIN

College Park, Georgia

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The Case for Prophetic History

By DAVID F. TRASK and GLENN W. HAWKES

AMERICAN EDUCATORS almost universally assume that instruction in the social studies should prepare young people to resolve the personal and public problems of democracy, but this mission has been hard to fulfill in an era of unprecedented technological change and psychological stress. We are told ad nauseam that we live in an age of anomie, anxiety, and alienation; that we are “hollow men” without direction, living in a moral vacuum; that we seek “escape from freedom” rather than solutions to its tensions. Serious students agree overwhelmingly that discontinuity and disorientation are prime characteristics of the day. Cultural confidence and social security have been destroyed during a half-century of total war and revolution. Erik Erikson has persuaded most of us that the problem of identity—the question of “who am I?” in relation to the past, present, and future—is an overriding concern. Identity is “diffused” and in “crisis” throughout a world fraught with extraordinary tension.

Given all this world-pain, what can educators concerned with the social studies do to encourage understanding and constructive action? Many believe that they have the answer to this question. Instructors, it is argued, are no longer justified in teaching young people “what to think”. Instead, the classroom exercise should concentrate on “how to think”. Teachers of the social studies should deal with the “structures” and the “processes” of the several disciplines included among the social studies as against substantive information and interpretation. Equipped with what one might call “the idea of the discipline”, students can manipulate appropriate data upon demand in order to solve problems. This outlook characterizes the most influential exponents of new departures in history teaching, formerly thought of as the linchpin of the social Studies. The critics of the history curriculum are legion. They maintain that “the past is no longer an effective ‘tool’ for dealing with the present and the future”. The past is irrelevant. Why should the schools encourage, for example, the study of George Washington or Benjamin Franklin, representatives of an eighteenth-century world that bears little or no resemblance to the twentieth century? Washington and Franklin are not relevant. Neither is history as narrative or story. C. Vann Woodward some time ago called upon historians to resume their traditional roles as storytellers, but the plea has had little influence in the schools. Clio as narrator has been sent to the corner as punishment for alleged irrelevance.

This preoccupation with structure and process rather than substantive knowledge, now generally known as “the new social studies”, is in some respects a sophisticated and valuable response to the challenge of contemporary complexity and change. Accepting the general advice of Jerome Bruner, whose ideas have affected all areas of education, many social studies teachers employ a new language in which terms such as “organizing concept” occur frequently. Educational publications bulge with glad tidings of the “new social studies”, and curriculum projects multiply at rabbit-rate.

Exponents of the new social studies treat history simply as one among the social studies rather than as the core subject. They hold that history, like economics or sociology, has its special methodology, and also a particular intellectual structure that is in the mind of the beholder. The teacher of the “new history” concerns himself principally with the way historians think and work, at least as these are deemed susceptible of analysis and communicable [Page 7]

[Page 8] to the student. The student learns how to derive the educational values inherent in history by concentrating on the way historians approach a given historical subject. If the “new history” succeeds, the student learns how to explore and manipulate the past that concerns him, utilizing disciplinary tools acquired in the classroom. When in school the student need not concentrate on “what happened” because his grasp of methodology allows him to produce needed information out of the past on demand.

The reasons for the appeal of this approach are not difficult to discover. We live in an era of unexampled disruption and violence. The age breeds unexampled institutional and psychological dislocation. One response to the discomfort of dislocation is to seek out acceptable means of reestablishing control over the environment, to regain a credible means of ordering existence. Those fortunate enough to escape the most terrifying outcomes of change in our time, that is, we who still have life, seek new foundations for a satisfying existence. The “new social studies” is one aspect of the search for new means of ordering existence to replace the discredited forms of the past.

Certainly mankind has experienced structurelessness and fragmentation before. This is why it has so often been preoccupied with the “fall” and with “atonement” (at-one-ment). Even Americans have weathered somewhat comparable moments of crisis in the past. Yet, is there a unique aspect of the present season of discontent? We believe so. For the first time in our national existence, we Americans no longer define ourselves as creatures of and in history. The road signs of history suddenly lose utility as indicators of where one is and where one goes. If this outcome is now quite apparent, it was many years in the making. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was extraordinarily appealing to the first rebels of the post-World War II era. It depicted confused spirits who nevertheless retained vague historical goals.

. . . whee. Sal, we gotta go an never stop going till we get there.

Where we going, man?

I don’t know but we gotta go.

In a more advanced situation, the characters in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) also plunge onward, reflecting great confusion about goals. “I tell ya, Hap. I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know —what I’m supposed to want.” (Act I.) Biff and Happy realized that they should ask something of the future, but they knew not what.

By the late 1960’s the tension inherent in the work of the early Kerouac and Miller had dissipated. Young people no longer concerned themselves with what one might call traditional historical goals, goals defined by absorption in the American tradition. Unlike the earlier postwar spirits, the young do not seem to worry about the loss of those goals. In the place of historical goals, the young see themselves as members of a “now” generation. Yesterdays and tomorrows mean little. The principal concern is with the immediate present. Young people lack historical orientation; America is near the end of a process of losing its history.

What is lost is not simply an historical overview; more important is the loss of means of orienting oneself securely in space and time by reference to a definite set of goals. Today many young people appear to see themselves merely in what might be called “simple location”. That is, they live without a sense of past and future—suspended in an indefinite present. Our “instant” lives symbolize the pervasiveness of “simple location”. We rely upon anything from “instant coffee” to “instant credit”. This dependence upon simple location is in great part a result of modern communications and information. These modes have the effect of extending our nervous system and, as described by Marshall McLuhan, facilitating a realistic concept of “one mankind”. But if simple location insures a sound grasp on horizontal [Page 9] (or spatial) reality, it tends to vitiate our grasp of vertical (or temporal) reality. In order to make rational and humane decisions about a desirable future, mankind must take both space and time into consideration. We live in a space-time continuum, no matter how much we might prefer a “now” generation. What we miss in today’s culture and society is a sense of historical wholeness, a sense of oneness reaching not only horizontally through space (the “global village”) but also vertically into time—into the past and future.

The trouble with the “new history”, admirable as it might be in many respects, is that it is an example of the pervasive embrace of “simple location”. It purports to produce “now” history, a contradiction in terms. The “new history” is an educational analogue, if you will, of the “instant” culture, a pedagogical attempt to produce a comfortable substitute for historical consciousness and understanding. As such it is tremendously appealing, but it is an impossible dream.

II

NON-HISTORICAL THOUGHT construes events as functions of eternal or repetitive essences, rather than as unique happenings. The wheel of the universe presumably determines what happens. There is nothing new under the sun. Such thinking clearly derived from subjection to the cyclical-seasonal patterns of the primary or natural environment. When men were necessarily bound to the cycle of the seasons, they had no reason to concern themselves with the fact that their thought did not penetrate beyond their own times and places. In fact, it was psychologically important not to inquire extensively either into the past or the future. Mather Nature was sometimes barren, but it was essential to sustain faith in the eternal return of her fertility. Various modes of prehistorical thought—in particular animism, mythology, and religion—sufficiently explained the beginnings, middles, and ends of experiences within the space-time continuum. To think historically is to order selected events into unique sequences in a particular space-time continuum, providing both descriptive and causal insight into what has occurred between two points across spacetime. Historical thought as we know it was of limited utility before the onset of “modernity”. “Modernity” is a function of scientific thought and technological innovation. It is what results when mankind gains the ability to derive from the natural environment a secondary environment of his own making which frees him from the cycle of the seasons. Industrialization and urbanization made a world in which historical thought became relevant.

No doubt exists about what kind of thought is needed to insure survival and prosperity in “modern” times. Our banking and investment systems, for example, necessitate a grasp of reality that extends far beyond the rhythm of nature. The experience of a given industry and its prospects for the future govern decisions about investment in its stock issues. And again, the existence of the Bomb, poised deep within the ground or under the sea, is a terrifying reminder of the kinds of temporal investment required of us if we are to exercise any desirable control over future events. In order to banish massive and unmanageable violence from the planet, mankind must envisage control of human behavior as a desirable and practical goal. We do not assume that such control will derive automatically from the cycle of the seasons or from the eternal return of some spiritual essence “out there”. After the advent of historical time, man for the first time confronted the unknown, the element of that-which-is-not, the undetermined future for which, presumably, he had some responsibility. The fact of the unknown conferred freedom, but also responsibility, upon humanity.

Those scientific and technological advances which freed man from the cycle of the seasons greatly broadened the potential variety and quality of life, but those advances proved valuable only when we learned to make broader and finer distinctions between various phenomena present to the senses in the space-time [Page 10] continuum. As a homely example, let us consider the Third Little Pig. (No greater capitalist ever lived.) The Third Little Pig’s advantage over the First and Second Little Pigs was not his technological ability. It was his capacity to imagine what might happen at some future date if certain things were not taken care of in the present. He built his house of material that would withstand the future onslaught of his enemy, the wolf. Or consider the rise of socialism. It was advanced as an alternative to capitalism because of the changed conditions in the nineteenth century, when many thinkers began to believe that collective and cooperative solutions to human problems were more advantageous than the individualistic and competitive practices of the going political economy. Socialism, like capitalism before, was a doctrine derived from considering what might happen in the future if alterations in practice did not occur in the present.

It is difficult to imagine the consequences of repudiating historical thought, and yet in our own time we note a vast rejection of it among young people. Why are they so profoundly ahistorical—even anti-historical—in outlook? One aspect of this question is the final discrediting of the dominant historical inspiration of the American people, an inspiration summarized and sustained by that strange intellectual-emotional construct known as the American Dream.

III

THE OLD AMERICAN DREAM was an agglomeration of values and opinions, both realistic and fantastic, which attested to an historical faith that tomorrow (a manageable entity) would be different from and better than today. The Dream was narrative, storylike, permeated with a sense of the uniqueness of events and of the capacity for those in history to achieve creativity and transcendence. The Dreamers of this historical Dream became activists in time, agents in the business of making history. They were, above all, in love with their history—as it expressed itself to them in the guise of the Dream. The American Clio imbued her suitors with remarkable powers, powers that allowed them to shape their futures in the image of the Dream.

Today the Dream is gone, destroyed by the twentieth century. It had matured slowly in the rural setting of the earlier nineteenth century, building on the storied colonial past, at a time of relative international calm. The Dream perished in the twentieth-century whirl of change in which unprecedented urbanization, advanced industrialization, and searing international crises broke the long embrace of the American and his historical Dream. When love is gone, one eschews old flames. Burned badly in the fires of youthful passion, Americans no longer accept the confident historical promises of a McGuffey. Even the chastened faith of Abraham Lincoln, touched by somber shadows of the unknown and the tragic, lies beyond us now. In a time of troubles, we have not simply replaced one historical faith with another. We have begun to deny the mind its historical dimension. Because we have rejected a superannuated idea of natural and even certain progress, we are falling out of love with history itself.

Pervasive national myths of chosenness and mission are in complete disrepute. The Dream assumed that Americans had been placed in this new world specifically to build a western paradise. Two world wars and more recent military interludes in Korea and Vietnam have helped establish a fear of total annihilation that has undermined the old faith. This faith once had more than a touch of invulnerability about it. After the Crash of ’29, where were the “rugged individuals” of hallowed memory? After the mushroom cloud at Hiroshima, who were the “chosen [Page 11] ones”? In this context, what happened to that Third Little Pig, that Ben Franklin-like exponent of thinking ahead?

A truly thoroughgoing reaction has taken place against yesterday’s simple, even innocent, story of the meaning of America and of Americans in history. Young Americans now find Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby incomprehensible. Jay dreamed a meretricious version of the American Dream and was destroyed by it. Today young people cannot imagine a fate like that of Jay because they have never made Jay’s investment in historical faith. If one refuses to go “on the road” in at least a psychological sense, there is no opportunity to get lost. Captain Ahab is just as incomprehensible nowadays as Jay Gatsby. Melville’s hero was certainly a pessimist, and therefore attractive, but he was undeniably historical. Above all else he was a prophet of the future. Never “out of love with history”, he embraced, however tearfully, the terrible imagination of disaster with which he lived. Left to us is Ishmael, the survivor. After the tragedy of Captain Ahab, after one history had come to an end, Ishmael remains all too silent. Disillusioned, he might never voyage again. Young people today often express the malaise of Ishmael. “I’m 22 years old,” one laments, “and I’m tired. America has worn me out. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe that America is the golden center of the universe.” He ends with what, in its implications, is a profoundly moving insight. “You can get away with not believing in one of these, but not both.” This youth can discern no place for himself in space and time, by means either of traditional religious or historical imagination. Unlike others of his generation, he derives no comfort from “simple location”. Because of him, and many like him. we must risk a new love affair, embracing history once again. Obviously, the old Dream is beyond us. We must find an acceptable alternative to it.

IV

WE CANNOT reembrace the old Dream, which is no longer sufficient unto the day, if it ever was. We propose as an alternative the concept of prophetic history. Such a history delineates in narrative form a particular process in space-time that allows us to prophesy realistically the shape of the future. That is, prophetic history is a narrative account of the past changing that helps us to define both the possible and desirable in the future. With this kind of historical insight, we might then make decisions appropriate to the building of tomorrows worth having. In a word, prophetic history confers upon us some capacity to shape our futures as we would like them to happen. We human beings think and act most effectively when we take into consideration both our past and our future—that is, when we view ourselves historically.

We hasten to distinguish between prophetic history and predictive history. The former gives us a glimpse not of what will happen tomorrow but rather a vision of what might be encouraged to happen tomorrow if we choose wisely today from among various options open to us. Prophecy is contingent; prediction is immutable. There are, of course, some limits upon our freedom of action. We have no real alternative to the choice of a future that takes for granted the existence of the “global village”. One world is a reality. We either live together or we die together. Prophecy is an affirmative act concerning the potential of the future. As such, prophecy enters into the future and can become the future itself. Prophetic history is voluntarist, open, malleable, and therefore hopeful and attractive. All too often, the “new history” to which we referred earlier derives from unconscious assumptions about prediction that make the future seem determined, closed, unresponsive, and therefore hopeless and unattractive.

Above all else, prophetic history engages the individual—that is, it puts individuals into history. The “new history” has a strong tendency to take the individual out of history. If prophetic history is by nature a construct, it is also an encounter—an historical happening in its own right. Prophetic history presumes an organic relation between the historian [Page 12] and a narrative cluster of historical information. That information is both chosen for him (in that certain events actually took place) and within his choosing (in that he has the power to select certain events out of a large mass of data for a particular purpose). We do not suggest simply that the individual define himself in relation to the past. We suggest that he ought to enter into history itself, even if the connection with history is profoundly subjective in some respects.

The capacity to view oneself and the world “objectively” is often productive of great and good things, but the virtues of objectivity can sometimes become vices. One suspects that J. Alfred Prufrock was able to draw upon a body of knowledge like that collection of “tools” made available by the latest research in the social sciences. Nevertheless, T. S. Eliot’s subject had no faith in either past or future, living as he did in “simple location”. He was “out of love with history”. The encounter inherent in prophetic history encompasses the individual in history and confers upon him the capacity of sensing his identity in the transience of his existence.

We perversely separate ourselves from history. For example, in most class room situations history teachers assume an “I” observing an “it”, a creature who stands apart from space and time and looks at something called history. Historical data are presented as pieces of “it”, and students are asked to manipulate data in various ways, all too often ways that confuse or bore them. We become captives of language, using phrases such as “I study history” or “the teaching of history” which makes us spectators in time rather than agents. Students easily absorb this attitude. Ask them what they do at school and they often reply that they “take history”. The difficulty with a history conceived of in this way is like the difficulty with religion in America according to Paul Tillich. He once noted that in this country religion was for all the world something that took place on Sunday and could be read about in Time between “business” and “economics”.

The “new history” takes into account the insight of historians such as Becker and Beard about “frame of reference” and the function of “everyman as his own historian” in relation to the past, but the “new history” of today might easily become sterile because it denies its students that sense of involvement and drama in time passing which imparts to us both the glory and the tragedy of existence. Beard and Becker realized the way that the future is woven inextricably into one’s view of the past, as well as the way that one chooses a future as a result of choosing a particular past. The “new history” often precludes such realizations. The model for the “new history” is often deterministic in nature. It assumes a predictive capacity which derives from its unduly scientific basis, a predictive capacity that tends to erode a sense of agency in history. If we now embrace deterministic theories of history, we fall victims to a modern version of the Antinomian heresy.

The hidden assumption in the “new history” is that it is possible for individuals to function effectively without a sense of a unique and important place in the unfolding pattern of the space-time continuum—without a sense of one’s personal role in history. What is missing is an idea of “I” in its relation to “will be”. This sense is also lacking in contemporary political and social phenomena like Hippydom, the New Left, and the Far Right. The concealed deterministic and predictive elements in all the new social studies might well reinforce contemporary assumptions about the inevitability of powerlessness and drift, depriving us of the will to solve problems.

Up to this point we have not really defined or described prophetic history as such. We have simply argued that prophetic history forces an encounter between the individual and time passing; that the encounter is itself an historical event in which individuals enter into history; and that in the experience of prophetic history the individual encounters a series of indications or “signs” that call for action in respect to the future. This argument [Page 13] the authors derive from their personal and even subjective responses to historical “signs” that have influenced their behavior, even including the composition of this article. Aside from our vision of “one mankind”, the sign that seems most important to us is derived from our encounter with the tragic unfolding of American history in this century. That sign is the ironic idea that American history has come to an end.

We now proceed to an example of what we mean by the term “prophetic history”. On first inspection “the end of American history” seems an absurd concept. But if we consider this idea in relation to certain specific signs around us, it takes on increasing plausibility. These signs are clustered in the concept of a “Twentieth Century War”. We explore this concept below in connection with an example of prophetic history. We actually indulge in prophecy, in the manner of the prophets of old. Before doing so however, we wish it understood that the truth or falsity of the prophecy we intend to make is not simply an outcome of reading the signs correctly or incorrectly. Our prophecy could prove false not only because we misread the evidence, but because those who hear our prophecy fail to join in affirming its validity. We embrace prophecy and eschew prediction precisely because the latter enterprise deprives us of power. We desire, like prophets in other times and places, to act on history rather than merely to act history out. The prophetic historian asks of his audience more than mutual exploration of the past changing. He asks for participation in that process as it extends into the future.

V

BY 1914 or so the United States had become a relatively “satiate” power, satisfied in the sense that it interested itself thereafter in the development and exploitation of the national bounty it had acquired during the nineteenth century rather than in further geographic expansion. For this reason the United States tended to accept and support the going international order—an order within which it had achieved the capability and status of a great power. In other words, the United States was generally a defender of the international status quo.

But the United States was not simply a sated power; it possessed a definitely “progressive” political and ideological tradition. An important aspect of that tradition was the theory that everyone could and ought to benefit from the course of history, including, of course, other nations besides the homeland. Americans were capable of taking into consideration the interests and aspirations of others besides themselves. The consequence was a predisposition in world politics toward behavior which encouraged general improvement in the material and moral condition of all mankind as well as that of the homeland, always assuming that progress of this nature took place within the established order of things.

During the twentieth century, then, the United States was a satiate-progressive nation, inclined to the preservation of the going international order but receptive to peaceful projects for general improvement within the community of nation-states. This national condition constantly influenced the responses of the Republic to the course of international politics during the last half-century.

As it turned out, that half-century was not to be a placid epoch. In 1914 the world launched upon a season of plenary violence —a degree of violence seldom encountered in the annals of the race. There began in that year a great international conflict which worked itself out in two extraordinarily violent phases. We call that struggle the Twentieth [Page 14] Century War. It was in effect an international civil war within the Western world, if that geographic entity, the West, is considered as a quasi-political unit, but it was sufficiently explosive to spill over into the non-Western world. Therefore, it had momentous consequences indeed for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Twentieth Century War worked itself out in five distinct phases. Its preliminaries reached back into the nineteenth century. The first violent phase, known to us as World War I, lasted from 1914 to 1918. Then there ensued a long armistice from 1919 to 1939. The second violent phase of the conflict, usually called World War II, occurred from 1939 to 1945. Since its end, we have been involved in its dangerous aftermath, a phenomenon we call the Cold War. As a consequence of the Twentieth Century War, two novel modes of warfare came to the fore—socia1 revolutionary warfare and also anticolonial warfare, which have joined in Vietnam. Too often we fail to recognize the profound interrelatedness of various forms of organized violence in our times. The concept of the Twentieth Century War is an attempt to call this reality to mind.

The end of American History was to be acted out on an international stage. At the turn of the century, America was a satiate-progressive power, generally committed to the maintenance of international stability but receptive to international reforms in order to create a context within which all peoples might hope for gradual but real gains within the existing order of things. However, the United States made a fatal mistake. Failing to read correctly (the “signs” of) the global scale of proliferating international violence, and therefore failing to draw upon its progressive heritage sufficiently in the early stages of that conflict, the United States helped seal the fate of nationalism—indeed, of its own nationalism—in this century. This great power sought to cope summarily with plenary warfare and revolution, but its action proved “too little and too late”. It failed to preserve itself.

Once the Great War of 1914-1918 (the first violent phase) began, the United States was slowly but surely drawn into the conflict despite every desire to avoid it. The history of American neutrality from 1914 to 1917 was a logical culmination of trends in being long before 1914. It was not true neutrality. An Anglo-American understanding with roots in the distant past culminated in co-belligerence in 1917. The history of neutrality is one of the most significant histories in the record of our past in the twentieth century, because during this time President Woodrow Wilson worked out a truly remarkable formula for the conduct of national policy in world politics—a formula that has been maintained despite manifold backsliding and modification from that time —before our actual entry into World War I. Wilson’s formula reflected America’s satiate-progressive tradition. On the one hand, the American President proposed to re-establish international stability by a territorial settlement he came to call “peace without victory”. This concept reflected American interest in the preservation of the status quo. On the other hand, Wilson hoped to insure stable world politics and also to sponsor general international progress by advancing his project for a league of nations. Here was a stirring break with the isolationist past, and one that was consistent with the deeply progressive nature of American ideology. Wilson sought desperately from 1915 to 1917 to impose a peace settlement on the European belligerents along these lines by establishing himself as a mediator. He failed because neither side in the European conflict was willing to accept a settlement short of decisive victory as long as each remained confident of ultimate military success. Wilson went to war in 1917 not because he wanted war but because he saw no other way of bringing about a world settlement consistent with his grand design—a re-established balance to be maintained by collective security. Wilson was above all a convinced nationalist. His object was not to extinguish nationality but rather to pacify the nation-state system [Page 15] by international devices so that it might continue to function without breakdowns comparable to World War I.

After the victory of 1918 Wilson went to Europe to complete his audacious project. At Paris he made a peace that, while imperfect, roughly approximated his objective. The tragedy was that his own countrymen killed his dream. We have no way of knowing whether the Wilsonian formula for international peace and progress would have worked after World War I, simply because it was never tried. Wilson was a prophet without honor in his own country. The peace settlement depended upon American participation, but the Senate refused consent to the Treaty of Versailles. Almost every major historical trend of later years stemmed directly from the failure of Wilson to achieve his objective. Wilson was a sound prophet. Who now would deny that the world would have been a different—and probably a better—place, had his dream been made flesh?

The refusal of the United States to participate responsibly in the process of postwar reconstruction was certainly a capital reason for the trials of the long armistice from 1919 to 1939. The war had unsettled the national economy. The brief recovery of the twenties was built on sand; the Great Depression of the thirties revealed the consequences of failure to unite effectively for reconstruction in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Depression let loose the cruel winds of totalitarianism at both ends of the Eurasian land mass. The rise of Hitler threatened the liberties of Europe for a second time in the century. Crisis in the western world encouraged Japan to pursue a policy of naked national aggrandizement in eastern Eurasia. If the United States looked on unconcernedly during the twenties, it was too preoccupied with domestic troubles during the thirties to assert its power effectively against the regnant dictators of Europe and Asia.

The outcome was a second violent phase in the Twentieth Century War, the conflict we call World War II, which took place from 1939 to 1945. Once again the United States found itself drawn into general warfare, this time at both ends of Eurasia. The wartime diplomacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrought a revival of American dedication to the principles of Woodrow Wilson. Like his predecessor, Roosevelt sought a peace settlement based on re-established [Page 16] international stability and an international collective security arrangement to keep the peace and foster real international progress. Like Wilson, Roosevelt pursued policies consistent with the satiate-progressive condition of the Republic. He too sought not to undermine but to purify the nation-state system.

Unfortunately, the world in 1945 was much different from that of 1919. That which might have worked a generation earlier was patently less applicable at the end of World War II. What were the consequences of that struggle? Two great superpowers loomed above all other nations; their rivals had been consumed in the fires of a calamity unparalleled in history. Power vacuums existed at either end of Eurasia where the war had been fought. Also, the old colonial world was now free to recapture its long-lost political sovereignty. These circumstances insured continuing instability. In such a context the Wilsonian formula was inappropriate. The principal world-historical trends of the post-World War II era stemmed directly from the problems posed by the power vacuum in eastern and western Eurasia and the emergence of an autonomous Third World.

The power vacuums in Eurasia gave birth to a short-run phenomenon supremely dangerous to peace, the Cold War; but that controversy was of controllable proportions. The United States and the Soviet Union came into protracted conflict as each sought to control the course of events in western Europe and eastern Asia—seeking settlements in line with their conflicting conceptions of national interest.

What ultimately prevented hot warfare? Perhaps the most important peacekeeping influence was the existence of nuclear power. Neither superpower could contemplate the use of nuclear weapons short of the ultimate emergency. In any case, twenty-odd years after World War II both the Russians and the Americans found themselves on the defensive in Europe and Asia. In Europe, the spheres of influence each had established, divided by the Iron Curtain, gradually reasserted some independence. In Asia, both powers encountered an unexpected opponent, the Chinese People’s Republic of Mao Tse-tung. Mao became the most important exponent of social revolutionary doctrine during the aftermath of the Twentieth Century War. The decline of revolutionary fervor in the U.S.S.R. combined with the growing apprehensions of the future in the United States to form a basis for Soviet-American rapprochment. Nothing makes friends of former enemies like common dangers. Ideological emotion sustained the Cold War long beyond its useful life, but it was close to its end in 1964. Once the power vacuums left in the wake of World War II had been refilled, the raison d’être of the Russo-American conflict had been eliminated.

But as is so often the case, it was a matter of moving from the frying pan into the fire. The prophetic historian, looking beyond the Cold War, could discern the shape of a much more imposing confrontation. Ever since 1950, most of the great international crises had turned not on European contentions but on conflicts rising within the Third World. These conflicts were functions of radical nationalist social revolutions. Difficulties in the Congo, Cuba, Korea, Algeria, and finally Vietnam attracted attention to the great gap separating the relatively affluent West from the poverty-stricken ex-colonial world.

The policies of successive American administrations since 1943 reflected the superannuated Wilsonian formula, a special version of the American Dream that once was worth dreaming but which was slowly turning into a nightmare as those conditions which gave it birth and relevance drifted into the limbo of the past. What had once been policies for a just and lasting peace were now all too likely to bring on catastrophic warfare. The course of the Twentieth Century War changed everything. The Dream has faded completely. For the first time in our history we are truly lost. Where are we? Indeed, who are we? And better still, where are we going?

[Page 17] We are now well into a post-national world. Nationalism has not ceased to exist, but it no longer contributes to survival itself. The time-honored national idea, so productive for centuries of human progress, has passed beyond its last stage of utility. As a matter of self-respect, nationalism should affirm its own death. Two great camps are potential enemies. If they should come to warfare, there would be no future worth having. The time has come for political innovation beyond the nation-state. American history has ended. The purification expounded by Wilson and Roosevelt is no longer appropriate. The supranational idea must now be adopted.

How could the world begin to accomplish this end? The great powers of the Westen world—Russia and America—must resolve their differences and unite the advanced nations for two great tasks. One is to achieve arms control leading to general disarmament. The other is to organize the resources of the world for the incredibly difficult but profoundly humane elimination of the economic gap separating the rich nations from the poor. Only action of this magnitude is likely to prevent an apocalypse. The methods necessary to achieve disarmament and to develop the economy of the Third World would begin the development of a system of world politics beyond the nation-state. Both efforts would require supranational agencies to which nation-states would have to surrender significant attributes of sovereignty.

Radical departures are called for; the future itself is in jeopardy. The world does not vary in size, but its weapons of warfare multiply in power by some ghastly geometrical progression, well beyond the capacity to destroy life on this planet. We prophesy an end to nationalism. To do otherwise is to surrender our chance for existence in any form worth having.

VI

SO MUCH, then, for our illustration of prophetic history. To claim a future worth having, we must excise what is dead within ourselves. We cannot ignore the irony and the tragedy of our existence, that “end of days” that is always with us, but we prefer to emphasize man’s ability to overcome and thereby to affirm. This aspiration to affirmation is “subjective”, but we deem it essential to the well-being of the race. We could easily prophesy the final destruction of mankind. Certainly there are many “signs” that point to that possibility, but who wants upon his hands the blood of future generations? We could also simply ignore all signs and portents, allowing the future to materialize as it would, but this posture delegates decisions about the future to others with no greater claims to the responsibility than our own.

Some historians have been expounding prophetic history, although they have not defined their work exactly in these terms. Unfortunately, they have had little impact on the precollege curriculum. What has happened to history in the schools as well as to other aspects of the social studies curriculum is what prompts our analysis and prescription. We simply do not believe that we can arm ourselves against the worst of all possible futures merely by learning to “discover” the “how” of the historical processes that have brought us to our present pass. We must make substantive decisions now in terms both of past processes and future aspirations in order to shape the future as history. Only by the technique of history as prophecy do we acquire the gift of planning both rationally and humanely for a desirable future. We realize that the debilitating “I-it” distinction described earlier is deeply rooted in the culture, a configuration of which formal education is only one part, but we hope in some small way to reverse the nonhistorical and nonprophetic climate that pervades the new social studies.

The study of history is not just another component of the curriculum; it is of vital importance—in our epoch the most important of all studies. History today performs the essential function of locating and identifying individuals in the space-time continuum. It confers meaning upon existence by [Page 18] ordering it—as we are born, we linger, and we die. Given the brutal and inescapable fact of death, who among us can hope to live fully and freely without the solace and stimulus of identity in time? Myth and religion used to rationalize the future as well as the past. Today that task is left to history. Other studies contribute to the search for meaning, but none compares in this respect with historical study, because history is about time passing, and time passing is the most elemental of all the realities with which we must come to terms. This quality of history is why any part of the changing past is relevant to human needs and aspirations.

Even as we make this claim we recognize the mounting pressure to escape from history. The seduction of soothing but oversimplified misrepresentation is always with us. Political extremists on both the far right and the far left constantly seek to misrepresent history and therefore to destroy its usefulness. In addition there are those who would merely resurrect the past, depriving the present of its own future and therefore of its own history.

In these latter days not many people take seriously the idea of prophecy. At most it arouses bemused recollections of Jeremiah or Amos—vague Old Testament memories. We call Martin Luther King, Jr., a prophet in our time, but we do so merely because it was his wish, not because we understand the way of the prophet. We who have fallen out of love with history live uncertain and empty lives. Nevertheless, we remain a Chosen People; to go on we must risk another love. Let us, then, draw out the prophetic possibilities that reside within us, and let us communicate those possibilities to our students. In so doing we choose freedom. We ought seriously to reconsider our present commitment through the “new social studies” to an unconscious deterministic model that deprives us of a role in shaping the future. The time for a new departure in social studies instruction has come, and we propose prophetic history as the shape of that departure.

[Page 19]

Notes from No-Man’s-Land

Observations on Interracial Adoption

By JOHN F. DUMBRILL

INTERRACIAL ADOPTION is a unique experience. All the articles on racial problems do not prepare the adoptive parent to know what to expect. My wife and I have found that our adoptions have been valuable teachers and hope to pass on some of our experiences and the insights that have resulted from them to other parents considering this type of adoption or curious about it.

Since our children are interracial, this article is written from a position that is little heard from amidst all the racial controversy that one finds today. It is an unusual experience to have one’s children standing on both sides of the racial line, and, I believe, one that helps strip away the preconceived ideas of race we have acquired and which may burden us unawares all of our lives.

First, I should say that our children turned out to be just human beings to us, their parents, and we think of them as individuals, not as black or white or as pawns in a social struggle over human rights. They are children who needed a home and had a poor chance of ever getting one in this environment. It should be mentioned that there is no problem in accepting or loving such children as your own. In our experience, the children were not yet carried into the house before all the parental instincts appeared, from tenderness to the fury of parental wrath should any threat to them arise. It would be pleasant to digress and write of kissing cut fingers and tucking-in at night and all the joys common to parents wherever or whoever they might be. Fortunately these things may be understood between us in silence, and we can remember that they are always there as we consider the more unusual circumstances that have arisen and the insights we have obtained through them.

The parent of interracial children slowly becomes interracial in attitude due to the strength of his attachment to his children. With most of us the image of blackness or whiteness has deeply imbedded itself into our self-concept and biased us in innumerable ways of which we may not be aware. The most well-meaning individual cannot trust himself to be without bias in a society that bombards him constantly with racism in many subtle forms. With an interracial family, one is forced to see the several viewpoints all at once, which is remarkably effective in stripping away preconceived ideas.

From the desire to protect the children came our first real notion of the depth of emotion that lurks beneath the surface of the human rights question today. A realization of overwhelming force burst upon us that our otherwise good white friends who either practiced discrimination against blacks or who went along with it were condemning my daughter to an inferior life. They might, for example, cause her to live in the environment of the ghetto. She might have to settle for an indifferent education, might find no work except scrubbing someone’s floor, might find herself married to a black husband who could find [Page 20] no employment, might live her days in disillusionment and despair. Suddenly the discrimination that I had always opposed took on a new dimension, and it became clear that white Americans are not guilty of just being slow to change outdated customs but of a crime of horrible proportions against humanity. How, I wondered, has it happened that black parents have been able to restrain themselves from killing in revenge these smug, complacent, and comfortable “good white citizens” who have caused and allowed the cycle of poverty, ignorance, despair, and crime to entrap their beloved children? When one changes his relative position, the view is different. Before, I had wondered how violence would be possible despite the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., and now, for a time, I found myself wondering how blacks found the strength not to resort to it more than they did.

Most of our fears about overt discrimination have proved unfounded up to now. A few minor events have occurred, just enough to keep one on edge for fear that something else might happen. White people may not realize that the black person does not move without some uneasiness in the public places considered by whites as safe territory. There is always the possibility of an incident, and the sense of justice of the police and other officials may not be working even if someone else clearly caused the trouble. There is good reason why those belonging to minority groups behave in an inconspicuous manner in white areas and why they hope to establish businesses run by their own kind. When one is vulnerable to possible discrimination at any time, he lives within a shadow of anxiety that does not lift except when he is on safe territory.

In our case, in order to give our daughter a group to belong to, we decided to adopt other interracial children so that the family would be as complete a unit as possible so that any outside rejection would be minimized. It should be mentioned that some black and some white people attempt to compensate for the public at large by being extra nice to the children and adoptive parents. It is a good thing they do, as the shock of finding that there are actually people who hate automatically over so small a thing as a baby’s complexion can be a blow, particularly to white parents.

As time has gone by, we have noticed that people tend to try to classify our children as either black or white, even though they are obviously racial mixtures. In other words, people go out of their way to put each child in a recognized racial group. The natural thing to do, were we not indoctrinated with racist attitudes would be not to classify such children in regard to race at all. It takes a forced effort to put them on one side of the imaginary racial line or the other; yet this is what people typically do.

An indication of how far the polarization of the races has gone in this nation is the fact that the millions of interracial human beings in our society are forced by the “blacks” and the “whites” to choose sides, joining one team or the other against an enemy created of a similar heritage, often to a very large degree. Our culture teaches us that it is slightly shameful to be interracial even though that is what most of us are. One of my children who is half Negro and half Japanese finds herself a “black”. Why? One who is a quarter Polynesian and a quarter Chinese finds herself just on the “white” side of the line. Another, who has a light skin and probably some Negro ancestors finds herself on the “black” side because she has kinky hair. Black Nationalists, totally oblivious to the obvious fact that black is not brown, insist that she is a black and must like collard greens. Equally blind whites seem ready, if they must, to marry off their son to the one just over the white side of the line. Nobody quite knows where to put our American Indian boy, who is also a mixture—he is one-eighth French—though he does not appear to be. My wife and I, who both are mixtures of various European stocks, are [Page 21] looked upon with some suspicion by both sides. The blacks would like to accept us for the sake of the children, but, after all, we have undeniably white skins. The whites recognize the light skins but doubt we can be trusted with those children about. The result is that we have made a home in no-man’s-land, as far as society is concerned. Perhaps to escape the tyranny of both the white and the black concepts, no-man’s-land is the only honorable place to be. Certainly I prefer to be just human instead of fighting in the trenches on either side against people who are also my brothers.

It has become apparent to us that there is today a need for an organization of interracial people in America, one that will give individuals a third choice, so that they no longer must split themselves and choose between the parts. They should have pride in being the mixture they are. Such an organization would have a great future if it could raise a third voice, a voice of reason among the races, and make itself heard. Such a group could bring people of various mixtures together and allow friendships to form. Well-meaning whites and blacks now tend to be excluded from the civil rights movement. They are looking for an organization that will allow them to serve the best interests of everyone’s human rights. Communications among the racial groups are now becoming ever more difficult, and ways should be found to keep them open. Society should realize it cannot be healthy until it recognizes that the black and white extremes are loud but insignificant when compared to the millions of people of mixed backgrounds existing at the central core of this nation and the world at large. It is only this racially-mixed center rising up in pride and taking its place which can destroy the racial Stereotypes and myths. An interesting thought, to me, would be the size of black history or white history compared to the as yet unwritten volume of interracial history. How much would be left to the racial purists?

The organization previously visualized was not spoken of in connection with the [Page 22] Bahá’í Faith, but it is possible that Bahá’í communities in the future may have a similar function. The adoptive parent must not advertise his interracial family, but as an agent of social change he cannot go unnoticed. The human parent-to-child relationship is the all-important reason for adopting, but one must be aware that there are social factors and take them into consideration. As Bahá’ís, we need to demonstrate the actual growth of a new community, one capable of raising up a people with new attitudes, uncontaminated by the illnesses of society around us, who can perhaps be healthy in a way that we can never be. A good way to demonstrate the oneness of humanity is to have an example of it in miniature as one’s own family. Though there will be instances of unpleasantness in one’s life, they will be far outweighed by the value of the experiences one will gain. The Bahá’í civilization stands for the most part still unseen over the horizon. We do not, it seems to me, have at this time so much is a glimmering of what it may become if we strive to make our ideals as much of a practical reality as possible. To put our faith in these ideals and to live accordingly is the type of action which the Bahá’í Faith holds to be a form of prayer.

I would urge Bahá’í parents who wish to adopt children to consider taking those of races other than their own. I would urge the same thing to non-Bahá’í parents also but to a lesser degree, as they have no home society totally approving of racial mixture behind them. For such adoptions it must be realized that obstacles will be raised by agencies that fear one may not be adopting out of love for the child but for the sake of a social crusade. There are also other legitimate reasons why one might be refused, and sometimes one may find outright prejudice standing in the way. However, if one perseveres one will eventually get the children he wants. Some of the advantages of this type of adoption are that one may have as big a family as desired, as varied as the rainbow, without adding to the world’s population problems one bit! They will be children who otherwise would not have been adopted, and as you, the adoptive parents, go through the daily work of taking care of them, teaching them, and loving them, you will realize that no matter how they turn out they are better off than had they been left in the orphanage. The duty and bounty of serving them, loving them, and attempting to guide them is a reward in itself and provides one with a rich variety of valuable experiences. The spiritual rewards will turn out to be far greater in the end than one had foreseen in the beginning.

[Page 23]

O my God!

O my God!

Unite the hearts

of Thy servants and

reveal to them Thy

great purpose. May

they follow Thy commandments

and abide in Thy

law. Help them, O God, in

their endeavor, and grant

them strength to serve

Thee. O God, leave them not

to themselves, but guide

their steps by the light

of Thy knowledge and

cheer their hearts by Thy

love. Verily, Thou art their

Helper and their Lord.

Bahá’u’lláh

[Page 24]

‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

Child of Light Amidst the Children of the Half Light

By ALLAN L. WARD

I

ON November 29, 1921, the remains of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá were laid to rest on the slopes of Mt. Carmel. The reaction of the people to His sudden physical absence reflected what His presence had meant to them.

At 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the casket of “plain white wood” covered with “a precious Persian shawl” began its journey up the slopes of Mt. Carmel. Bahá’ís, Christians, Muslims, and Jews thronged the way, “burning with their grief, shedding their tears, throwing themselves on his casket, giving their last kisses to it.”

At 10:25 a.m. the casket was placed on a bier near the Shrine of the Báb. A procession of speakers expressed the grief of the multitude there and beyond the horizons. A Muslim orator said, “Which one of his perfect deeds can I mention to you, when they are greater than can be mentioned and more than can be counted.” A Christian writer said, “He has trained, taught, assisted, rescued and guided the souls to the straight path.” A Jewish leader said, “. . . there are many in Europe and America and in all the world who thirst for his universal principles which are conducive to real brotherhood, who are weeping, too, for missing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.”

II

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ’S life flowed through a succession of nearly incredible incidents of opposites, reverses, and diversity. Yet He remains the gentle Friend, Who translated divinity into humanity in a touching and continuous stream of daily activities for more than three-quarters of a century.

His life was related to all the world. It was not aloof from the mud of the barnyard and the sweat of the street. His life was not an isolated monastery statue which could fall apart at the rough touch of the daily struggle for existence. His life was lived in the middle of that struggle. The money-grabbing, lying, cheating, hypocritical worlds of sneering wealth and screaming poverty, the glittering ballrooms and stench-filled morgues were His workshops. He asked none to go where He not only went, but lived, and survived, and triumphed. For none of the filth touched His spiritual core. No sword or gun or gold or currency seduced Him to depart a hair’s breadth from manifesting perfectly the attributes of love, justice, mercy, and truthfulness.

III

AS ‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ was born in 1844, two historic cycles touched. During His first nine years, the Báb’s teachings ignited Persia, and bands of heroes met their deaths. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s sister recalled that when she was a little girl, “we heard each day the cries of the mob as a new victim was tortured or executed, not knowing but that it might be my father [Bahá’u’lláh],” and that she “spent the long days in constant terror . . . afraid to unlock the door lest men should rush in and kill us.”

She also recalled the journey over frozen mountains into exile, when it was “bitterly cold,” and “we were all insufficiently clothed, [Page 25] and suffered keenly from exposure. My brother in particular was very thinly clad. Riding upon a horse, his feet, ankles, hands, and wrists were much exposed to the cold, which was so severe that they became frostbitten and swollen and caused him great pain.”

The next ten years—‘Abdu’l-Bahá's ninth to nineteenth years—were spent in Baghdad. There “He became his father’s [Bahá’u’lláh’s] closest companion” and as a teen-ager “under took the task of interviewing all the numerous visitors who came to see his father” and even “helped His father in answering the questions and solving the difficulties of these visitors.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá was the perfect student of the Perfect Teacher. His sister recalled:

During these years Abbas Effendi [‘Abdu’l-Bahá] was accustomed to frequent the mosques and argue with the doctors and learned men. They were astonished at his knowledge and acumen, and he came to be known as the youthful sage. They would ask him, “Who is your teacher—where do you learn the things which you say?” His reply was that his father had taught him. Although he had never been a day in school, he was as proficient in all that was taught as well-educated young men, which was the cause of much remark among those who knew him.

When He was nineteen, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, accompanying His Father Bahá’u’lláh, went into a second stage of exile in Constantinople, and then a third stage, in Adrianople, that lasted five years. When He was twenty-four years old, the family arrived in ‘Akká. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá later described the surroundings:

Imagine the conditions and surroundings when we were . . . imprisoned in the barracks of Akka; Bahá’u’lláh occupied one room; His family and several other families were forced to occupy one room. Aside from the severe illness that was raging, and the death of many among us prisoners—adults and children—on account of unsanitary surroundings and starvation, I noticed that my own presence in that crowded room was another source of torture to all of them. This was due to the fact that parents and children were suppressing and restraining themselves by trying to be quiet and polite in my presence. So in order to give them freedom, I accepted the morgue of the barracks, because that was the only room available, and I lived in it for about two years.

In ‘Akká, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was married. His wife recalled:

. . . I was the wife of my Beloved. How wonderful and noble He was in His beauty. I adored Him. I recognized His greatness, and thanked God for bringing me to Him.

It is impossible to put into words the delight of being with the Master; I seemed to be in a glorious realm of sacred happiness whilst in His company.

. . . in the youth of His beauty and manly vigour, with His unfailing love, His kindness, His cheerfulness, His sense of humour, His untiring consideration for everybody, He was marvellous, without equal, surely in all the earth!

O my Beloved husband and my Lord! How shall I speak of Him?

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‘Abdu’l-Bahá begot nine children, but five of them, including all of His sons, died in prison.

Service to Bahá’u’lláh and His followers and visitors was not ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s only activity. When He was thirty-one years old, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá penned the lines, “Praise and thanksgiving be unto Providence that out of all the realities in existence He was chosen the reality of man and has honored it with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in either world,” thus beginning His volume, The Secret of Divine Civilization. And with the words, “Touching the individual known as the Báb . . . diverse tales are on the tongues and in the mouths of man, and various accounts are contained in the pages of Persian history and the leaves of European chronicles.” He opened His account of the early history of the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths in A Traveller’s Narrative.

When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had been imprisoned in ‘Akká for twenty-two years and was forty-six years old, the English Orientalist E. G. Browne, who gave the world its only firsthand glimpse of Bahá’u’lláh through Western eyes, also wrote what is probably the first description of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá by a Westerner:

Seldom have I seen one whose appearance impressed me more. A tall strongly-built man holding himself straight as an arrow, with white turban and raiment, long black locks reaching almost to the shoulder, broad powerful forehead . . . eyes keen as a hawk’s, and strongly-marked but pleasing features—such was my first impression of ‘Abbas Effendi. . . . Subsequent conversation with him served only to heighten the respect with which his appearance had from the first inspired me. One more eloquent of speech, more ready of argument, more apt of illustration, more intimately acquainted with the sacred books of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muhammadans, could, I should think, scarcely be found. . . . These qualities, combined with a bearing at once majestic and genial, made me cease to wonder at the influence and esteem which he enjoyed even beyond the circle of his father’s followers. About the greatness of this man and his power no one who had seen him could entertain a doubt.

The next year, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was forty-seven, Bahá’u’lláh died. His will enjoined all to turn “unto the most great Branch”, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

By this time small tendrils of the Faith had begun to reach into the West. In 1898 the first group of Western pilgrims arrived in the Holy Land. One of them, May Maxwell, described their stay in ‘Akká:

During the three wonderful days and nights we spent in that sacred spot we heard naught but the mention of God; His Holy Name was on every tongue; His beauty and goodness were the theme of all conversation; His Glorious Cause the only aim of every life. Whenever we gathered together in one of the rooms they spoke unceasingly of the Blessed Perfection [Bahá’u’lláh], relating incidents in the life of the Beloved, mentioning His words, telling of His deeds and the passionate love and devotion of His followers until our hearts ached with love and longing.

Another pilgrim, Phoebe Hearst, wrote:

. . . ‘Those three days were the most memorable days of my life . . . my greatest blessing in this world is that I have been privileged to be in His [‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s] presence, and look upon His sanctified face. . . . I must say, He is the most wonderful Being I have ever met or ever

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[Page 28]

expect to meet in this world. . . . The spiritual atmosphere which surrounds Him and most powerfully affects all those who are blest by being near Him, is indescribable. . . .’

The early pilgrims continued to visit the Holy Land. The first American Bahá’í Thornton Chase, on pilgrimage in 1907, described how ‘Abdu’l-Bahá “embraced us with kisses as would a father his son, or as would brothers after a long absence,” explaining that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá “hesitates not to express his love and he truly loves all humanity in each one. He is the great Humanitarian and each friend is to him the representative of all mankind.” He described ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as having “the stride and freedom of a king— or shepherd”, stating that He was “strong, powerful, without a thought as to any act, as free and unstilted as a father with his family or a boy with playmates. Yet each movement, his walk, his greeting, his sitting down and rising up were eloquent of power, full of dignity, freedom and ability.” Two other pilgrims, in 1908, said that while in ‘Akká, “we shared with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the prison life, but we were in the Home of God.”

In 1910, a reporter from England went and spent several months living with the Holy Family in Haifa, becoming intimately acquainted with them and writing an extensive article for the Fortnightly Review in England. followed by an equally extensive article in Everybody’s magazine in America. She wrote:

. . . This servant of Baha is a man with shrewd, kindly, courteous eyes that seem to look into you instead of at you, but that instinctively make you like them and all that goes with them. . . .

Regard him well, my friends, for in him you behold one of the most significant figures in the religious world to-day. . . .

. . . He possesses to a positively miraculous degree the faculty of interesting himself in every human soul that asks his spiritual or material aid. . . . But above all, he possesses that subtler quality of spirituality which is felt rather than understood by those with whom he comes in contact. Gentle, genial, and courteous always, he receives, instructs, advises, and assists with unfailing tact and understanding the cosmopolitan stream of pilgrims which flows so steadily and so increasingly toward this little Syrian coast town.

The charities of Abbas are bounded by no horizon of race or creed. The thirty-odd Persian families who followed Baha Ullah into exile have more than once had his son to thank for the clothes they wore and for their daily bread. “Not a year passes,” a Roman Catholic remarked not long ago, “that Abbas Effendi does not help our work among the poor, and”—she paused, for his charities are never open—“if I were only permitted to tell you of the secret good that he has done!” Question them, and the imams of the Haifa mosques and the pastor of the German Lutheran Church, the foreign consular agents and the resident manager of the Hedjaz Railway, will tell you the same.

If you go to Damascus and walk in that street which is called Straight, you may perchance have dealings with a certain Persian youth, who, if he learns that your face is set for Haifa, will salaam profoundly and beg that you convey his respectful greetings and a letter to the Master. On that spring day in 1909 when the bloody wave of Kurdish fanaticism broke over Adana, leaving forty thousand corpses in its wake, he saw his shop pillaged and burned down, and his family butchered, and he himself was left for dead under a heap of slain. It was Abbas Effendi, hearing of his sad case, who sent him monetary help, started him in business afresh, and wrote him kindly letters that gave him [Page 29] courage to face life again. Abd-ul-Baha takes a personal interest in every one of the Persians in Haifa, helping to educate them when they are unable to afford education for themselves, settling their quarrels, deciding their differences, and advising them in their material as well as their spiritual wants. . . .

The Effendi himself . . . lives in the utmost simplicity. His own bedroom is almost Spartan in its plainness. A bowl of soup and a dish of rice usually compose his heartiest meal. . . .

. . . That his theories have worked out among those who follow him is evidenced by the dozen nationalities which often sit down at his table in utmost harmony; and this, remember, in a land where religion and fanaticism are all but synonymous; where a true believer will rarely consent to use the dishes that an infidel has handled, much less consent to eat beside him. The Effendi is a keen and clever controversialist; his verbal parries and thrusts are quick as rapier-strokes, as has been learned to their discomfiture by theologians of all creeds who have visited Haifa for the sole purpose of confuting him with their arguments. So highly is he respected, even among the most bigoted followers of Islam, that many Moslem ecclesiastics of note have stopped at Haifa to pay him a visit of ceremony on their way to the Holy Cities.

Nor does he confine himself to things spiritual and theoretical. He takes a lively interest in those political, social, and educational movements of the Western world which he holds to be the beginning of the fulfilment of the prophecies of Baha Ullah. . . .

Along with his mental grasp and power, he has that inestimable gift of humor which brings priest, peasant, and prince on to a ground of common understanding.

. . . he is a sincere, courageous man, a figure whose increasing influence is already world-wide in its significance.

Thus did four decades pass—the 1870’s, 1880’s, 1890’s and the first tenth of a new century—before, in 1910, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá left the area for the first time in forty years. He had entered the prison in His twenties and there had seen His brother die and later five of His own children, was appointed in His Father’s Will as the Center of His Covenant, survived the harassment and persecution of government agents, witnessed the fall of the dynasty that had imprisoned Him, saw science produce during His exile the telephone, electric light, phonograph, radio, automobile, and airplane, and emerged from prison when He was sixty-six to visit Africa three times, Europe twice, and America for one extended period. There a leading columnist wrote, in 1912, “he comes, seemingly out of college, fresh, uncontaminated by the world of work and worry,” and concluded, “there is no doubt among thinking people, that this man represents, in a great degree, the growing and evolving spirit of our times.”

IV

ACROSS EUROPE AND AMERICA, both reporters and people on the street stopped and looked, and turned to take a second look, and found Him in many ways inexplicable. His “versatility” and “capacity to reason and form suggestive theories on any subject”, wrote one reporter, “[are] all the more amazing when one remembers that Abbas Effendi . . . for forty years a jealously guarded prisoner . . . where he was wholly cut off from the world of culture, has never known a single year of schooling.”

When He walked hand in hand with the Archdeacon of Westminster to the nave of St. John’s church, and delivered the first public address of His life, the Fortnightly Review observed, “Surely the dawn of a new day was heralded on that Sunday,” and the American Review of Reviews concurred:

Considering the dignity and conservatism [Page 30] of the Established Church of England, and the fact that this little-known Persian prophet has come to the western world to proclaim the dawn of the millennium, to announce that the Messiah awaited by all nations has actually lived, taught and died upon this earth within the past century, and to preach what he and his followers believe to be the new world religion, designed to include and supersede all others and to unite all nations under the banner of a common faith, this would hardly seem an extravagant statement.

When Lady Blomfield informed Him in Paris of a letter from reliable sources stating that it might be “dangerous for Him to visit a certain country,” He responded, “My daughter, have you not yet realized that never, in my life, have I been for one day out of danger . . .?” He assured her that “These enemies have no power over my life, but that which is given them from on High.” The American Bahá’ís subscribed $18,000 for His trip to the United States, but ‘Abdu’l-Bahá returned it for charity.

Francis Henry Skrine at that time authored a new book on the Bahá’í Faith and said that it “may come in the great republic with a rush which nothing can resist.” And Elbert Hubbard wrote:

Abdul Baha is a most remarkable individual. He has magnetism, plus. His zeal, enthusiasm, animation, hope and faith run over and inundate everything.

No man can argue with him. No man can dispute with him. Everyone has to agree with him—and everyone does. He is what he is. He was born to this work, and for this work, and considers himself devinely appointed.

Maintaining a daily schedule that tested physical endurance to the limit, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá rode by automobile between nearby cities and traveled long distances sitting up overnight in train chaircars, instead of taking Pullman accommodations. In this way He went from New York to Washington to Chicago. back through Cleveland and Pittsburgh to Washington, and back to New York, visiting in the region Montclair, Lake Mohonk, Jersey City, Boston, Worcester, Cambridge, Brookline, Fanwood, Philadelphia, Newark, Morristown, and Englewood. He then traveled by way of Boston to Dublin, New Hampshire, and Eliot, Maine, back through Malden, Boston, and Cambridge, then up to Montreal, on to Buffalo, back to Chicago and Kenosha, westward to Minneapolis, St. Paul, Omaha, Lincoln, Salt Lake City, Denver, Glenwood Springs, San Francisco, and Oakland. In California He also visited Palo Alto and Los Angeles, returned to San Francisco, then went to Sacramento, back to Denver and Chicago, on to Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, and back to New York. He told the American Bahá’ís on the 239th day of His teaching them by word and example, “You have no excuse to bring before God if you fail to live according to His command, for you are informed of that which constitutes the good-pleasure of God.”

During this time, He spoke at churches, synagogues, diverse clubs and organizations; rented a house whenever He stayed for any period of time; cooked meals and served guests; was sought out by Alexander Graham Bell, Admiral Peary, United States Treasurer Lee McClung, former President Theodore Roosevelt; attended a New York play; was filmed for newsreels; took a steam bath in a hot spring cave in Colorado; taught the Faith to passengers clustered around Him in train cars; joked with Supreme Court Justices; brought together black and white, telling them that world unity depended on their unity, made front page headlines with His emphatic approval of interracial marriage, [Page 31] and personally arranged such a union; took streetcars frequently instead of taxis to save money; gathered the servants of the Hearst estate together and gave them generous donations; laid the foundation stone for the Wilmette House of Worship; endlessly deepened the understanding of the friends by telling them of the lives of Bahá’u’lláh and of the martyrs and trained each person according to his capacity along the path of spiritual development; took catnaps lying on the grass in a New York park; gave apples to children; and responded to the comments of the secretary of the International Peace Society who had said he was sorry that religion could not be included in the organization since the various sects might disagree, by observing, “Your members may be compared to beams of different metals and you are trying to unite them as you would tie these fingers together with a string. See, no matter how you tie them, still they shall remain separate. But the way to make these metals into one alloy is to put them into a crucible and apply intense heat to melt them all. For our melting-pot, we use the fire of the love of God.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá went back to Europe and traveled through London, Paris, Stuttgart, Budapest, and Vienna. He returned to Haifa, only to be imprisoned again and threatened with crucifixion; in the meantime He was engaged in drawing up a blueprint for the world-wide dissemination of His Father’s Revelation. When General Allenby, fresh from his exploits with Lawrence of Arabia, captured Haifa, he cabled London, “Notify the world that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is safe.”

TO THE PEOPLE of an age where materiality and spirituality are often confused and misunderstood, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s life-style defines clearly the values that He held. In the half-light of a world of uncertainty and compromise, those who knew Him personally, and those who read deeply into His Life, find an example of flexibility without compromise, gentleness without laxity, justice without harshness, love without possessiveness, and a host of other finely balanced virtues. He defined these virtues, not in philosophical discourse, but in daily activity. To study His life is to study the “light” of these attributes in action. He took abstract qualities and translated them into the acts of eating and sleeping, talking, working, teaching, loving, sharing, praying, and laughing.

Each human being has the potential to understand these qualities, and express them in outer activities. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá showed how the soul, aglow with the light of developed spiritual attributes, can wear a physical body of any size, color, or age, and the body be clothed in garments of any profession, climate, or culture. It is the soul with its attributes that determines how the body and garments are used. Without this inner development, outer diversity brings age gaps, ethnic frictions, and destructive sectionalisms, but with unity of inner attributes, outer diversity is seen as beauty.

If we seek, in this day when the planet has become a neighborhood, for a “universal man” to live in this new environment, we can begin with a study of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, dwell on the Teachings that gave meaning to His life, discover the universality He gave to each action, and attempt to understand how His mode of life applies to ourselves.

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The Mountain of God

By E. S. STEVENS

INT THE LAST ISSUE of WORLD ORDER (Spring 1970), we published excerpts from The Mountain of God, a novel by E. S. Stevens. In this issue, we conclude the publication of excerpts from that novel whose actions take place in Haifa and ‘Akká early in this century and which depicts scenes from the life of that small band of Bahá’ís who dwelt in the shadow of Mt. Carmel.

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“I’d give anything to know what religion means to people,” she [Sabra] said. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Yes, I think it does,” Underwood replied.

“And to me, nothing. I’d willingly be any religion you’d name me if I could derive satisfaction from it. Sooner Moslem than any other though, I think, because it is a worship of Destiny, and I believe in Destiny—that is, I have an instinct for it. Have you seen Abdul Baha —the one they call the Master?”

“No.”

“Is he a charlatan, do you think?”

“How can I say?” asked Underwood. “But he seems to me, from what Noureddin says, to be sincere enough, persuaded of his father’s mission—they called his father the Manifestation, I believe—discourages any attempt to introduce the miraculous element, though some of his followers would like to exaggerate it, and spends his life in working for the cause, teaching, giving personal advice, and organising the movement throughout the world. I’d no idea that the thing was as spread as it is. They have converts all over the East, and, of course, in America.”

“And how they love him!” said Sabra.

“They love him, it is true.” He thought of Noureddin’s shining eyes.

“Personality,” said Sabra.

“Perhaps.”

“But what are the teachings of their religion?” she asked.

“They are teachings which, if they continue to spread rapidly in the East, may have a considerable political significance. A religion which can engraft tolerance and progress on to Islam and makes easy converts among Mohammedans is a political force.”

“Perhaps that is why they were so persecuted in Persia?” she said.

“Of course.”

“But tell me the teachings,” she said.

“I’m as ignorant as yourself. Noureddin lent me a very badly translated book on the subject, and that’s about all I’ve been able to obtain, except what they tell me. As far as I can make out, the exoteric teachings are simple enough—there may be inner teachings, of course. It’s a Utopian theory of the Universe—a mixture of Maeterlinckian mysticism with practical aims. It’s love for one’s kind followed out to its logical conclusion. For instance, love of humanity is to come before patriotism, with a Bahai. Chauvinism is positively wrong. National aggrandisement at the expense of others is as bad as personal aggrandisement at the expense of others. A nation has to be humble about itself, and to work for the common good, just as an individual should do. War, of course, is to be abolished. Race-feeling is to be abolished, a [Page 34] universal language taught in the national schools of every country, and a reign of universal tolerance and freedom of thought preached. Priests are to disappear. There’s a sort of Communism about it, too, that follows naturally on the theory that you should love your neighbour as yourself, not for the neighbour’s sake, or for your sake, but for the sake of the God of Humanity.”

“They’re fine ideals,” she said. “But, Lord how unpractical!”

“Christianity was rather unpractical,” said he, “but it founded modern civilisation. Perhaps this may found the civilisation of the future.”

“Impossible! We have grown out of religions.”

“Have we grown out of love, though we might propagate the species on a basis of reason?”

Her dark skin suddenly reddened.

“No.”

“Religion is like love, I think,” said Underwood. “We shall never grow out of it. And a subconscious power, like that of religion. is necessary if they are ever to bring about their Utopia.”

“But I don’t call it a religion,” she said. “Haven’t they any mosques? And no priests!”

Underwood laughed. “Does Christianity depend on bishops and churches?”

“Of course not, though personally I’m devoted to bishops. But you don’t understand what I mean. Bahaism isn’t other-worldly enough to be a religion. Tolstoi might just as well say Tolstoism is a religion.”

“It hasn’t dogmas, perhaps. But it has”—he hesitated—“what I should call an immense love of God, and acquiescence in the Divine Will. Did you ever read the Fioretti or à Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi? They have that spirit in them—heaps of it. A sort of mediaeval mysticism, a cheerful mysticism, which finds comradeship with all the world. Their Malekoot seems to me to be identical with the divine enlightenment of the Franciscans.”

“Love of God again,” she said impatiently. “How can one? The Moslems don’t ask you to. They adore Him, as one bows to irresistible destiny. I can understand that. But to love—”

She sank into thought.

Then she suddenly looked up with a laugh, and exclaimed—

“There we are!”

“What?”

“Talking about religion. I told you it was infectious in this country. You’ve caught it from the Persians, and now I am getting it from you! If we were in London we should no more dream of discussing such things than of flying. New Theology is associated with the suburbs, of [Page 35] course, and one could talk a little discreet theology with a nice old parson, or get sentimentally converted by Father Vaughan, but even then, it’s only in a sort of dilettante way. Of course one goes to church when one is staying in the country, for the sake of the good example, and all that. But here! I suppose it is partly because when one sees the fellahin, one remembers that Christ was probably just such a one, and He lived in just such a dirty little mud hut as people of His rank in life live in nowadays. That makes one think to begin with. And when one sees a religion in the making, like this Bahaism, one can’t help thinking that Christianity must have begun in the same way, with a very ordinary lot of men after all. It sounds irreverent, but I dare say the houses of the disciples were just as full of fleas, and just as insanitary as the houses of the fellahin to-day. When one sees how the best of people unconsciously exaggerate in this climate, one can see how lots of the unbelievable things grew up. And when one knows any Greeks, one wonders how any truth or life was left in Christianity at all after it made its headquarters in Constantinople.”

“Switch it round in the other direction,” said Underwood. “It’s possible that, robbed of all those accretions, the fellah Christ is more inspiring than all the jewelled figures on Byzantine altars.”

Noureddin and his father were in the house of the Master on the hill, whither they went every evening. Sometimes they stayed to eat there, and Underwood missed them both when they did so.

He had been pleasantly surprised that day. Noureddin had come in with a dish of wonderful oranges.

“The Master sends you these. They are from his garden in Akka— from the Rizwan.”

On another occasion flowers had arrived with a similar message.

What and who was this mysterious personage, and whence this kindly interest in a stranger? The house on the hill, new, white, and ordinary looking, conveyed nothing. Underwood had sometimes walked past the gates on his crutches and looked inside. One or two Persians sat outside, chatting together; a watch-dog yawned in the sun, and the big door leading into the house stood open, as if guests were expected. It was nearly always open. Now and again a Persian would enter, or issue; sometimes old men with the remembrance of deep waters in their [Page 36] eyes, sometimes young men in European dress, fresh from the college at Beyrout, who occasionally bade him good-day in English.

A rough road bordered by prickly pears led beyond the house of mystery up the hillside—too stony and steep, however, for Underwood to attempt it. It led up to the tomb of the Bab, half-way up the side of Carmel, the great square building which dominated Haifa from its position on the hillside. Noureddin and his father often climbed up there in the evening to drink tea in the little rose garden overlooking the bay, and to talk to the other Persians, or to pray at the tomb. Sometimes they told him that the Master had been there too, and that after drinking tea together he had descended with them.

One day Underwood had driven up by the carriage road with Noureddin to the tomb, and learnt how, some fifteen or twenty years ago, the body of the Persian saint had been brought by a few faithful Bahais overland from its hiding-place in Persia to its resting-place on the Mountain of God. And Underwood remembered what Whitby had said.

He looked inside. The tomb was in the inner chamber, so that he could not see it, but in the outer chamber there was no adornment on the plain walls—its only furnishing was a piece of grass-matting and a few chairs. Chairs were taken from it, in order that he and Noureddin might sit on the rose-planted plateau before the tomb, whence they watched the wide horizon of sea and sky and bay, and the town lying beneath them, while a dark-skinned, silent Persian gardener, a black sheepskin cap on his long locks, gathered them roses from the sacred garden.

It was all so simple.

There was none of the pomp or circumstance of sainthood.

Surely nothing was more unlike a sepulchre than this pleasant, airy room, where to smile was not out of place, for the Persian guardian, who brought them glasses of over-sweetened tea, laughed when Noureddin rallied him about something.

· · · · ·

Underwood had felt the charm of these days and nights descend upon his soul with a promise of peace. The atmosphere in which these people lived was about him; he breathed it—drew it into his soul; it was daylit, and fresh and pure. To some, religion was a hard code of rules, set prayers, recitations, and postures; for himself, perhaps, it was philosophy upon its knees. But with these people, religion was an internal rhapsody, a singing of the heart, as natural as the unfolding of the pimpernel in the sun or the glad impulse of the lark into the spring sky.

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AKKA, which lies like an ivory phantom, a city of foam, on the long sickle of the bay when seen from the palm gardens of Haifa, loses something of its whiteness as one leaves the half-way house guarded by Turkish soldiers on the lonely sands between the two cities.

It has many names, this wall-girt Syrian town washed by the sea, and each name recalls a vanished glory. Accho brings back some of its first splendours, when tall galleys bore their freight of purple dyes and precious glass to Egypt and Carthage and Greece—for the murex, the purple shell, lies on the shores of its bay; and by the Belus, the shallow river which empties itself into the sea at the end of a dusty avenue of gum trees leading to the fortified gate, the first glass was made by the Phoenicians for export into the wealthy cities of the classical world. Ptolemais was its name in the days when Paul of Tarsus spent a busy day of his life in its pagan walls. The word “Acre” brings back the splendid phantoms of Richard the Lion-Hearted with his paladins, and the temporary triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. But the Crescent regained its supremacy and the stout little city held her own against Napoleon, who raised an artificial mound against its walls and trained his guns against the fortifications in vain. You may still see his cannon balls within the streets. It was stubborn St. Jean d’Acre which checked his victorious progress through the Levant. He had dreams of becoming Mohammedan in those days, the great Napoleon, and of ruling Islam as its sacred Kaliph. He almost saw the mantle of the desert Prophet on his shoulders. The mound is there to this day—a silent monument over which Bedouin camels nibble in the spring-time.

And, through the centuries, Akka remained within her walls, never building outside them, never enlarging her boundaries. Hence the pestilences which raged through her narrow streets, bordered by high houses and vaulted in from the sky; for the inhabitants built upwards since they might not build outwards. The Turkish Government have used it, therefore, as a penal settlement. Plague and pestilence are useful deputy executioners, and undesirable captives died natural deaths in the prisons—all of which was very convenient to the Sublime Porte. The proverb had it that a bird died if it flew over Akka.

Since the Constitution, the little town, unhealthy as a pot-bound plant, has seen another era. Two new gates are being built—before there was but one—and concessions have been made to extend the city [Page 38] beyond its century-old limits. The awakening has come late—the ships that rock beside the walls of the old fortified khan have yearly become fewer, and Haifa on the other side of the bay, which has accommodated herself to the encroachments of progress while her prouder sister remained in seclusion, has waxed in favour and flourished, whilst the old glory of Akka has declined. But whereas in Haifa Christian women go unveiled and dress like the foreigner, in Akka even the handful of Greek Christians prefer to veil their women, and Islam, although its pomp and panoply are somewhat tattered, still lords it over submissive Christendom. Camels pad the streets, everywhere you are met by the aristocratic impassivity of the Moslem, by the dignified reticence which flies before imported civilisation. In Syria above all other places, Islam confers a kind of nobility: the Mohammedan is more or less of a gentleman; the native Christian—too often—more or less of a cad.

On this April day, there was a display of bunting in the streets. Everywhere the red flag with its white crescent and star fluttered, mingled occasionally in an entente cordiale with the tricolour, the stars and stripes, or the Union Jack. But not often—the red flag with the emblem of Islam was in predominance. For it was the anniversary of the dawning of the new era of freedom, the birth of Young Turkey. That lusty infant was just one year old.

The decorations were almost the only signs of rejoicing. The new régime had not touched the life of the good people of Akka beyond certain externals. They permitted themselves to use firearms and to criticise the Government, they considered themselves entitled to a little more licence and disorder, and a peasant who before would have humbly dismounted when his Excellency the Mutessarif passed by, now rode on his way. This was how the Constitution was understood in Akka. On the Other hand, it was vaguely suspected by a large proportion of the Mohammedan population that the security of Islam was threatened by the new-fangled methods of government in Constantinople. The new Sultan was a shadow to them, whereas the old had made his hand felt. They distrusted the Committee of Union and Progress, and shook their heads over the doings in Constantinople in the coffee-houses. Others there were who had an equally vague belief in the new régime. The few Christians mocked at it, were sceptical of it, but blessed it.

Be this as it may, there was a show of jubilation on this hot April day. The red flags over the gateway of the old khan of the town, which tradition says was a nuns’ cloister in the days of Richard the Lion-Heart, rose and fell languidly on the warm wind as a man in a black fez and European dress entered the square in front of it, took a seat on one of [Page 39] the rush-bottomed stools of the little coffee-house opposite, and unfurled a newspaper, settling his spectacles on his nose. The other coffee-drinkers exchanged greetings with him, but without much cordiality. He was a stranger—to judge by his silky black beard and fez—most probably a Persian.

A young Syrian lolling at a table near by remarked with a scarcely lowered voice—

“An Irani, by Allah, come to see the Persian god!” He spat and uttered some foul references.

But the stranger read on, unperturbed, drank his coffee slowly, read his paper, paid his metallique, saluted the company courteously, and crossed the sunny square towards the khan. Beyond the gateway the sun beat fiercely into the courtyard. Some beasts reposed in the shadow of the arcading, while some half-dozen camels were watering at the tank in the centre of the court, sucking up the muddy liquid into their throats through their loose and heavy lips with a hissing sound.

An uneven stone stairway led to the guest-rooms above, once the living-cells of mediaeval nuns, and up this stairway the man in the black fez went. The sun made deep shadows—if the courtyard was flooded with hot light, the cloister above was pleasantly cool and dark. One or two rusty petroleum tins filled with flowers—an ivy geranium and a carnation plant—placed here and there where they would catch the sunlight between the columns, spoke of permanent residents in this abode of wanderers; otherwise the rooms were hired out to wayfarers, native merchants, and sailors. At one of the doors so marked, the man in the black fez halted, then rapped. A quavering voice answered him in Arabic.

“Min?” (Who is there).

“Man” (I), he answered, in Persian.

“Deign to enter,” replied the quavering voice.

The man with the black fez obeyed.

An old, old man, whose scanty white hair flowed half-way to his waist beneath his turban, sat on a bed within the simple little room. He wore the native Persian dress. This bed, a wooden chest or two, a basin, a divan spread with a rug and some faded cushions, were the only pieces of furniture; an elaborate specimen of Persian script in black and gold, framed and hung on the wall, was the only ornament which the room boasted, except for a glassful of scented stocks and coral-plant which stood on the wide sill.

On the divan a man in a European morning-suit and a fez was seated. At the newcomer’s entry he averted his head quickly, as one who had no wish to be recognised.

[Page 40] “Fear not, Excellency,” said the old man on the bed, in Arabic. “Among the children of Baha there is no treachery to a guest. And this my friend is but newly come from Persia.”

Then he greeted the man with the spectacles warmly.

“Allahu Abha!” (God is most bright).

“Allahu Abha!” returned the other. He spoke in Persian, and after the usual greetings had been rapidly exchanged, looked inquiringly at the man who had averted his face.

“He is one of us?”

“No—a seeker. Inshallah, he may discover the great Light.” He turned to his first guest and repeated what he had said.

The newcomer added gravely in Arabic—

“Then he is in the first of the seven valleys, of which it was said, ‘Not until the traveller migrates from himself and has accomplished these journeys will he arrive at the sea of nearness and union, or taste of the peerless Wine. The steed upon which to journey through the Valley of Search, is Patience.’”

“Well said,” put in the old man.

The newcomer stroked his silky black beard.

“I admire your Arabic, effendi,” said the first guest. “And the words which you have uttered are, I perceive, from a Sufi author.”

“Nay, they were spoken by Baha ’Ullah himself in answer to questions asked by Sheikh Abdur Rahman at Bagdad.”

“But Sheikh Abdur Rahman was a Sufi.”

“That is why your Excellency thought the answer revealed by Baha ’Ullah to be Sufi. To the Sunni he spake as a Sunni, to the Sufi as a Sufi, to the Jew as a Jew, to the Christian as a Christian—even as God Himself hath spoken. What are the different creeds save the different languages of God? The Speaker is the same, but the words differ according to the medium. If the medium be Our Lord Mohammed well, if the medium be His Holiness Jesus, well also.”

“The mollahs would not approve of your commendable utterance, effendi.”

“That does not trouble us. We look for the approval of God and our own hearts, and not that of the mollahs.”

It was said with delicate irony, and all three men laughed.

“Are you as brave in Persia?” asked the first guest.

“Effendi—we have given our lives and those of our children—yes, even the honour of our wives and daughters has been sacrificed for the truth.”

The other man looked at him sharply.

“I have been ready to give as much for freedom.”

[Page 41] “There is only one complete freedom,” said the Persian. “That is freedom from the tyranny of one’s prejudices. Love and fellowship are the true freedom; there is no other.”

“I have worked for political freedom.”

“Do you think we have not worked for that also? But that is only one part of the greater freedom.” His eyes glowed through his spectacles. “The Blessed Perfection said concerning this, ‘Glory is not for him who loveth his native land, but glory is for him who loveth the world.’ In a city a man preserves order and harmony in his own household not that his family may be enabled to devour their neighbours, but that they may live honourably as citizens. So it should be with that greater city the world, and the families the nations. Turkey has set her house in order, Persia has set her house in order, but it must be for the greater rather than the lesser good, or disaster will ensue.”

“Yes, yes—but what have you done?” asked the first guest abruptly. It was perhaps his European blood which spoke, though he did not know it. “What have you done? We have exiled Abdul Hamid. Have you anything but words to show?”

“Does a man die for words? What are we doing? We are working steadily in the Cause of Unity. We have schools in the West as well as the East; we have a chain of believers all round the world, so that in the West you may find Western men who are working steadily with us as blood-brothers, in the East a Bahai may sojourn with Bahais in any country from Japan to India, in the North there is a Great Power who has, by the grace of Allah, given secret support to our emissaries because they see in us the apostles of progress in Islam. And in our own country thousands of devoted believers have sprung from the blood of the martyrs, ready to sow another bloody harvest if need be.”

“‘The apostles of progress in Islam,’” repeated the other, as if the words impressed him. Then he made a movement as if to brush the impression away. “Words, words,” he said. “That is what chokes us. It is choking Young Turkey. We talk of a thing, and imagine it done. In Europe they do a thing, and talk of it afterwards. That’s the paralysis which is on us—the paralysis of words.”

“God’s apostles of progress in Islam,” repeated the Persian earnestly, paying no heed to the outburst. “What movement has ever lived among the children of Shem that was not religious? What is the sword which pierces the heart of Young Turkey, of Young Persia? of enlightenment all through Asia and Africa? It is fanaticism. Disbelief in God learnt in European cities is no weapon to parry its thrusts. There is only one weapon which will prevail—a religion inspired by God, a religion [Page 42] that burns up prejudice like a flame, that sets men’s hearts on fire, that intoxicates them with the wine of enthusiasm—the revelation of the Blessed Perfection, the command of God Himself.”

He spoke with intense emotion; his eyes burnt with conviction, his spectacles making them unnaturally large.

“By Allah,” cried the old man on the bed, in his shaking voice, “it is well said, it is the truth! By Allah, it is the truth!”

There was a moment’s silence, vibrant, charged with mental excitement, and then the light died out of the eyes of the Persian, and his face resumed a more ordinary expression.

“And now, Mirza Mushkin,” said he, “I beg you to show me the writing, if it is finished. for I leave to-morrow.”

The old man shuffled off the bed, and going to a wooden chest took from it, after a little search, a roll of parchment-like paper. Then he drew his tottering old limbs beneath him on the bed again, and handed the roll to the Persian.

The latter, with a gracious movement, opened it so that Mirza Mushkin’s other guest might share the sight of it.

But both men uttered an exclamation of wonder and admiration as they looked. To the Oriental, decorative caligraphy holds a high place among the arts; and the peacock in three coloured inks, its feathers composed of rows of exquisitely fine Persian writing embellished by fanciful curves which showed the adept’s touch, was to them a triumph of handicraft, a masterpiece of imagination. To the initiated, too, the arrangement of the letters had a mystical significance—for each letter has its numerical value, and an esoteric meaning attaches to these.

“Can your Excellency read it?” asked the Persian.

“It is in Persian—nevertheless I can read a word here and there. What is it, by your permission?”

“It is a tablet revealed by the Blessed Perfection,” said the Persian, in a reverent voice. Then he added very simply: “When my brother was put to death eighteen years ago in Teheran, he recited this tablet while tortures were applied; it was but newly revealed by the Blessed Perfection in Akka. And many of the bystanders were moved to tears and came afterwards to my uncle and became Bahai. I was one of them.” He looked a long time at the odd decorative bird in silence. Perhaps memory had misted over his spectacles. “By the mercy of Allah,” he ended.

“There is my signature,” said the old man, in a piping voice. He put his thin scraggy finger in the corner. The Persian translated it. “Mushkin Kalam, slave of Abdul Baha.”

“They know that for my signature anywhere from Bombay to [Page 43] Damascus,” said the Mirza, his aged face lit up with a senile smile. “For seventy years—for seventy years—I am very old.”

“But your hand does not shake,” said his guest.

“El hamdu’lillah! My hand is sure. They do not understand how to write nowadays; they are too quick. The values of the letters are nothing to them. They even write on tables. There is only one way to write perfectly, and that is to hold the paper in the palm of the hand. And when one is learning, one should practice by night—there is no light like candlelight. But there are few who can write—”

His thin voice was like a lament.

“The Mirza had great fame in Persia,” said the man with the spectacles. “He was celebrated as a wit as well as a writer. He was welcome in the house of princes. But he left it all in order to share the banishment of the Blessed Perfection, and Abdul Baha after him.”

“Yes, all of it I left, el hamdu’lillah,” repeated the old man. His sparse white hair, long like a woman’s, betokening his rank, gave him an eldritch look, as of something not of this world. But there was a youthful triumph in the worn old eyes that had worked so long over the making of beautiful things. “I am content,” he said. “I shall die in Akka, near Abdul Baha, near the holy places. He sent for me to come from India, whither I had been sent by the Blessed Perfection. He recalled me. He knew that I should want to die in Akka. I am content.”

He looked out towards the window, from which one could see the masts of vessels swaying gently against a gentian-blue sea, lost in dreams of his own, the child-like dreams of those who have lived so long that Heaven is as near to them as in their infancy.

The Persian gave the other man a quick glance, which said: “He forgets that we are here.” Aloud he said, “I leave to-morrow for Persia; if your Excellency comes to Teheran, I shall hope to offer you hospitality.” He produced a card, upon which was written a name in Persian, Arabic, and French.

The other man read it in silence, and then produced his own pocketbook, from which he too extracted a card.

“Your Highness will forgive me if I ask you to let no one see this card,” said he. “But I have the Mirza’s word for it that I can trust a Bahai. I have reasons which make it necessary that I should conceal my stay in Akka.”

The Persian read the name.

“I have seen the name of Schmidt Pasha in the Turkish newspapers, Excellence.” He put the card into an inner recess of his notebook. “It was in a worthy cause, Inshallah, it will serve a worthier cause yet.”

He placed five Turkish pounds beside the still dreaming caligraphist, [Page 44] and with a salutation quietly withdrew.

At the closing of the door, Mirza Mushkin came back to his surroundings with a start.

“The prince is gone,” said Schmidt Pasha.

“A lot of people are coming,” said Sabra, lifting her brown eyes, wet with tears, to the horizon. “Look along the ramparts. Noureddin and his cousin are with them; I can see their black fezes, and I should know Noureddin’s walk anywhere. And so is that old man with the bent head we met in their house—Mirza Hosseyn.”

Approaching slowly along the ramparts were some five or six men. Underwood saw that they were all Persians by the dress of the older men. But at a slight distance before the others walked a single figure. He was clothed in a long, loose iron-grey coat, beneath which his dress was white, as was his turban. The rest walked behind, with their hands folded beneath their hearts and their heads slightly bent. Presently the figure in front paused, and turning, addressed a few words to one of the party. Noureddin suddenly detached himself, and came swiftly towards the wall beneath which Sabra and Underwood were seated. His eyes were shining, his voice breathless.

“Mr. Robert! Mr. Underwood! Will you come? The Master has told me to fetch you. I told him that you were the friend of Mr. Whitby, and he said, ‘Bring him to me.’”

Underwood rose with the young Persian’s eager help, and made his way, as quickly as his crutches would let him, to where the little group stood.

Before him stood the figure with the iron-grey cloak. His beard was white, his hair, which was long, was doubled up beneath his turban, from which a snowy strand or two escaped. Underwood met the penetrating and kindly gaze of a pair of blue eyes set beneath overhanging eyebrows. It was one of the most commanding countenances that he had ever seen. Strength was in every line of it. The transparency of the skin showed the spirit triumphing over a somewhat tired body; his erect, dignfied carriage, keen self-possession, and look of transcendent sweetness, that the conquest was continual and complete. The nose was hooked, and very cleanly chiselled; there were lines of gentle humour about his eyes. The whole aspect of the man gave an impression of indomitable will, mingled with something difficult to define, [Page 45] which made him lovable. Spirituality is an abused word, but it might stand for it.

“Please tell the effendi that I am glad to have the opportunity of thanking him in person for the fruit and flowers which he sent.”

The man in the iron-grey cloak spoke. His voice was sonorous and yet sweet.

“He says that it is nothing. That he is pleased to serve you. That Christ has commanded us to serve each other, whether the creed and nation of those we serve be the same as our own or not. He says that he is glad that you have come to the Mountain of God.”

“Please say, Noureddin, that I should like to call on him one day if he will allow me to do so.”

“It is allowed,” said Noureddin.

The little procession moved on in the glare of the noonday, the figure of Abdul Baha moving in front, white and silver against the stainless blue.

“Was the old man who walked first the One they call the Master?” asked Sabra, standing up to look after them as soon as Underwood returned.

“Old man?” repeated Underwood. Then he realised that the strength and sunlight on the face of the man with whom he had spoken had somehow given him the impression of eternal youth and beauty. Then he added, “Yes, that was he.”

The garden of the Rizwan lay in the fork of the river Namein, or Belus, which winds sluggishly down to the sea on either side of the flowery island, to unite its streams again before emptying itself over long, flat sands into the sea. The carriage stopped at a wooden gate. Noureddin dismounted, and had to knock several times before there was a reply. At last, however, the door was unbolted, and the young Persian came back to help Underwood to dismount from the high vehicle.

An old woman, muffled up to the eyes, admitted them into a little garden over a wooden bridge, and then disappeared down the flower-bordered walks like a rusty black ghost. The sirocco lay heavy still upon the earth, the sky was obscured, and the heat made a thick pall of the sky. In this sultry, moist, and sullen atmosphere the colours of the garden seemed to glow with a light of their own. The oranges that [Page 46] hung on the trees shone golden under their glossy leaves, the coral plant flamed in the grey air, the lilies rose transcendently white, the roses were audaciously red. Verbenas, geraniums, jasmine, a riot and tangle of other sub-tropical plants, daturas, oleanders, and the flaming glory of the bougainvillaea, made a rare and beautiful paradise of this island set in a waste. Noureddin told Underwood that it had been tilled by the Persian exiles as soon as the rigour of their gaolers permitted it, in order that their beloved leader, Baha ’Ullah, might come sometimes from the stifling streets of the penal town where he was confined, to breathe the purer air and sweeter fragrances of the little pleasaunce. So this garden of love was planted after the Persian fashion in beds divided from each other by tiles and interlacing paths, over the ordered primness of which, here and there deft gardeners had allowed the marigolds to spill their gold in audacious and spendthrift patches.

Noureddin excused himself to his guests for a moment, and following the centre path they found themselves in a little paved court by the river’s edge, shaded by two great mulberry trees, around which wide wooden benches painted blue and white had been spread with carpets for the reception of the foreign guests; carpets made fifty years ago on hand-looms by cunning master-workmen in distant Tabriz.

Noureddin rejoined them a moment later, followed by the old woman, who bore a large trayful of freshly picked lettuces, and in the midst of them a china bowl full of a clear amber liquid. This last proved to be sweetened vinegar.

“I went to fetch you these,” said Noureddin. “It is a Persian custom. We dip the lettuces in the vinegar and eat them so. Rizwaniya will be sorry she is not here. She is very greedy, Rizwaniya.”

“Oh, we’ll take some back to her,” Sabra exclaimed, with a smile. “Poor darling Rizwaniya!”

Presently she uttered a little exclamation, for down the middle of the court, in a marble channel, a stream of water was flowing. It made its plashing way down the steps which led to the river. It was fed from a small white fountain in the scented garden above, which was now sending a crystal jet into the air.

“Is it magic, Noureddin?”

“No, it is the horse. It is working the wheel which sets the fountain [Page 47] in motion.”

“It’s magical in its effect, anyway,” she said.

The trickling, plashing water, the call of some peacocks at the farther end of the flowery walks, the sleepy rustle of the garden in the still grey air, the enchanted atmosphere, the palms on the opposite bank gently swaying as from an unfelt wind, produced a drowsiness in her that was overpowering. Oblivion suddenly descended on her like a soft mantle, blotting out the little courtyard, and the river, and the thick foliage of the ancient mulberries. She slept.

They walked slowly up the hill to her house.

He looked up at the mountain.

Its long ridge cut sharply into the satin-green sky; the pine trees and cypresses on its dusky slope were dark as the plumage of black swans. Stately, benevolent, silent, the mountain seemed almost a divine presence, with something of the brooding dignity of the vast images carved by primitive races in the virgin rock to symbolise the incomprehensible.

“It is still to-night,” said Sabra, lifting her head.

“Very still,” he answered.

Moths fluttered past them. Fireflies carried their fugitive lights before them like flying sparks of blue flame, hither and thither, as if without purpose.

They turned in at the gate of her villa. Latifé was in the porch, wondering at their belated coming.

“It is good to be here again,” Underwood said simply, as he sat at the table.

“It’s not much of a meal, I’m afraid,” she responded.

“I love your little dinners. It isn’t that. It’s you. I’ve missed you.”

“And I you,” she replied sincerely.

“Do you remember my first meal here—lunch, wasn’t it?—and how Whitby was expected, but didn’t turn up?”

“Mr. Whitby! It seems a year ago since I met him with you at the hotel. And now he is in Teheran—or should be.”

“Yes, the Persians have had news of him.”

“I can’t understand," said she, “how a man like Mr. Whitby—” She paused.

[Page 48] “Well, I think I can. I can understand how a man of Whitby’s temperament could become a mystic instead of only a scholar. Did I tell you of my studies with Noureddin?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I scribbled down some disjointed verses of the translations he showed me, because I thought they might interest you. Read them, and then tell me if they remind you of anything.”

She took the page of manuscript which he drew from his pocket, and read it by the light of the red-shaded candles.

“O Son of Spirit! I have created thee rich: Why dost thou make thyself poor? Noble have I made thee: Why dost thou degrade thyself? Of the essence of Knowledge have I manifested thee: Why searchest thou for another than Me? From the clay of Love I have kneaded thee: Why seekest thou another? Turn thy sight unto thyself that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, Powerful, Mighty, and Supreme.”

“O Son of the Highest Sight! I have placed within thee a spirit from Me, that thou mightest be My Lover: Why hast thou forsaken Me and sought to love another?”

“O Son of the Supreme! I made death for thee as glad-tidings: Why art thou in despair at its approach? I made light for thee a splendour: Why dost thou hide from it?”

“O Son of Existence! Thy heart is My Home; purify it for My Descent: Thy spirit is My Outlook; prepare it for My Manifestation.”

“O Son of Clay! Be blind, that thou mayest behold My Beauty: Be deaf, that thou mayest hear My Sweet Melody and Voice: Be ignorant, that thou mayest enjoy a portion from My Knowledge: Be poor, that thou mayest obtain an everlasting share from the sea of My Eternal Wealth.”

“O My Children! I fear that, without having enjoyed the melody of the Nightingale, ye may return to the region of mortality; and, without seeing the beauty of the Rose, ye may return to the water and clay.”

“O Son of Passion! The people of wisdom and insight struggled for years, and failed to attain the meeting of the Exalted One, hastened all their lives and did not see the Most Beautiful; whilst thou hast arrived at home without hastening, and hast attained the goal without search. Yet, after gaining all these degrees and ranks, thou wert so veiled with thyself that thine eyes did not behold the Beauty of the Beloved, and thine hand did not reach to the Hem of the Friend. Therefore marvel at this, O possessors of insight!”

“O Servant of the World! At many a dawn has the breeze of My [Page 49] Grace passed through thee, and found thee asleep upon the bed of neglect, and returning back it wept over thy condition.”

“It sounds pretty,” she said,—“and poetical. Yes. it reminds me of the Imitation of Christ, if that’s what you mean. My aunt had one.”

“And you read it?”

“I used to read it in church during the sermon as a variation to the funeral and marriage services, and the churching of women, with the psalm that all men are liars. I didn’t understand it much. I always imagined that the lover who would eventually marry me would talk like that. I made a childish confusion of the thing. I’ve often told you I’ve no religious sense—not a scrap. You have, I believe, or you couldn’t enjoy talking to the Persians so much. Tell me, you saw Abdul Baha?”

“Yes,” he said, taking the paper again and returning it to his pocket.

“Won’t you leave it with me?” she said. “I’d like to read it more carefully and see if I can make any sense out of it.”

He smiled, and handed the paper to her.

“What did you think of him?” she asked, reverting to her question, when dinner was over and they sat in the garden. “Of the Master, I mean.”

“I think,” he said, more to himself than to her, “that he is one of the sails of the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, some one—is it Maeterlinck?—once said that there were some rare spirits that carry the ship of humanity forward—beautiful ardent sails that fill with the winds of enthusiasm and genius and bear the boat forward. One need never be afraid of crowding too much sail on—for every white and wind-eager sail there are millions of heavy and prudent souls that will provide the necessary ballast and keep the keel down in the waters of matter-of-fact.”

“But supposing that a generation came which produced nothing but sails?” she asked, lifting her cigarette from her mouth.

“Then we should fly away into the ideal, I suppose.”

“That would be uncomfortable for some of us,” said Sabra, with a sigh. “I don't see anything attractive in the prospect. Idealism is draughty. I hate idealists. They are usually people who don’t know how to dress and belong to small societies that issue pamphlets and invite you to lunch at Eustace Miles’.”

Underwood was somewhat chilled. Her persistent clinging to her hedonistic principles, her adoration of the pagan in life, her refusal to see anything admirable in the spiritual in human nature, was something [Page 50] more than inability to understand. She could understand, if she would. She had understood, perhaps, once. But her blindness was obstinate. She defied the gods, while she suffered. Like Prometheus, who pilfered the fire to animate a thing of flesh, she had risked her all in order to lavish it upon that which was least worthy. Had Prometheus stolen the divine fire for a godlike use, he need never have known the tortures of the vulture.

“Surely, Sabra, you believe in some kind of idealism?” he said. “I mean some lifting of the head of the brute beast in us, towards a higher horizon. Good Lord! If it weren’t for that—”

“You wouldn’t be able to stand living,” she ended for him, in a softer voice. “Yes, I understand. But . . . at best, it’s a kind of consolation, a cowardice, this spiritual life. The Persians are children. They walk like little Tommy-head-in—Air. And you have the gift for it too. You, and people like Father Patrick on the hill, and some of these German peasants. . . . But I can’t find any pleasure in it, and never should. It’s not an acquired taste, like tomatoes. It’s got to be born in you. It wasn’t born in me, and there’s an end of it. They say women are religious. I think they are not. They like it as a soporific, an anaesthetic, or a mild form of intoxicant. What do most women pray about? Their lovers, or their husbands, or their children. Is that spiritual, or is it a sort of fetish-propitiation?”

She drummed her fingers upon her knee and smoked without further speech.

Then, after there had been a long silence between them, she lifted the cigarette from her mouth and spoke again, in a softer, more wistful voice.

“And yet,” she confessed.—“l don't know. There must be something in it, after all.”

“Why not?” said Underwood. “I prefer the fighting chance.”

[Page 51]

[Page 52]

Art in Apocalypse:

Some Reflections on Recent Films

By GARY and GAYLE MORRISON

AMERICAN FILM in the 1960’s has at last begun to take its place with world film as an art form rather than simply as corporate-enterprise mass entertainment. Although the twenty-five million dollar dinosaur Hello Dolly shows that such a major industrial production can still survive in the movie market, we have seen at the same time the emergence of the low budget, vital and often more highly creative personal film. American audiences, used to movies as escapist entertainments, are frequently unsure about what to make of the personal film, the individual statement or vision of a director, composed of new techniques in editing, color, and photography, controlled not by what we expect to see and hear but by the conceptions of the director as artist.

In the personal film the director attempts to create solely in terms of film, uninhibited by the strictures of other media. A French critic has termed this manner “caméra stylo”, in which the camera becomes a director’s pen; hence every angle, shot, set, color shading, movement of the camera, and bit of dialogue has meaning in the artistic conception of the whole, and the camera becomes “a means of writing as supple and as subtle as that of written language”. The body of work of a director may be read and studied cinematically so that we may become as familiar with the film language, techniques, styles, and themes of an Eisenstein, Bunuel, Fellini, Antonioni, Mizoguchi, Kurasawa, Torres-Nillson, or Satyajit Ray as we are with the thoughts and expressions of a Robert Frost or Hemingway in other media.

Film demands viewing as does any other art form, not from middle to end and catching up on the beginning with a box of popcorn before leaving, but rather as the director conceived of the work; today even the ambience of the initial credits is an important ingredient in film. An essentially ephemeral experience, film cannot simply be stopped for one to savor every image; one must move with the film, accept it on its own terms, and talk about it as a unified aesthetic experience. The personal film is the filmmaker’s canvas.

In the past we have looked to literature, painting, and theatrical forms from dance to the play to gain insights and understanding of people, our society, and the milieu of a period; today we can see in the personal film the artist’s vision of the human condition and the concerns of our time. Perhaps more than with other media, however, the integrity of film, especially in America, is often compromised by a commercial system in which the profit motive may dictate that a group of businessmen rather than the director has the final cut of the film; for example Sympathy for the Devil is a studio’s cut of Jean-Luc Godard’s original film, 1 + 1.

Despite the impediments to excellence in filmmaking, the best recent movies deserve to be seen as art rather than entertainment and to be taken seriously, whether or not one likes or agrees with the director’s worldview. [Page 53] (After all how could one be entertained by alienation, sexual perversion, cannibalism, or total annihilation?) Joseph Morgenstern, one of America’s leading film critics, wrote recently that “the movies are on to something big—the end of the world”. As his essay “Bang! Apocalypse for Sale” suggests, filmmakers throughout the world today are indeed caught up in the dark heart of this age of transition. They are providing, and audiences are responding to a singular vision of the end of an age. In the underrated Zabriskie Point Antonioni shows the hero dying a meaningless death and the gradual radicalization of the heroine who in fantasy blows up a desert mansion symbolizing the gross materialism and dehumanization of her society. Fellini Satyricon depicts a transitional Rome, savagely pagan and pre-Christian, a world unlike ours but perhaps as grotesque and similarly coming apart at its moral and spiritual seams. Stanley Kubrick’s often tedious 2001: A Space Odyssey implies that man has reached the technological limits of his world and must either evolve his spiritual being or face destruction. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend is a surrealistic vision of a world without love or moral commitment. The Damned, Luchino Visconti’s film, originally titled Götterdämmerung, displays by analogy a society stoking the fires of spiritual, moral, and physical perversion, flaming into personal decadence and political fascism in the catastrophe of the Third Reich. Even the joy of Woodstock is tempered by realization of the problems inherent in massive overpopulation and scarcity of resources.

Although apocalypse is one theme linking these films, other directors have explored equally cataclysmic concerns but on different levels of human involvement. The shocking conclusion of Easy Rider is the callous murder of the two young outsiders by two insiders who might represent one brand of American “law” as much as our lawlessness. Sydney Pollacks’ They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? gives us the harrowing metaphor of the 1930’s marathon dance to show the degradation of man in pursuit of winning and of profit and the ultimate destruction of the perennial loser, Gloria, shot at her own invitation. In Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger views the urban jungle and focuses on Joe Buck, struggling for his manhood only to discover that it lies not in his male prowess but in his capacity to feel, to care for, and to love another human being. Medium Cool explores the manipulation of people and events by impersonal news media in a turbulent, factionalized society. Alice’s Restaurant reaffirms the basic innocence and individuality of youth in a society which places a premium on conformity and would as soon draft the young to their deaths as let them live in a style of their own. And M*A*S*H epitomizes the waste of human life in the insanity of war, in which outrageous humor is the one defense against the horrible realities of blood and carnage.

Uniting these personal statements of the human condition, and linking them as well to the films of catastrophe is the underlying theme of the cheapness of human life. It becomes obvious that in every age of transition, when civilizations appear to disintegrate, belief in a Supreme Being or in the sustaining strength of the society itself wanes, people turn inward out of hopelessness and despair, and consequently individual life becomes bankrupt.

In its depiction of Roman decadence, Fellini Satyricon is infused with the director’s particular consciousness and unmistakably bears his stamp. Like La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and Juliet of the Spirits, it is a gallery of typical images—of the sea, of bare plazas and stark architectural forms, of shadowy nights contrasted to brilliant days, of faces each more grotesque than the last. Unlike his earlier works, however, Fellini Satyricon is an attempt to recreate a pre-Christian world, haunted by death and by the fading shadows of its own gods. For the protagonists and most of the characters they encounter, the ultimate value is self-indulgence, feasting [Page 54] without hunger, and having sex without love. Out of the panoply of hedonists only one couple stands distinctly for love and honor and decency. They are believers, one infers, in the old republican Rome and in the gods who had watched faithfully over the fortunes of their ancestors. Condemned to death because they vary from the values of their society, they choose instead to die at their own hands. It is a uniquely Fellini image, a brief flickering of purity and innocence amidst overwhelming decadence.

Fellini Satyricon illuminates an incongruity which is both obvious and easily overlooked by us: an age may prize worldly pleasures and pursuits and the gratification of physical desires, but because others are always sacrificed to the self, life for everyone becomes precarious and cheap. In the opening scenes of the film a leisured audience enjoys a Roman version of “living theater” in which an actor is led to a block where his hand is chopped off. (The theater is figuratively just a step away from the delights of the coliseum.) The status of the central characters fluctuates wildly between patronage and slavery. Even the gods are not immune to the chances of Fate; the protagonists, Encolpius and Ascyltus, seek to exploit a hermaphrodite demigod by taking it from its profitable shrine, inadvertently leading it to its death.

Because the setting is strange and the sky if often tinged with an apocalyptic glow, it is easy to accept Fellini’s image of his characters as figures from a time-worn frieze, relics of a dead civilization. Yet the parallels between Rome in the first century A.D. and our own age are striking and intentional. The ambitious, intriguing industrial magnates in The Damned preside over orgies and the destruction of other lives as calmly as Fellini’s Romans; with the rise of National Socialism in Germany the former head of the family steelworks and his wife are destroyed, like Fellini’s republicans, because they stand against the tide. In the same period, the 1930’s, in America we see in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? a dance marathon spectacle in which, enticed by food and promises of a grand prize, people with nothing else to do drive themselves to mental and physical collapse and finally to death. The dance floor is a miniature coliseum, but the gladiators in the ring are condemned by their own despair and hopelessness rather than by any moral convictions.

The films discussed differ, perhaps, only in the degree of their preoccupation with cataclysm and in their visions of regeneration. In Weekend Godard presents the trappings of modern life at their most sinister but no human beings with whom we can identify; his characters are one-dimensional and dehumanized, and they all come to a bad end. The destruction is total, and there is no hint of a phoenix rising from the ashes. Easy Rider overwhelms the viewer with scenic beauty; as in Weekend, the countryside is idyllic. Its central characters are, however, believable if not altogether admirable human beings, and they are destroyed by a society they could neither accept nor reject wholeheartedly.

Zabriskie Point has also been seen as an essentially cataclysmic and nihilistic statement. Admittedly, Antonioni finds much to criticize in contemporary American life. His streets are lined with billboards; policemen and students are shown compulsively at odds. The vista in Death Valley for which the film is named is stark and barren, and the film ends in explosions superimposed on explosions, a vivid depiction of destruction.

Yet, almost universally unfavorable reviews notwithstanding, Zabriskie Point is both life-affirming and positive in its vision of regeneration. Much has been made of the director’s choice of the Death Valley location for scenes of the deepening relationship [Page 55] between the hero and heroine; it has been called “the lowest, most symbolically lifeless spot in the United States and therefore the best spot to make symbolically doomed love”. But the Zabriskie Point setting is a paradox: barren and yet on Antonioni’s canvas exhilarating in its beauty, almost like the sea in its power to cleanse away the dross of civilization. The boy and girl are paradoxical, too. They have been called “lifeless” by those who fail to see that, although attractive physically, they are meant to be seen simply as average people. The so-called hippie love-in, Daria’s vision as she and Mark come together at Zabriskie Point, is rather Antonioni’s lyrical, cinematically poetic collage of the human body celebrating itself in the act of love, and the series of images suggests various primeval life forms energizing and regenerating the expansive wastes, awakening and growing through the power of love.

Nevertheless, it is the ending of the film which is most paradoxical and most misunderstood. Another of our veteran film critics, Pauline Kael, has written, “when America is so lusciously destroyed, is the sequence deliberately beautiful because Antonioni thinks America is so evil that destroying it is a beautiful act or because Antonioni is such an aesthete that . . . he cannot resist the photogenic glories of destruction?” She adds, “It is perhaps a true sign of his aristocratic aesthetics that in the final sequence, when America blows up, there are no bloody bodies, no people at all; only our material objects go up. And, even here, one cannot tell if this is because he wouldn’t be so crude as to show bloody bodies or because he is satiric and saying that America is nothing but garden furniture and books and the contents of our freezers—that we are a nation not of people but of objects”. The point, we believe, is that it is American materialism which Daria condemns to death, not American people, not even American materialists. And that is why the vision is beautiful, because some one from whom life still has meaning is consciously remaking her world. It is not unnatural that she starts by clearing away the possessions which have enslaved and diminished us. What indeed could be more beautiful?

The filmmakers, like the rest of us, are caught in a double vision of our time. It often seems that the death throes of our age will entrap the entire race, that, in other words, Godard’s hell is not far removed from the approaching reality. Then again we can see a dreary world such as Joe Buck’s in Midnight Cowboy lightened, if only fleetingly, by touches of love and selflessness. Humanity is capable in our time of virtually transforming itself and the world or of debasing itself and despoiling the planet.

For the Bahá’í this double vision is acute and often painful. It is indeed the end of the age, and apocalypse is at hand; yet life itself is too precious for one to rejoice that the fortresses man has built and then imprisoned himself within are crumbling. Unfortunately, what is happening is not fantasy, and unlike Antonioni we cannot exempt people from destruction, however much we might will it. Indeed our age, as Shoghi Effendi describes it, is much like Fellini’s Rome:

The chief idols in the desecrated temple of mankind are none other than the triple gods of Nationalism, Racialism and Communism, at whose altars governments and peoples, whether democratic or totalitarian, at peace or at war, of the East or of the West, Christian or Islamic, are, in various forms and in different degrees, now worshiping. Their high priests are the politicians and the worldly-wise, the so-called sages of the age; their sacrifice, the flesh and blood of the slaughtered multitudes; their incantations outworn shibboleths and insidious and irreverent formulas; their incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends from the lacerated hearts of the bereaved, the maimed, and the homeless.

[Page 56] As in Rome, we have the potential both of destroying our civilization and of contributing important elements to man’s regeneration. Then, as must be true now, equilibrium could only be restored through a spiritual revitalization, infusing man with renewed belief in eternal truths and a new appreciation of that which is divine in our humanness. If the best of modern films are onto something big, apocalypse, we would have to say that a few, very few, hint at something even more significant— the reaffirmation of those human qualities within us necessary to the moral and personal regeneration of the individual, and thereby of the social order in general. But these films have no where to go—Ratso Rizzo dies leaving Joe Buck in the sterile middle class of Miami, and Daria symbolically blows up the materialism of America only to drive off in a desert. Yet compassion, brotherhood, and a vague commitment to remaking one’s environment are there, however weakly suggested. These are the human qualities which need to be revitalized in man as a vital component in the first stirrings of a new age.

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Authors & Artists

JOHN F. DUMBRILL, a junior high school art teacher, holds two degrees from the University of Wyoming. His interests in art, comparative religion, and education are reflected in his recent activities: a series of paintings illustrating the cultural contributions of various ethnic groups and religions, and a series of art classes for culturally deprived children.

GLENN W. HAWKES is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts and formerly the chairman of the social studies department at St. Mark’s School in Dallas, Texas. He is working on a curriculum design which rests on the notion of an emerging world culture.

GARY MORRISON, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, has contributed both a movie review (Winter 1968-69) and a book review (Winter 1969-70) to WORLD ORDER. He has recently received a Master’s Degree in the Southeast Asia Studies program at Yale University.

GAYLE MORRISON, an Associate Editor of WORLD ORDER, has recently received a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of Massachusetts.

DAVID F. TRASK is Professor of History and Chairman of the Department of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island. His interests lie in American foreign relations, especially American diplomacy during World War I. He has written a brief interpretative survey of American foreign relations entitled Victory Without Peace.

ALLAN L. WARD is a familiar name in the pages of WORLD ORDER, having written an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (Winter 1968-69) and an introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Earth’s Holocaust” (Spring 1969). Mr. Ward, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Public Address and Oral Interpretation from Ohio University, is Director of Research and Staff Development at Arkansas Enterprises for the Blind.

ART CREDITS: p. 3, photo by Jay Conrader; p. 7, drawing by Mark Fennessy; p. 15, drawing by Cecil G. Trew, from a private collection; pp. 18, 21, drawings by Mark Fennessy; p. 27, photo of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, courtesy of Bahá’í Publishing Trust; p. 52, drawing by Mark Fennessy; pp. 51. 56, photos by Jay Conrader; back cover, photo by Jay Conrader.

MARK FENNESSY, a honors graduate of Yale University, contributes regularly to WORLD ORDER.

JAY CONRADER is a freelance writer and photographer.

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