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[Page 159]

WORLD ORDER

AUGUST 1939

THE VALLEY OF LOVE

Juliet Thompson

CAN EDUCATION BRING WORLD PEACE?

Bertha Hyde Kirkpatrick

A MEETING WITH ‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ

Martha L. Root

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA

Anna McClure Sholl

THE UNIVERSE IN PRAYER

Maye Harvey Gift

[Page 160]

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

AUGUST, 1939 VOLUME 5 NUMBER 5

SPIRITUAL REALISM • Editorial ................................ 161

THE VALLEY OF LOVE • JULIET THOMPSON ......................... 163

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE • SHAO CHANG LEE ............... 167

TOMORROW • Poem • EVERETT TABOR GAMAGE ....................... 172

GARNERING AMONG THE GLEANINGS • DALE S. COLE ................. 173

CAN EDUCATION BRING WORLD PEACE? • BERTHA HYDE KIRKPATRICK ... 176

ISLAM, XI • ALI-KULI KHAN .................................... 178

A MEETING WITH ‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ • MARTHA L. ROOT ................. 183

THE VISION • Poem • ELSIE PATTERSON CRANMER .................. 184

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA • ANNA McCLURE SHOLL .................. 185

TO ALL NATIONS • Poem • ROSE NOLLER .......................... 190

THE UNIVERSE IN PRAYER • MAYE HARVEY GIFT .................... 191

THE GOOD SOCIETY • Book Review • ALICE SIMMONS COX ........... 195

VIEWING THE WORLD AS AN ORGANISM

Change of address should be reported one month in advance.

WORLD ORDER is published monthly in New York, N. Y., by the Publishing Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada. EDITORS: Stanwood Cobb, Bertha Hyde Kirkpatrick and Horace Holley. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Alice Simmons Cox, Genevieve L. Coy, G. A. Shook, Dale S. Cole, Marcia Atwater, Annamarie Honnold, Marzieh Carpenter, Hasan M. Balyusi, Shirin Fozdar, Inez Greeven. BUSINESS MANAGER: C. R. Wood. PUBLICATION OFFICE: 135 East 50th Street, New York, N. Y. EDITORIAL OFFICE: 119 Waverly Place, New York, N. Y.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: $2.00 per year, $1.75 to Public Libraries. Rate to addresses outside the United States, $2.25, foreign Library rate, $2.00, Single copies, 20 cents. Checks and money orders should be made payable to World Order Magazine, 135 East 50th Street, New York, N. Y. Entered as second class matter, May 1, 1935, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Contents copyrighted 1939 by BAHA’I PUBLISHING COMMITTEE. Title Registered at U. S. Patent Office.

August 1939, Volume 5, Number 5

[Page 161]

WORLD ORDER

August 1939 Volume 5 No. 5

SPIRITUAL REALISM

EVERY increase in true insight produces a necessary revision in our definitions of value. Realism, for example, which has implied conformity with material facts and conditions, undergoes complete transformation of meaning when we realize that the paramount, hence “real” facts and conditions are spiritual and not physical or material in nature.

This truth applies directly to the foundations of personal and social virtue at a time when virtue is being revolutionized through the breakdown of the social structure and the impairment of individual psychology.

The realist has been he who conformed to that pressure recognized as the necessity of survival in a competitive civilization. Making certain of the security of his investments, he has abandoned the maintenance of general ideals and traditional virtues to those less fitted for the material struggle. He has seized and exploited the commonwealth of natural resources, and felt interest in government only to the extent that he could assure himself a free hand in his personal enterprise. Identifying survival with material wealth, his realism carried him triumphantly to his goal with no thought of the effect upon other individuals or upon society.

But realism, applied to the larger movements of history, proves that this attitude even in the past has been a perversion of personal romanticism rather than realistic. It has been the projection of a fierce subjective and personal idealism of an unhappy and ignorant soul into the mysterious movements of cause and effect. For at no infrequent intervals the revulsions of his social environment has destroyed the power and effectiveness of his accumulated booty. The feudal estates of France were made fatal liabilities and not assets at the outbreak of the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

The realism of wealth can be recognized today as that condition in which wealth benefits all who directly or indirectly contribute to its creation. The separation of any form of wealth from the process of social evolution means that that form will sooner or later be destroyed. When the effects of such causes are realized, there is no power nor authority on earth capable of averting nor staying [Page 162] the destined decree. It is not the wealth which is evil, but its segregation from the realm of social conscience and will. There is no automatic socialistic principle which can be applied mechanically to determine the limits of private property. The only limits recognized by destiny are those which concern motive and use, not legal title.

Age after age the energetic and intelligent minority has sought to guarantee the perpetuation of its wealth by setting up the power of government as a bulwark against revolution, and age after age the function of government has misrepresented the real elements of social security. Age after age, consequently, the eventual revolution has gone beyond the limited aim of removing one or a few oppressors and aimed at the control of the state itself. The mechanism of defense has become the instrument of attack upon its own creators.

The social process today remains unchanged except for the significant fact that the operation of cause and effect has become extended to the international field. The psychological factors previously inherent in the process of cause and effect are today raised to the stature of sociological laws. The former limited conflict between mob and rulers is become the unlimited conflict between armed states.

We are in dire need of a new realism, a new sense of history and of society, which will enable us to realize the predominance of destiny, made visible as the working of cause and effect, throughout the whole area of mankind and civilization. What we formerly termed revolution was the restoration of the balance of justice when injustice had become crystallized in the very structure of the local or national community, but modern war, apparently so different from lawless revolution of the historic mob type, is in reality the restoration of that same balance. For as the individual or group previously withdrew from their local or national community for the segregation of their power and privilege, so now the nations withdraw from the world community for precisely the same reason. We find collective reasons for doing exactly what the selfish few have previously done under the excuse of personal survival.

Hence the helplessness of even the most powerful social institutions today in relation to the vital factors of currency and trade. The result proves that the world is desperately engaged in producing not wealth but poverty, not security but the most overwhelming menace mankind has ever faced.

Spiritual realism, the recognition of the supremacy of divine law over human statute, the realization that only the meek (those who obey divine law) can possibly inherit the earth, can alone reveal a path from this prevalent struggle into the realms of social peace and well being. Men need to sink themselves in the Ocean of Truth. They have become sick unto death from immersion in depths of error. Until the balance of justice is embodied in an international government there can be no security nor peace.

H.H.

[Page 163]

THE VALLEY OF LOVE

JULIET THOMPSON

THE “Seven Valleys” of Bahá’u’lláh is a letter written by Him to an eminent Sufi, in which the Poet of poets, the supreme Revelator of this day, chooses a theme used in the Islamic middle ages by the Sufi poet, Attar: the seven stages through which the soul must pass in its migration from self to God.

“Not until the whole nature is consumed to the roots,” wrote Attar, “can the heart become a casket of rubies to pay the price.” Bahá’u’lláh, in His Seven Valleys, leads us as far as the Valley of Annihilation, in which the fire of love, consuming at last “the whole nature,” unites the soul to the Divine Beloved. Then He tells us that even so pure a state as this is “but the first gate to the city of the heart.”

The Valley of Love is the second stage in this spiritual journey.

The Sufis’ interpretation of the Islamic Religion is, in a sense, Pantheistic, for to them the Essence the Deity Itself permeates all created things and the whole creation is in the process of becoming God. According to the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, the Essence of the Creator is like the sun, which, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains, “does not divide itself into luminous particles” and enter planetary life, but emanates life-giving rays. Thus the soul’s relation to its Creator is one of emanation. Our only means of comprehending the Divine Essence is through the great Messenger of God, who are as flawless mirrors reflecting to us His holy Attributes.

Throughout the “Seven Valleys,” a delicate ear will hear the call of Bahá’u’lláh to the Sufis to recognize the Messenger of today.

The traveler in the Valley of Search, when he has “found a trace of the Traceless Friend and inhaled the fragrance of the lost Joseph from the Divine Herald,” immediately plunges into the Valley of Love and “is consumed by the fire of love.”

He has found the Messenger, has seen for the first time, powerfully reflected, the unclouded Beauty of God. And he has become like a new-born babe in a strange and glorious world.

A Bahá’í, writing from Akká after her first meeting with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá— (that pure and gleaming Mirror who reflected into this world the glory of Bahá’u’lláh) said, “The past is obliterated. I am filled with love for the face of my Lord. This is reality—all else a dream.”

If you will pause and consider what it means to see, in the mirror of a peerless Being who speaks to us with human lips and looks upon us through human eyes, the perfections of God, [Page 164] the might of His love, the depths of His knowledge, the transcendency of holy attributes, you will understand that the first glimpse of such a revelation of spiritual splendor must plunge the soul into a new condition. A bewildered and confused condition. For such is the state of “the traveler” in the Valley of Love. He is “alien to both worlds.”

Once I saw a picture by a great artist, Kahlil Gibran, called “The Beholder.” A man is standing on a mountain-peak, bowed before a blaze of glory bursting through clouds, amazement in every line of his lonely figure. This to me is a representation of the traveler in the Valley of Love. He stands on the threshold of a new world. He has caught but the first glimpse of the light bursting through clouds. But this glimpse is enough to make earth shrink for him. His former life, his “little life,” seems to have been a state of death, a condition narrow as the babe’s life in the matrix— a twilight compared with the blaze into which he now looks. All that pertains to this “little life” is nullified by the great new vision, and, with the transformation of his values, the disintegration of his old safeties, his old attachments, begins.

The traveler has seen in the mighty Messenger the symbol of the Cross, of the seed sacrificed in the earth that the Tree of Life might be planted in this world, freeing the world of its miseries through its fruits of Divine Love and Faith. The spirit of the disciple wakes in this seeker. He too would sacrifice his life for so transcendent an object. Egoistic ambitions can no longer retain any foothold in him. A pure ambition has replaced these. Human love seems no more than a step on the way, as he contemplates the heart’s true goal, the image of the Divine Beloved in the perfection of the Messenger. As yet the traveler has not advanced to that Valley where all loves branch from one Love, all work is exalted into worship. Stunned by his vision of light, he cannot adjust to human life the new, overwhelming experience. “The harvest of reason is consumed.” The logical conclusions of his finite mind, concerned with the circumstances of a limited experience, are useless in this Kingdom of Faith, into which he has gazed from its threshold.

The traveler is now disqualified for the world in which his body lives. In his state of ecstasy he is unintelligible to others, even those once nearest to him. His new language is as a foreign tongue to them. He has forgotten theirs. His aims are transposed to another dimension than the world in which they function. Their goal is not consciously his goal. He becomes a helpless stranger in their midst, and while he yearns to carry them with him on his wondrous voyage of discovery, by his very actions, his futile zeal, he is ever defeating his own purpose, driving his dear ones farther and farther from him and from the Truth he worships.

No wonder that in this Valley the traveler “rides the steed of pain.” For though, as Bahá’u’lláh sublimely says, “he seeks no asylum save the Friend” and “would joyfully offer a hundred lives in the way of the Beloved,” nevertheless the tentacles of the heart are slow to disentangle themselves from [Page 165] the dear objects of attachment, or from the subtler attachments to the hidden self, and as yet the traveler has not reached that valley where he “sees the end from the beginning,” “peace in war,” “life in death,” “reconciliation in estrangement.” Still, though he must inevitably suffer in this process of detachment, which will in the end enable him to love with the freedom of the divine love, in his state of ecstasy he courts pain. As Attar writes, “Let the infidel have error and the faithful Faith, Attar seeks only an atom of Thy pain.” Dimly aware of its import in the “Way of Love,” his being is focused on pain.

A visitor in the Prison of Akká, called to the presence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “the Servant of the Glory,” saw in that presence the unattainable beauty and perfection. An agony of desire was wakened in her to bring to His feet gifts, an agony of realization that she had nothing to bring, nor would ever have a worthy gift for the majesty of this Servant unless His holy Spirit first bestowed it upon her. So, when He said to her, “What would you ask of me? Speak!” she answered, “I want to suffer.” For instinctively she knew that “not till the whole nature is consumed to the roots can the heart become a casket of rubies to pay the price.”

“You have given your heart, my daughter,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá replied.

“This heart is not fit to give. I want to give everything it loves.”

“You may,” said ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

Thus, the “lover,” who “loses consciousness of himself and all else,” is willing—nay eager—to immolate others, as well as his own life, on his altar of sacrifice—to build a great funeral pyre for himself and his beloved alike!

Though such a condition of mind and heart renders the seeker more or less useless to man or God, nevertheless this violent wrench seems to be a step which must be taken in the migration from self to the Creator, from the kingdom of the unlit reason to the Kingdom of Faith, or Illumination. We are taught by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that powerful though the rational faculty is, “not till it turns to the Kingdom of lights will it become reflective of rays;” and not until the heart is filled with love for the Divine Beloved (that passion and ecstasy of love awakened by His revealed Attributes) can it be a radiating center for the universal love. For this is Deific in nature and must be born of the Deific. When this love enters the heart of man, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us, all the powers of the universe will be realized in him. But the heart must be “cleansed and purified” for the reception of such a Guest. And as lesser things can only be shed, or renounced, by filling their place with that which is greater, so nothing but love for the Supreme Beloved can empty the heart for His possession of it.

“The whole problem,” writes Bahá’u’lláh, “is a circle around the Beloved”—He who is made accessible and irresistible to us by the reflection of His beauties in the Holy Messenger.

Although, to the bystander, a seeker in such a wilderness as the Valley of Love is at best a wearisome fanatic, unpredictable in his actions, unbalanced and inarticulate, Bahá’u’lláh, [Page 166] in His all-comprehending wisdom, sees with another eye. While He quotes, “Love is a stranger to the two worlds; in him are two and seventy insanities,” He also Writes, “O my brother, would you attain the Joseph of the Beauty of the Friend, you must needs enter the Egypt of Love; and would you open the inner eye, like Jacob you must sacrifice your outward eyes; and would you commune with the Friend of Ecstasy, you must needs burn with the fire of Love. . . . Wherefore, O friend, renounce the self in order to find the peerless One; and eschew the mortal earth in order to repose in the divine nest. Wouldst thou kindle the fire of existence and be admitted to the Way of Love be nothing.

“‘Love does not admit those conscious of life;

The royal Falcon disdains hunting the lifeless mouse.’”

As in the Valley of Search He paints for us a great picture, a canvas of the whole world wherein “all beings” are seeking God, even such as “sift the dust” to find Him, so in the Valley of Love Bahá’u’lláh paints the universal suffering, caused as by a cup of poison in the hand of God. “Love’s wrath is the source of all that is tinged with red.” All pallor upon the faces is the effect of God’s poison. “To the lover’s taste this poison is sweeter than honey.” But every creature is favored with the poisoned cup that the conscious seeker in him may wake and start upon the journey of the valleys, finding the Valley of Love, then groping his way through its jungle into the tranquil Valley of Divine Knowledge—traveling on and on, till at last he reaches the gate of the city of the heart.

The second in a series on The Seven Valleys of Bahá’u’lláh.

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Center your energies in the propagation of the Faith of God. Whoso is worthy of so high a calling, let him arise and promote it. Whoso is unable, it is his duty to appoint him who will, in his stead, proclaim this Revelation, whose power hath caused the foundations of the mightiest structures to quake, every mountain to be crushed into dust, and every soul to be dumbfounded. . . Let your principal concern be to rescue the fallen from the slough of impending extinction, and to help him embrace the ancient Faith of God. Your behavior towards your neighbor should be such as to manifest clearly the signs of the one true God, for ye are the first among men to be re-created. by His Spirit, the first to adore and bow the knee before Him, the first to circle round His throne of glory.—BAHÁ’U’LLÁH.

[Page 167]

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE

SHAO CHANG LEE

THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH

WHEN the great principle of Tao was carried into operation, all under heaven worked for the common good. They chose men of virtue and ability (for office). They practised faith and cultivated harmony. Thus men did not love their parents and children only. They made provision for the aged until their death; secured employment for the able-bodied; and gave the means of growing up to the young. They provided sustenance for the widows, orphans, and childless men, and those who were disabled by disease, so that they were all sufficiently maintained. All men had their proper work and all women their homes. Men extracted wealth from the earth, out of dislike that it should be wasted, but without any desire to keep it for their own gratification. They exerted their utmost strength in labor, never solely for their own benefit. Hence selfish scheming was repressed and found no development, and robbery, theft, rebellion, and banditry were unknown. Hence the outer gates remained open and were not shut. This was what was called the Great Commonwealth.

THE GREAT CRIME

When Ch’iu was the chief officer to the Chi family, he was unable to change the evil ways of his master. Moreover he exacted from the people twice as much grain as they formerly paid. (Upon hearing this) Confucius said, “Ch’iu is no disciple of mine. You, my pupils, may beat the drum and censure him.” Looking at the subject from this case, we perceive that when a ruler was not practising benevolent government, all who enriched him were expelled by Confucius: how much more readily would he have expelled those who fight for their ruler and encourage a warlike spirit in him! They fight on the contentions of territory. They slaughter people till the fields are filled (with corpses). They fight to gain control of cities. They slaughter people till the cities are filled (with corpses). This is what is called “leading (the spirits of) the earth to devour human flesh.” Death is not enough for such a crime. Therefore those who advance themselves by their skill in war should suffer the severest punishment. Next to them should be punished those who intrigue to unite the leaders of some states in league against other states; and next to them, those who by plans make the most of the land, turning every bit of it to account, not for the benefit of the people, but only for the good of the ruler.

[Page 168]

JUSTICE AND HARMONY

Human beings live together; they seek for the same things, but with different methods. They have the same desires, but different degrees of knowledge. This is natural. Both the intelligent and the stupid are alike in having some capacities. But what they are capable of is not the same, and here the intelligent and stupid differ. If their circumstances remained the same while their degree of intelligence differed; if they could act selfishly without incurring trouble; if they could give free rein to their desires without end; then the people’s heart would be aroused to strife and there would be no contentment. . . . Poverty is a misfortune and strife is calamity. To rescue people from misfortune and eliminate calamity, there is nothing like making divisions of occupation clear and socializing the people. . . .

Human beings possess spirit, life, knowledge, and a sense of justice. Hence they are the highest beings on earth. Though their strength is not equal to that of the ox and their running is not equal to that of a horse, yet the ox and the horse are used by them. Why? Because men are able to socialize themselves, whereas these others are unable. How is it that men are able to socialize themselves? Because they have divisions of occupation. How can they carry out their divisions of occupation? Through their sense of justice. Thus when occupations are divided justly there is harmony; when there is harmony there is unity; when there is unity there is much strength; when there is much strength there is power; and when men are powerful they can conquer things. Hence they can have mansions and houses for habitation. Hence they can order their actions according to the four seasons, control all things, and make beneficial to the whole world.

LOVE OF PEACE

He who with Tao assists the ruler of men will oppose conquest of the world by force of arms. For such an attempt is bound to invite reprisal. Where armies are quartered briars and thorns grow. Great wars unfailingly are followed by years of dearth. Therefore a good general acts resolutely and then stops. He ventures not to take by force. Be resolute but not boastful; resolute but not haughty; resolute but not arrogant; resolute because you cannot avoid it; resolute but not violent. For in the scheme of things, a time of vigor is followed by a period of decay. Violence is against Tao, and what is against Tao will soon perish.

Fine weapons are ill-omened tools. They are hated by all creatures. Therefore he who has Tao does not rely on them. . . . Weapons are indeed ill-omened tools. They are not the tools of the princely man, who uses them when it is absolutely unavoidable, for he believes in peace. When he wins (a war) he does not glorify it. For to glorify war means to delight in the slaughter of human beings. And he who delights in the slaughter of human beings will never have his ambition fulfilled in the world. . . . He who has slaughtered multitudes of human beings should grieve for what he has done and weep. He that has [Page 169] won battles should be received with mourning ceremonies.

CULTIVATION OF SINCERITY

“I have long desired to see you,” said Prince Wu of Wei to Hsu the Unghostly. “I wish to love the people, and for the sake of justice, put an end to war. Can this be done?”

“It cannot,” replied Hsu the Unghostly. “Love of people is the beginning of all evil to the people. To put an end to war for the sake of justice is the origin of all wars. If your Highness starts from this basis, the result will be disastrous. For that which you wish to make beautiful is itself ugly. Although your Highness wish to be loving and just, I fear your love and justice are false. . . . Have nothing with you which is treacherous. Seek not to conquer other people in cunning, in plotting, in war. If I slaughter the scholars and the common people of another nation and annex its territory in order to satisfy my selfish desire and my spirit,—irrespective of military skill, wherein does the victory lie? If your Highness will only abstain, that will be enough. Cultivate the sincerity that is within your breast, so as to be responsive to the conditions of your environment, and be not aggressive, then the people will escape death and what need for your Highness to put an end to war?”

RIGHT AND WRONG

Here is a man who enters his neighbor’s orchard and steals some peaches and plums. When the theft is known, this man is condemned by the public, and, when caught, will be fined by the governmental authorities. Why? Because he has injured others to profit himself. . . . If he goes as far as to waylay an innocent man, take away his fur coat and cloak, and stab him with his sword, then his crime will be greater than that of stealing a horse or a cow. Why? Because he has done thereby a greater wrong. And the greater the wrong a man does to his fellowmen, the greater is his sin, and the severer shall be his punishment. In all these cases the gentlemen of the world agree to condemn this man by declaring “He is wrong.” Now here is the greatest of all crimes —the invasion of one nation by another. But the gentlemen of the world not only decline to condemn it, but even praise it, and declare: “It is right.” Shall we say that these gentlemen know the distinction between right and wrong?

Killing one man constitutes a crime and is punishable by death. Applying this principle, the killing of ten men makes the crime ten times greater and ten times as punishable; similarly the killing of a hundred men increases the crime a hundred-fold, and makes it that many times as punishable. The gentlemen of the world unanimously condemn and pronounce the killing of even one man to be wrong. But when they come to judge the greatest of all wrongs—the invasion of one state by another, which is a hundred thousand times more criminal than the killing of one innocent man—they cannot see that they should condemn it. On the contrary, they praise it and declare it right! . . .

Here is a man who sees a few black objects, and calls them black, but [Page 170] who, after seeing many black objects, calls them white. We surely say that this man does not know the distinction between black and white. Here are the gentlemen of the world, who condemn a petty wrong and praise the greatest of all wrongs—the attack of one nation upon another—and declare it right. Can we say that they have a clear notion of what is right and what is wrong?

MAN AND UNIVERSE

Men resemble heaven and earth in that they possess the five elements. Of all creatures man is the most highly endowed. But his nails and teeth do not suffice to procure him maintenance and shelter; his skin and sinews do not suffice to defend him; his running cannot help him to attain profit nor escape harm, and he has neither hair nor feathers to protect him from the cold and heat. He is thus compelled to depend on things to nourish his nature, to rely on his intelligence, and not to put his confidence in brute force. Therefore intelligence is appreciated because it preserves us and brute force despised because it encroaches upon things.

I am not the owner of my own body, for I, when I am born, must complete it, nor do I possess things, for having got them, I must part with them again. The body is essential for birth, but things are essential for its maintenance.

If there were a body born complete, I could not possess it, and I could not possess things not to be parted with. For possessing a body or things would be unlawfully appropriating a body belonging to the whole universe, and appropriating things belonging to the universe. Would a sage do this?

He who regards as common property a body appertaining to the universe and the things of the universe is a perfect man.

And that is the highest degree of perfection.

FROM THE “TREATISE ON EDUCATION”

If a ruler wishes to transform the people and to perfect their manners and customs, must he not start by giving them education?

The jade uncut will not form a vessel for use; and if men do not learn, they will not know the way of life. On this account the ancient kings, when establishing states and governing the people, made instruction and schools a primary object. As it is said in the Charge of Yueh, “The thoughts from first to last should be fixed on learning.”

When one learns, he knows his own deficiencies; when he teaches, he knows the difficulties of learning. After one knows his deficiencies, he is able to stimulate himself to effort. Hence it is said, “Teaching and learning help each other;” as it is said in the Charge of Yueh, “Teaching is the half of learning.”

According to the system of teachings nowadays, the teachers repeat aloud the words on the tablets which they see before them, multiplying their questions. They speak of the learners’ making rapid progress, but pay no regard to whether they actually learn what they are taught. In their teaching they are diffident. What they inculcate is contrary to what is right, and the learners are not given [Page 171] what they seek. Consequently, the latter are distressed by their studies and hate their teachers; they are embittered by the difficulties, and do not find any advantage from their labor. They may seem to finish their work, but they quickly forget what they have studied. Does not this result in poor instruction?

The rules aimed at in the Great College are: the prevention of evil before it is manifested; the giving of instruction just at the time it is required; the adaptation of the lessons to present conditions and the giving of encouragement to students to set good examples for each other. These four rules will make teaching more effectual and flourishing.

Prohibition of evil after it has been manifested meets with opposition, and is not successful. Instruction given after the time for it is past, is done with toil and carried out with difficulty. The communication of lessons in an indiscriminating manner and without suitability produces injury and disorder, and fails in its object. Learning alone and without friends makes one feel solitary, uncultivated, and not well-informed. Friendship with the pleasure-loving leads to opposition to one’s teacher. Friendship with the dissolute leads to the neglect of one’s learning. These six things all tend to make teaching in vain.

A man of learning, who knows the causes which make instruction successful, and which make instruction ineffective, can become a teacher of others. Thus in his teaching he leads and does not drag; he strengthens and does not discourage; he opens the way but does not conduct to the end (without the learner’s own efforts). Leading and not dragging produces harmony. Strengthening and not discouraging makes attainment easy. Opening the way and not conducting to the end makes the learner thoughtful. He who promotes such harmony, attainment, and thoughtfulness may be pronounced a skillful teacher.

Among learners there are four defects with which the teacher must make himself acquainted. Some err in trying to acquire too many studies at once; some in that their studies are too few; some, in that they feel that they can learn without effort; and some, in the readiness with which they give up a difficult study. These four defects arise from the difference of their attitude toward study. When a teacher understands the attitude of his students, he can save them from the defect to which they are liable. Teaching should be directed to develop any natural inclination in a learner.

A good teacher makes his students able to carry out his ideas. His words are brief, but far-reaching; unpretentious, but deep; with few, but apt illustrations. In this way he may be said to perpetuate his ideas.

When a man of talent and virtue knows the difficulty on the one hand and the facility on the other in the attainment of learning, and knows also the good and the bad qualities of his pupils, he can vary his methods of teaching. When he can vary his methods of teaching, he can be a master teacher indeed. . .

If the teacher is skillful, though he may seem indifferent, the ready learner will double the attainment of another, [Page 172] and in the end will ascribe his achievement to the skill of his master. The slow learner, while the teacher is diligent with him, yet makes only half the attainment of the former, and in the end is dissatisfied with the teacher.

The skillful questioner is like a workman addressing himself to deal with a hard tree. First he attacks the easy parts, and then the knotty. The teacher talks to the pupil for a long time until the subject is explained. The unskillful questioner takes the opposite course.

The teacher who skillfully waits to be questioned, may be compared to a tuneful bell when it is struck. Struck with a small hammer, it gives a small sound. Struck with a great one, it gives a great sound. But let it be struck leisurely and properly, and it will give out all the melodious sound of which it is capable. He who is not skillful in replying to questions is the opposite of this. This all describes the method of making progress in learning.

He who gives only the learning supplied by his memory in conversations is not fit to be a teacher. Is it not necessary that he should hear the questions of his pupils? Yes, but if they are not able to put questions, he should put subjects before them. Should he do so, and if even then they do not show any knowledge of the subjects, he may let them alone.

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TOMORROW

EVERETT TABOR GAMAGE

TOMORROW: shall it repetition be

Of all the heartaches, fear and misery

Of yesterday? Or shall the spirit move

Lit by a brighter light, with footsteps free

In realms found only by who find Thy love?

[Page 173]

GARNERING AMONG THE GLEANINGS

DALE S. COLE

IN years past, and even in some places today, it is customary, after grain has been harvested and the sheaves gathered in, to glean the fields. Women and children are sent out to garner the single stray wisps of grain. While these gleanings are not the important part of the harvest, they represent the difference between thrift and shiftlessness.

A similar experience may be encountered in the harvesting of knowledge, especially that relating to matters spiritual and Divine. A new book comes into our possession. We read it once, twice, or thrice and place it on the shelf with the complacent feeling that we have done pretty well by it, despite the fact that each reading has brought to us new ideas and new meanings.

Sooner or later we cease to study diligently. We do not glean the field of the book’s possibilities for the last wisp of meaning which the present state of our development makes us capable of assimilating. In this are we not rather more neglectful than thrifty to our own detriment?

Every line and paragraph of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh is so laden with spiritual meanings and truths that no one can ever hope to garner for himself all of the possibilities even though he study continually, but he can use what he finds as he finds it, as the substance of continuous and progressive extension of his knowledge and experience.

We are taught that the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh “may be likened unto an ocean in whose depths are concealed innumerable pearls of great price, of surpassing lustre.” Some of the lesser pearls may be easily discernible whilst the great ones lie deeply imbedded in the writings and appear to us only when we really strive to find them through prayer and meditation. It pays to be thorough in this garnering for the harvest is “of great price.”

“This most great, this fathomless ocean is near, astonishingly near unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein.” In our garnering we do not have to go far afield, according to this assurance. But what is it that can be closer than our life vein? There seems to be but a single answer, that which is responsible for, that which animates and vitalizes the life vein— the Spirit. “The spirit that animateth the human heart is the knowledge of God. . . .”

Our garnering task, then, consists in acquiring knowledge of God, possibly bit by bit, as the women and children pick up the stray wisps of grain in the fields, a constant, life-long job [Page 174] but one of tremendous possibilities promising “pearls of surpassing lustre.” The reward is superlative.

As the fragments of knowledge are acquired, there is a complementary requirement, ere they can become effective, and that is a realization of what they mean, a consciousness of their actual potency in life, and subsequently their application to living.

Increasing knowledge brings with it an awareness of the forces operating in our lives and recognition of their source. Consciousness of God and His creation is, in effect, being in His court. “No man that seeketh Us will We ever disappoint, neither shall he that hath set his face towards Us be denied access to Our Court. . . .”

Imagine for the moment, an actual royal reception chamber, a huge rectangular shaped room with the throne at one end, its walls covered with priceless hangings. The king is seated on the throne. Near and around him are some of his subjects. Others are deployed near the center of the room while still others stand about near the walls. A few are hesitant just within the doors.

Since the king is in the chamber, all who are also therein are in his presence, in his court. It is true that some are nearer to him than others, and in this example one can readily distinguish all degrees of nearness, that those just within the portals are relatively far from the king as compared to those grouped closely about the throne, yet one important fact is to be recognized—that all who are in the chamber are in the presence of the king, regardless of their particular degree of nearness to the actual throne.

They are in the atmosphere of the court. Assuming our imaginary king to be all that the name implies, the kingly presence suggests a place of kingly thoughts and acts.

Since those who turn their faces towards God are not denied entrance into His court, may we not then be in that courtly chamber?

Is not one of the “pearls of great price,” one of the possible most useful gleanings, the feeling that those who recognize the Manifestation of God in His Day, are in the court of God, in His Presence, always and continuously? As a matter of fact we are under His protection, whether we realize it or not, but it is the realization that makes all the difference.

Being in the court chamber, are we not in the court atmosphere? It is a place and condition where nothing negative exists. It is a condition of light, knowledge, goodness, health and well being. “Every good thing is of God, and every evil thing is from yourselves.” If we consciously feel that we are in that court, then how can there be any room in our consciousnesses for the things that are not courtly, kingly and positive?

We pray that we may be healed of some disability and yet carry in our minds the feeling that we are not well, a negative rather than a positive attitude, resignation rather than the expectancy of real faith. If we are in The Presence, are we not then in a state where no negative aspects of life exist?

The essential of the matter is to attain to that consciousness of being in the court which is true faith, an experience of feeling rather than of [Page 175] thinking.

It is a proven fact that our physical bodies can live in one state and our mental and spiritual beings in another at the same time, as evidenced by dreams where physical limitations have no meaning.

It is possible to live mentally and spiritually within the Court, no matter what environment may surround our bodies, and living in that positive, beneficial atmosphere will have effect on the conditions of life.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá suggested something of the sort when He advised always replacing a negative thought with a positive one.

Does it not behoove those who have been honored and privileged by admittance into the court chamber, to make the most of that blessing by obeying the commands of God, by garnering the life-controlling truths from the writings and making their admonitions and suggestions the way of life? One can be in the court chamber and yet be relatively far from the throne and lead an ineffective, incomplete life as compared to the life it is possible for one to live. But even in such a state, one is in The Presence.

“O ye peoples of the world! Know assuredly that My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of my mercy for My creatures.”

“Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws, nay rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power. . . .”

“The first duty prescribed by God for His servants is the recognition of Him Who is the Day Spring of His Revelation, and the fountain of His Laws. . . . Whoso achieveth this duty hath attained to all good. . . .”

Are we living in the state suggested by that last line? If so, why not? The estate is ours, within the Court, ours by actually realizing that it is ours. By not only being in the court but by acting the part of one who is there, and knows it. The point involved is that of being and then of becoming endowed with courtly characteristics and convictions.

When we begin to acquire courtly manners and ways of thinking and acting, we take effective steps to improve, definitely, our way of life, to become positive rather than passive, and to become eligible for all that is promised.

“If ye follow in His way, His incalculable and imperishable blessings will be showered upon you.” This is a conditional promise dependent upon following in His way, but what true courtier does not follow his King, once he has become a real courtier and knows within his own being that he is?

The grace of God is an ever-active force.

“Not for one moment hath His grace been with-held, nor have the showers of His loving-kindness ceased to rain upon mankind.”

Nor do we have to await some outpouring on great masses of people:

“A dew-drop out of this ocean would, if shed upon all that are in the heavens and on earth, suffice to enrich them with the bounty of God, the Almighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.”

[Page 176]

CAN EDUCATION BRING WORLD PEACE?

Answers to Questions

BERTHA HYDE KIRKPATRICK

SINCE the World War there has been going on with earnestness and sincerity a vigorous campaign to educate people for peace. In the schools, at least some of them, there has been an effort to extol peace heroes instead of war heroes, to create world fellowship societies among school children, to arrange for the exchange of gifts and letters with children of other countries, and by other means to create understanding and appreciation of people of other races and nationalities. In the adult world groups have been organized to study the World Court, the League of Nations, economic and other problems associated with causes of war; lectures and sermons have been delivered decrying war and extoling peace; books, pamphlets and articles have been written and circulated with the same object; innumerable peace societies have been formed. Moving pictures and stories based on experience in the World War have set out the horrors of war, and now for the past few years we have had opportunity to observe, at a distance, the even greater horrors of up-to-date war carried on from the air. And surely no one will deny that this education has in a way been effective, for who is there today who does not desire peace? Never was such universal desire for peace because never was there such universal fear of war with all its attendant and far-reaching suffering and disorganization. Few today are deceived by the “glories” of war. And yet nations are seemingly being swept into war like swimmers into a horrible vortex, powerless to resist.

Shall we say then that education for peace has failed, that the goal of world peace is unattainable? No, on the contrary, Bahá’u’lláh assures us that world peace is possible and that it will be established within the next few decades. All the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh have for their aim universal peace and the accompanying progress of mankind in true civilization. To study and follow these teachings is, we believe, to become educated for peace because they are far-reaching and go deep into the heart. He tells us that the root cause of war is some kind of prejudice,—either race prejudice, national prejudice, religious prejudice or class prejudice,—lack of love and understanding of other humankind. Nursed and cultivated these prejudices grow into jealousy, greed, hate and finally into the monster War. Education can do something to wipe out these prejudices and already has among a few for scientific [Page 177] research on the intellectual plane endorses the idea of the oneness of mankind. But to eradicate deep-seated prejudice education on the higher spiritual plane is necessary. Man’s spiritual consciousness must be quickened. To do this is the mission of the Prophets, God’s Messengers.

This brings us, we believe, to the secret of peace education for today. Bahá’u’lláh has swept aside all ground for prejudice in His declaration that this is the Age of the Oneness of Mankind and that there is but one true religion, the religion of God. All the Prophets who have founded the great religions, He declares, are Messengers of the one God and all have taught the worship of one God and love and justice to fellowmen. And as in the past God has fortified His Messenger with that spiritual potency which assures the fulfillment of His Words. That is why we urge those who work for peace and would educate for peace to study these Words for themselves. “I commend it to you all,” wrote recently one of royal blood, “If ever the name of Bahá’u’lláh or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá comes to your attention, do not put their writings from you. Search out their Books, and let their glorious, peace-bringing, love-creating words and lessons sink into your hearts as they have into mine.”

But the substituting of love and justice for prejudice is not all. Bahá’u’lláh tells us that this principle of the Oneness of Mankind means not only right and just feelings towards our fellowmen but a unified world with all the nations brought together under a universal House of Justice. A world organized for peace is the only answer to world war which in reality is world anarchy. Peace education must look forward to a World State.

These ideals show the direction, Bahá’ís believe, in which genuinely constructive peace education must move. It is not claimed that it is a simple thing or that it will necessarily avert the impending catastrophe, but that it is laying a firm foundation for lasting peace, that it is God’s destined plan for the world and that He has therefore released through His Prophet Bahá’u’lláh the spiritual forces to bring it to pass.

This education is, in fact, now taking place. All over the world are groups of people educated and being educated for the New Age. But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that “Endeavor, ceaseless endeavor is required. Nothing short of an indomitable determination can possibly achieve it. Many a cause which past ages have regarded as purely visionary, yet in this day has become most easy and practicable. Why should this most great and lofty cause—the day-star of the firmament of true civilization and the cause of the glory, the advancement, the well-being and the success of all humanity —be regarded as impossible of achievement?”

[Page 178]

ISLAM

ALI-KULI KHAN

XI.

IN the ninth and the tenth years of the Hijra (630, 631 A.D.) Muhammad was between sixty-two and sixty~three years of age. His life was drawing to a close, but His work was also nearly completed. Submissive embassies, from all Arabia, now flowed toward Medina.

Muhammad had sent Amr to Jeifir, King of Oman, inviting him to accept Islam. After some hesitation, he embraced the Faith, and until the Prophet’s death, ruled Oman on His behalf.

The Himyarite Princes, of Yemen, who were Christians, also accepted Islam. So, the Chief of Al-Bahrein, on the Persian Gulf, embraced Islam. About the same time, the tribe of Beni-’Azd from the South, who were idolators, joined the Faith of the Prophet.

Mo’adh was sent South, with a band of collectors to receive the tithes, and with many teachers of the Faith, to instruct the new Moslems, and when the Prophets’s life was at its close, the sound of war had almost died away. Only two hostile expeditions were undertaken during this year. One against Nejran, under Khalid, the other headed by Ali, against the Beni-an-Nakha, in the Yemen. Both expeditions succeeded in subduing the tribes and obtaining their voluntary conversion to Islam.

In A.D. 630, Muhammad, at the age of sixty-three, performed the farewell pilgrimage to Mecca. On approaching the Holy Temple, He prayed to the Lord, to bless the Holy Place.

He then performed the pilgrimage to Arafat, which is an abrupt, conical hill, beyond Al-Muzdahifa, concluding with the verse 5, Sura V: “This day, have I perfected your Religion unto you, fulfilled my Mercy upon you, and appointed for you Islam, to be your Faith.”

Having returned from that station, Muhammad completed the pilgrimage at Mina, mounted on His camel, with Al-Fadl, son of Al-Abbas, seated behind Him. Amid a heavy rainfall, He shouted the pilgrims’ cry:

“Labbeik! O Lord! Labbeik! Labbeik!

There is none other God but Thee.

Labbeik!

Praise, blessing, and submission be to Thee.

Labbeik

No one therein, may share with Thee.

Labbeik! Labbeik!"

He continued with these words, until He entered the valley of Mina, and [Page 179] here cast stones at the “devil’s corner,” a rock at the entrance. Here He offered animals in sacrifice and ended the pilgrimage by shaving His head, partly also His beard, and paring His nails. These were ordered burned, although tradition states that the hairs were all caught by His followers, to keep as a treasured relic. From the tenth to the twelfth of the month of Dha’l-Hijja, Muhammad remained at Mina and every evening, as the sun declined, He went to Akaba, and repeated the rite of casting stones.

On the second day, the Prophet addressed the vast crowd of pilgrims in a memorable speech, which He knew, and his hearers felt, to be his last farewell. He enjoined the following sacred obligations on the Moslems:

“Ye People! Hearken to My words: for I know not whether, after this year, I shall ever be amongst you here again. Your lives and property are sacred and inviolable between one another, until the end of time. The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance; a testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs. . . . Ye People! Ye have rights demandable of your wives, and they have rights demandable of you. Upon them, it is incumbent not to violate their conjugal faith, neither to commit any act of open impropriety: . . . And treat your women well. . . . And your slaves! See that ye feed them with such food as ye eat yourselves: and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a fault which ye are not inclined to forgive, then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented. Ye people! Hearken to my speech, and comprehend the same. Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. All of you are in equality (as He pronounced these words, He raised his arms aloft, and placed the forefinger of one hand, as an emblem of equality, on the forefinger of the other), ye are one Brotherhood.

“Know ye what month this is? What territory this is? What day?” To which the People answered: “The sacred month, the sacred territory, the Great Day of pilgrimage.” At each reply, Muhammad added, “Even thus sacred and inviolable hath God made the life and the property of each one of you unto the other until ye meet your Lord.

“Let him that is present tell it unto him that is absent. Haply, he that shall be told may remember it better than he who hath heard it.”

He ended his address with these concluding words: “Verily, I have fulfilled My mission. I have left that amongst you, a plain command, the Book of God, and manifest ordinances which, if ye hold fast ye shall never go astray.” Then, looking up to Heaven, He said: “O Lord! I have delivered my Message, and discharged my Ministry.”

“Yes!” cried all the people crowding round him. “Yea, verily, thou hast!”

“O Lord! I beseech Thee, bear Thou witness unto it.” He then dismissed the great assembly.

After three days at Mina, He returned to Mecca and performed further ceremonies there. After three more days at Mecca, He returned to Medina.

[Page 180]

THREE FALSE PROPHETS

In the eleventh year of the Hijra, which opened peacefully, Muhammad was engaged in the reception of embassies and the issue of decrees to His various delegates in the different parts of the land. What at first seemed a new danger, was the appearance of three pretenders to the prophetic office. The least of the three imposters was Toleiha. He pretended to have received verses from Heaven, and also to work miracles, for he had learned the art of sleight-of-hand from conjurors.

Al-Aswad, the “Veiled Prophet” of the Yemen, not only was a pretender, but he cast off the Moslem Faith, while the Prophet was still alive. He succeeded in falling upon several tribes and killing their chiefs, and gaining some authority. But he was finally slain on the very night preceding the death of Muhammad.

Museilima was a pretender, a man of small stature, and insignificant, but ready and powerful in speech. He, too, pretended to work miracles, and falsely informed the people of Al-Yemama that his prophetic claim had been admitted by Muhammad. In reply to Muhammad’s emissary to submit to Islam, he sent word demanding that the Prophet divide the earth with him.

During the caliphate of Abu Bekr, in the Battle of Al-Yemama, Museilima lost his life.

“I HAVE CHOSEN”

In June, 632 A. D., about two months after His return from the farewell pilgrimage, Muhammad enjoyed His usual health. He was now sixty-three years of age. He arranged an expedition to the Syrian frontier under Osama, son of Zeid, the friend of Muhammad, who had been slain at Muta. Osama was only twenty-years of age. The Prophet called him to the mosque and appointed him to march on the territory where his father, as commander, had lost his life. He presented with his own hand the banner to Osama. The camp was formed at Jurf and all fighting men, including Abu Bekr and Omar, were ordered to join it. But a more stunning subject now drew the attention of the city.

On the same day, which was Wednesday, Muhammad was seized with a violent headache and fever, but it passed off, as had similar attacks, since He had been poisoned. The next day, He was somewhat better, but fever again seized Him. To those who inquired as to the cause of His illness, He answered: “This, verily, is the effect of that which I ate at Kheiber.” Of late, Muhammad had been conscious of the approach of death. In revealing the Sura of Victory, it was known that His own career would close after He had brought the various tribes of Arabia into submission to His Faith. At this last illness, He at first followed His usual routine of work and visits. One night, He arose from a restless sleep, and casting His clothes about him, followed only by a servant, He walked to the cemetery in the outskirts of the city. There He rested, and after praying for the departed, He returned to His house. On the way, He told His attendant that He, too, himself was hastening to the grave. “The choice hath [Page 181] verily been offered Me to continue in this life with Paradise thereafter, or to meet My Lord at once; and I have chosen to meet my Lord.”

In the morning He returned to A’isha’s room. He walked there with the support of Ali and Al-Abbas. The fever, which continued for seven or eight days, did not entirely confine Muhammad within doors. For He was able to move into the mosque and feebly lead the public prayers. But, as the sickness gained ground, with occasional fits of swooning, He resolved to make an effort to address His followers who had murmured at His appointment of the youthful Osama to the command of the army for Syria. He then ordered water for ablution, and He spoke thus: “Ye who murmur at the appoinunent of Osama also murmured at the appointment of his father, Zeid, before him. But, you found later that Zeid was fitted for the command. Now Osama is as clear to Me as was his father. Wherefore, do ye treat him well, for he is one of the best amongst you.”

After a pause, He made reference to His approaching end. The people had not yet thought the illness would prove his last. But Abu Bekr saw it, and burst into tears. Muhammad bade him not to weep, and praised him as the “chiefest among all, for love and devotion to him.” (This greatly influenced the Moslems in naming him Caliph, after the Prophet’s death.)

He then ordered all doors leading into the Court of the mosque to be closed, except the door of Abu Bekr. As He was about to enter A’isha’s room, Muhammad expressed His gratitude both to the people of Medina and to the refugees, especially the men of Medina, amongst whom He had found refuge. Then, having urged the early departure of the Syrian expedition, He retired into the chamber of A’isha. This address, and the feelings of emotion, aggravated His sickness. The next day the Prophet could not command enough strength to lead the prayer, and He sent Abu Bekr to the mosque to do so. This leadership of prayer was interpreted as indicating the Prophet’s desire that Abu Bekr should be His successor.

In His weakness and sickness, He again urged the sending-off of the army of Osama with despatch. He also inquired about the new embassies that had arrived, and He enjoined hospitable treatment of them.

The sickness, which had now lasted nearly a fortnight, began on the night of Saturday to assume a very grave aspect. The fever waxed more violent.

Omar, approaching the bed, touched the sufferer’s forehead, but the heat made him withdraw his hand suddenly. Then Omar said, “How fierce is the fever upon Thee, O Prophet!"

Muhammad answered, that during the night He had repeated seventy Suras, and among them, the seven long ones in praise of the Lord. He then spoke of the great sufferings of God’s Prophets, who were destroyed by lice, or tried with poverty; and who yet rejoiced exceedingly in Their love for God.

All Sunday He lay helpless and, at times, delirious. Osama, who had awaited the issue of the Prophet’s illness, [Page 182] before leaving for Syria, came from the camp to visit Him. He stooped down and kissed the Prophet’s face, but he heard no sound. Muhammad raised His hand and blessed the head of Osama.

At times, during the day, He complained of pain in His side and became unconscious. Once he asked for writing materials to be brought. Omar said: “He wandereth in his mind. Is not the Qur’án sufficient for us?” And a discussion ensued between him and the women who wished that the Prophet’s command be obeyed.

(The Shi’ites, who opposed the caliphate of Abu Bekr, Omar, and Othman, and recognized Ali as the true successor of the Prophet, condemn this refusal by Omar as an act of rebellion which prevented the Prophet from naming Ali as his successor.)

In the course of the day, the Prophet ordered A’isha to give to charity the gold that had been entrusted to her care. Having directed her to divide it among certain indigent families, He said: “Verily, now I am at peace. It would not have become me to meet my Lord with this gold still in my hands.”

As the illness lay heavy on Him all Sunday night, he was heard saying, “O My soul! Why seekest thou refuge elsewhere than in God alone?”

The morning brought relief and some return of strength. The faithful in their anxiety had crowded the mosque and Abu Bekr again led the prayer. While in the midst of the services, they saw the door open and the Prophet enter. He whispered in the ear of Al-Fadl who supported Him, “The Lord verily hath granted unto me refreshment in prayer,” and He looked around with a smile on His face and a sign of deep emotion.

He signified to Abu Bekr to continue the prayer while He sat beside him.

DEATH OF MUHAMMAD

As the Prophet was found that day to be better, Abu Bekr sought permission to visit at Sunh, a suburb of Medina, his wife, the daughter of Khadija. He then spoke to His followers in words of affection, and then addressing His daughter Fatima and His aunt Safi’ya, He said: “Work ye out that which shall gain acceptance for you with the Lord. For I verily have no power with Him to save you otherwise.” He then retired, exhausted, to His quarters.

His strength now rapidly waned. He felt that death was drawing nigh. He called for a pitcher of water, and, wetting His face, he prayed: “O Lord! I beseech Thee, assist Me in the agonies of death!” Then three times earnestly:—“Gabriel, come close unto Me.” He then spoke softly while being held in A’isha’s arms: “Lord! Join me to the companionship on high.” “Eternity is Paradise!” Then all was still. The Prophet of Islam was dead.

It was a little while after mid-day.

(To be concluded)

[Page 183]

A MEETING WITH ‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ

MARTHA L. ROOT

PROFESSOR Johannes Pedersen, a distinguished Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, went to Haifa in July, 1921, in order to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This educator is an Honorary Doctor of Theology of Lund University, Sweden, and a Doctor of Philosophy and History in the Copenhagen University; he has published a number of books about the Bible, has written a Biblical History for schools and home and a text book about Islam, as well as several other volumes which have to do with Islamic history. Calling upon him in 1935, in his “honor house” (for this home was given to him because of his great services) I found him to be a keenly alert, a profoundly thinking scholar, a man then perhaps about fifty years of age.

When I asked him about the Bahá’í Faith, Professor Pedersen said that he first heard of the Bahá’í Teachings when he studied Oriental languages in Copenhagen and in European universities. While in Budapest, Hungary, in 1912-1913 he stayed with Professor Ignatius Goldziher for three months and read Islamic texts with him. This Budapest scholar at that time often spoke with him of the recent historic visit of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to Budapest. “In our conversations,” said Professor Pedersen, “we discussed the great Arabic philosophers and when Professor Goldziher mentioned Ibn Sina (Avicenna) he found that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in many points agreed with him. Professor Goldziher spoke much about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Bahá’í Teachings as well as the discussions of Arabic philosophy.”

“Then in 1920,” said Professor Pedersen, “I went to Egypt and met some of the Bahá’ís of Cairo; they were very fine people. We spoke about the Bahá’í Teachings, and it was there, I remember, that I first saw a picture of the Bahá’í Temple which is being constructed near Chicago.”

While in Damascus, on his trip through Palestine and Syria in 1921, the Professor said that a Muslim who visited him every day had told him that a community in Palestine honored by every one without distinction of race or religion or politics was the Bahá’í community in Haifa. Professor Pedersen said that he was so impressed by everything he had heard in the different countries about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that he took a steamer from Beirut and went down to Haifa specially to meet Him. A number of students of Beirut University were also on this boat going down to visit ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Unfortunately the ship went [Page 184] into quarantine and the Danish Professor instead of having two days in Haifa had only one.

He went to the home of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and sent in his card. As Professor Pederson expresses it: “I saw that He had many guests and I had heard from the friends in Egypt that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was not very strong, yet He received me most graciously. We spoke in Arabic and first we talked about Arabic philosophy. It was just after the War and we spoke about conditions of humanity after the war, and He said to me that He was quite sure if people had not forgotten their religion there would have been no war: and it was necessary for humanity to become united if the people should not destroy one another. I felt that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was a very great figure, and he was very kind to me.”

This little glimpse of how a Danish Professor knew of the Bahá’í Faith, reveals how the Truth of Bahá’u’lláh’s Teachings, the beauty of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s life and the devoted services of the Bahá’í followers permeate the very sap and fibre of the new Tree of God for this universal cycle.

---

THE VISION

ELSIE PATTERSON CRANMER

“Sleep . . .and ask for appearance in the world of vision.”—‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ.

IF, after darkness has oppressed thy brain

And weariness encompassed all thy days,

Thou shouldst, oh wanderer, turn with upward gaze

See, from the budding heavens the falling rain!

Thus shalt thy heart be cleansed from stain.

Then turn thee to the Heavenly One and raise

Thy sobbing voice in fine and intimate praise.

Prayer from the sad was never made in vain.

And when upon thy couch thou layest thy head

Clad thou thyself in pure and stainless white

Toward the holiest dream shalt thou be led.

Breath thou the holy name with faith confessed

On praying lips, enfolded in pure light.

Thou shalt behold the Vision manifest.

[Page 185]

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA

ANNA McCLURE SHOLL

THE all too common theory that saints and mystics have no dexterity in dealing with the affairs of this world is completely refuted by the dramatic life of Catherine Benincasa, one of the most arresting figures, not only of pre-renaissance Italy but of all time. Italy, a breeding-ground of genius, produced in this glory of Siena a woman, not only of genius but of the highest sanctity, who was militant for peace; and in her own life united an earthly and a heavenly world and died in the attempt to clarify them to a restless and war-like society.

Her origins were humble, but not without the dignity of those who were cradled in the proud city of Siena. She was the twenty-fifth child of Jacopo Benincasa, a dyer, and his wife Lapa, and with Catherine came a twin-sister who did not survive birth. The little pretty plaything, the last of the long line of children, went straight to the heart of the family life, and, as the child grew, her fascination was felt by the plodding neighbors who, tradition has it, would “borrow” her for an hour or two as they might have opened a window to a ray of sunshine. This personal charm, so early exercised, was to increase through life, heightened and deepened by a spiritual vision as rare as it was exalted. No Alpine coldness here, but the inexorable magnet of warmth from divine sources.

The world into which she was born has strange resemblances to the present political situation, in that everyman’s hand seemed raised against his neighbor in murderous delirium. The long residence of the popes at Avignon had demoralized Christendom; and made of those in spiritual authority mere puppets in the hands of French king and German emperor. The Eternal City had become the haunt of bandits, ecclesiastical, and lay; and in Catherine’s life time the papal nuncio was flayed alive in the streets of Florence. These wild landscapes might well have brought terror to a heart less sure of divine direction than Catherine’s.

Medieval society possessed one great virtue, rarely found or lacking altogether in modern times—violent conviction of both good and evil, the sad grey tints of agnosticism and doubt being absent. They murdered, they lusted, they cheated but they had no other name for these activities than those bestowed by the Ten Commandments. Their vocabulary was singularly lacking in subterfuge, excuse and evasion. Hell was near and heaven was near. Religion was an intense reality however much they broke its [Page 186] laws and flouted its ideals. Sinners were not classified according to Freud, and genuine spiritual gifts were revered. The lightning of the stormy times revealed both the New Jerusalem and the portals of the Inferno.

As always when passions good and evil, run high, the mystic flourishes as he cannot prosper in a placid, well-padded civilization. At seven years of age the mysticism in Catherine’s temperament began to manifest itself, and she received with full acquiescence the impact of the religious forces around her. That great troubling of the waters which a century before St. Dominic and St. Francis had effected was still spreading its circles through Italy, but why these should have caught up a child is a mystery known to two extremes of religious expression—the Catholic and the Puritan. New England in Jonathan Edwards’ time did not lack the “conversions” of mere babes, and indeed mere babes were expected to search their infant souls for original sin and redeeming grace. Catholicism has never been without these children, who keep their baptismal innocence, but seldom with such a glorious history ahead of them as Catherine was to experience.

St. Dominic enthralled her imagination, even at the age of seven. His order of preachers had multiplied, had produced, as had St. Francis’s friars, a Third Order of men and women who took vows but lived in the world. About the age of sixteen Catherine entered this Order, following a long course of self-discipline and devotion in her father’s house. This discipline was not carried out solely through acts of religion, though the saint made her every act religious.

Her parents wanted her to marry! Neither of them, apparently, had much patience with a girl of beauty and charm, who wilfully, very fixedly, refused the eligible young men of Siena, refused the bride chest and the glory of ruling over her own establishment. Lapa and Jacopo simply could not understand and with a ponderous weight of parental authority set out to break her spirit and her will. Housework which often accomplishes both ends when there is too much of it, was their weapon, and the girl Catherine became the maid-of-all-work very literally, scrubbing, cooking, sewing, and yet finding time to visit sick neighbors. Her charm and her strength of will both held.

They gave in at last to inexplicable forces, to forces, had they but known it at the time, which were transforming their house into a world shrine, and that not for religious minded people alone. Historians have sought out Catherine’s home as if its very stones might tell something hidden from bibliophiles. They muse in the shadowy street over the secret of a young thing who did not learn to read until she was nearing twenty, and who influenced kings, popes, potentates, and directed the affairs of whole municipalities in Italy.

Her secret was at once simple and profound. She was God-taught, and on this hidden knowledge she meditated, and of it she spoke only to her confessor. Her “mystical marriage,” those espousals of a soul to the divine will, noted and recorded of the few who have had the courage and the [Page 187] spiritual gifts to force their way into regions closed to average humanity; this union took place, and its fruit was evangelical fire that ran like visible flame to warm cold hearts and souls, or to burn them awake, with a pain as sharp as that of physical burns. Catherine received the Stigmata, the symbol of the crucifixion she was to undergo in her efforts for the Kingdom of God.

Such flame the old walls of Siena could not confine. She was writing now those extraordinary letters to all grades of people from noble to peasant in which the reader still feels the throb of ecstasy which was obliged to translate itself into the terms of common humanity. What she seemed to have desired most was reconciliation, first between all the forces of her own nature, then with nostalgic passion, the kiss of peace between cities, or individuals, it did not matter! She had a genius for dealing with massed forces and with the slender reeds of the isolated. With the former the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit; with the latter a sister’s breath, almost suspended lest the awakening soul might find even gentleness too strong.

The Fathers of Siena, sensitive to her holiness, made use of it in situations they could not themselves handle; and invoked her aid in missions that might well have frightened the heart of warriors. One of these is described in a letter to Fra Raimondo. A young man, Niccolo Tuldo, having spoken disrespectfully of the Siennese government was by it condemned to be beheaded—strange prophecy of our time in this—and his horror and despair over so great a sentence for so light a word induced the Municipality to invoke Catherine to soothe him and prepare him for death.

“I went to visit him,” she writes, “whom you know; whence he received such comfort and consolation that he confessed and prepared himself very well. And he made me promise by the love of God that when the time of the sentence should come, I would be with him. So I promised and did . . . his will was accorded to the will of God; and only one fear was left, that of not being strong at the moment. But the measureless and glowing goodness of God deceived him, creating in him such affection and love in the desire of God, that he did not know how to abide without Him, and said; ‘Stay with me and do not abandon me. So it shall not be otherwise than well with me. And I die content’ . . . And he said ‘I shall go wholly joyous and strong, and it will seem to me a thousand years before I arrive, thinking that you are awaiting me there.’ And he said words so sweet as to break one’s heart of the goodness of God. I waited for him at the place of justice; and waited there with constant prayer. . . . Then he came like a gentle lamb; and seeing me he began to smile, and wanted me to make the sign of the Cross. When he had received the sign, I said ‘Down! To the bridal sweetest, my brother, for thou shalt soon be in the enduring life!’” The executioner did his work, with Catherine whispering words of comfort to the end and she received the severed head in her hands. A magnificence of the will to succor which resembles the most finely tempered steel!

[Page 188] In 1374 the plague visited Siena and she nursed the victims throughout its duration. From that time on her public ministry is continual. The state of the Church weighed on her soul as a greater and more ruinous plague than any that could afflict the body. The Great Schism rose before her inner eyes and in a distraught Italy she began her pilgrimages of reconciliation, the first to Pisa and Lucca to prevent them from joining the League of Tuscan cities against Pope Gregory XI, The Ghibellines of Florence were also in revolt against him, and to the Eight of War of the Commune of Florence the saint wrote with a severity she could on occasion employ. “But you, with your taxes and frivolities, are spoiling all that is sown. Do so no more for the love of Christ Crucified and for your own profit.”

She had become less a daughter of Siena by this time than an allegory of Unity and Peace, living and breathing this heavenly message to the world, even to the confines of Avignon where Gregory XI was living in exile. Yet in old Siena that strange and chilling change had not occurred which overtakes friends and neighbors left behind by a townsman hidden in a cloud of glory. Catherine never lost the sweetness of the street, if it may be called that, and half the youth of Siena followed her with passionate devotion and even grumbling Lapa, her mother, was swept into the train of this inexplicable daughter, who walked with the saints in the highways instead of keeping them dim behind the candles in the parish church. Stefan Maconi is the best known of her secretaries, and she puts an end to the long-standing quarrel between his family and the Tolomei. These boys and girls from Siena who went as far with her on her journeys as their parents or their purse allowed made a spring-time of rapturous devotion about her. She felt its warmth and departed from it into bleaker and bleaker missions for the reform of the Church.

Pope Gregory came back to Rome but he seemed to resent the part Catherine had played in ending the Avignon exile. She continues her mediation with the Florentines, living among them, and, on one occasion barely escaping the violence of the mob bent on having it out with Rome. No stopping now! But for a quiet interval she returns to her own city and gives herself to the writing of her Dialogues, those mystical conversations of her spirit with the Lord Christ in which are found the loftiest expression of perceptions from no earthly source, and the secret of her power over princes and peasants alike.

Her correspondence, meanwhile, was continuous. Surely no one ever had a greater range in the recipients of her letters, from the Queen of Naples to the King of France; from the tailor’s wife at Florence to Sir John Hawkwood, the soldier of fortune from far England; from her secretaries to her little niece in a convent. To the last-named she defines prayer as “the holy, perpetual desire which prays in the sight of God, whatever thou art doing; for this desire directs all thy works, spiritual and corporal, to His honor.”

She was summoned to Rome by [Page 189] Urban VI, the successor of Gregory, and there endured the trials that followed on a divided papacy, Clement VII having been elected by cardinals who questioned the validity of Urban’s election. Even the exalted soul of Catherine was weighed down by the sorrows and the sins of the official church. In her thirty-three years she had lived many lives, too many for the fragility of her body. Those boys and girls in Siena, those adolescent lovers, those tender neighbors who smiled when they spoke her name, those tired old work-people who never again would see their beloved—all these were to know soon that in the imperial city of the Caesars and the Popes a young creature lay dead of her effort to send divine fire through streets running blood. She died April 30, 1380, and is buried in Rome.

No estimate of her genius can separate her mysticism from that drama of her Italy which spread its violence even as far as Elizabethan drama; for the source of her profound influence was a vision so piercing that all earthly matters fell into their proper position and proportion on the road of that divine perspective. Like all mystics of the first rank she has enormous common sense, whose calm human light illumines problems great and little. “There are some,” she writes in a letter to William of England, “Who give themselves to castigating their body perfectly, doing very harsh penance; and that the flesh may not rebel against the reason, they have placed all their desire rather on mortifying their body than on slaying their self-will.”

To Catherine the Five Wise Virgins of the parable are the Five Senses brought into obedience to divine law. Her conception of charity includes among the other virtues that of not judging what spiritual meat is best for others. She writes; “It frequently happens that a soul which sees itself advance by way of great penance, would like to send all people by the same way; and if it sees they do not walk there, it is displeased and shocked, feeling that they are not doing right; while sometimes it happens that the man is doing better and being more virtuous than his critic.” She had critics herself, but answered them with much sweetness and humility. In another place she says; “We conceive virtues through God and bring them to birth for our neighbor.”

When she writes to Sir John Hawkwood it is to plead with him to be in the service of Christ and “take the pay and the cross of Christ Crucified” by which he will show himself a true and manly knight. To Pope Gregory she pictures the hireling shepherd who so “far from dragging his sheep from the hands of the wolf, he devours them himself.”

A very beautiful passage is found in her letter to three cardinals;

“Our life and the beauty of youth pass by, like the beauty of the flower which is gathered from the plant. There is none who can save this beauty, none who can preserve it that it be not taken, when it shall please the highest Judge to gather this flower of life by death.”

Her imagery is drawn from the violence of the times. Out of the blood-drenched scenes she sees growing the mystery of a Blood that flows [Page 190] ever to create life not death. If her language sounds strange to modern ears it must be remembered that the mystic, like the poet, unites his spirit to the earthly landscape and uses its diameters for heavenly direction. Of sieges she writes to Queen Giovanna of Naples, “I reply to you he wearies himself in vain who will guard the city with force and with great zeal, if God guard it not.” A sentence that might be inscribed over the gates of many cities in present-day Europe.

Catherine was canonized in the life time of her mother Lapa, who walked in the procession of triumph. What were her thoughts in the midst of these rejoicing? Perhaps that, after all, the little baby she had held in her arms had escaped them for a longer journey than the streets between the house and the parish church. A journey farther than Avignon, farther than Rome, even to fastnesses, to storm which was a greater siege than those that ended in Italian cities.

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TO ALL NATIONS

ROSE NOLLER

IF there is another war,

Where will you hide

With your protected pride?

Who will be your councilor?

Do you think that all your foresight

Can outdo the ghastly night

Which follows wiping out a city?

Do you expect pity?

Don’t you think, rather,

There will be stress

On your finesse? . . .

Will there be left any space

For safety

Save in that One Secret Place?

[Page 191]

THE UNIVERSE IN PRAYER

MAYE HARVEY GIFT

As world-encircling gloom deepens, and human devices fail to solve man’s problems or insure serenity of spirit, man is, more and more, turning inquiring eyes toward prayer. So little does he comprehend the potency of this great law of progress that he can but say “All else has fallen short, this cannot be more disappointing.” This remark indicates that man is all unconscious of the fact that prayer is being constantly used, not only by himself, but by all forms of life. And it works. In truth it is the only method that does work.

Open your eyes, O doubting man, to its manifestations all about you, yea and within your very self!

Prayer, in the sense mentioned, is the reaching out toward that which will bring fulfillment. Every phenomenon has potentialities which it has the urge to bring into actuality; but this it cannot accomplish without assistance from a source more powerful than itself. To illustrate: the raison d’etre of the mineral is to rise out of its lowly condition and participate in the more abundant life of the vegetable world. Does it therefore say “I will arise and forthwith fulfill my destiny?” Not at all. After it has completed the range of experiences in the mineral world, it still possesses an unappeased hunger for something which has proved to be beyond its own possibility of achievement. Whereupon the mineral atom prays. It reaches out to a source higher than itself. Its overpowering desire serves as the magnet which attracts the longed-for assistance. The answer comes through the instrumentality of what may be termed the vegetable spirit. The mineral particle is absorbed into the body of a plant. An entire change of condition occurs. The mineral is no longer a mineral; it has been metamorphosed into a vegetable atom, a new creation, with different and greater capacities. Its prayer has been answered. It now moves in a wider sphere and functions under higher laws.

How little, O man, have you been aware of this ceaseless prayer throughout creation, and of the continuous answering upon which life, all life depends!

This is but the beginning. The vegetable atom remains restless in spite of multitudinous experiences within the vast and varied vegetable realm. The essence of its being cries out for further development. This reaching out again brings a response from a higher source. An animal consumes the plant, and through the spirit of the animal world, the vegetable atom is assimilated and becomes an animal [Page 192] atom. Again a prayer, again an answer which releases additional potentialities.

Again, O man, God hath written His beneficent law across the world, if thou wilt but heed. Furthermore, throughout the realm of animal existence thou canst read the same message, reiterated and amplified.

For the variety of experience of the animal kingdom does not bring lasting satisfaction to the atoms compassing it. Once more there is an instinctive reaching out for further fulfillment. Once more assistance is attracted from a higher realm. It is the spirit of life governing the human kingdom that responds and transforms the animal atom into a human atom, a new creation with increased capacities and responsive to higher laws.

This is the perfection of physical creation, but not the end of progress. This perfected physical creation, the body of man, provides the instrument used by the human intelligence or rational soul. This is a new range of creation, a higher octave, so to speak, but still regulated by the same fundamental law of development already observed. But with this difference, the law must now be consciously applied in order to secure the intended results. A maturity of understanding, of desire, of accomplishment is both possible and essential at this stage of evolution. All this is latent within the rational soul. The lower forms of creation developed without conscious volition. P. D. Ouspensky in his “Tertium Organum” takes cognizance of this fact. “Further evolution, if it takes place, cannot be an elemental and unconscious affair, but will result solely from conscious efforts toward growth. Man, not striving upward toward evolution, not conscious of its possibility, not helping it, will not evolve. And the individual who is not evolving does not remain in a static condition, but goes down, degenerates. This is the general law.” God does not force this next step in growth upon man. He has, however, created the human soul so that a divine dissatisfaction fills it at the prospect of nothing more than intellectual attainments, inexhaustible though these be. For man higher achievements are necessary if he is to find his true equilibrium.

Man is said to be created in the image and likeness of God, and those potentialities must become manifest in God-like attributes. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá terms them celestial qualities. Among “the virtues and attributes pertaining unto God are . . . trustworthiness, truthfulness, purity of heart while communing with God, forbearance, resignation to whatever the Almighty hath decreed, contentment with the things His Will hath provided, patience nay thankfulness in the midst of tribulation, and complete reliance, in all circumstances, upon Him.”

These qualities do not become the habitual and consistent expression of man simply by virtue of his being man. The universal birthright of humanity, as already pointed out, is the rational soul or intelligence. These celestial attributes are the bestowal of the divine kingdom, the realm above the human. They are obtained through the same general law of development which the physical creation follows, [Page 193] the unqualified reaching outward and upward. Bahá’u’lláh explains it thus: “These energies . . . lie, however, latent within him (man), even as the flame is hidden Within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. . . . Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never be ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.”

The assistance transmitted to man through the instrumentality of the Prophet brings into living reality the latent celestial qualities. “Through the teachings of this Day Star of Truth every man will advance and develop until he attaineth the station at which he can manifest all the potential forces with which his inmost true self hath been endowed. It is for this very purpose that in every age and dispensation the Prophets of God and His chosen Ones have appeared amongst men, and have evinced such power as is born of God and such might as only the Eternal can reveal.” And such a supreme power is essential, for man is as the seed, the divine impetus is comparable to the sun and the rain, and without it the seed will never burst into life.

The moral man may declare “I, of myself, am just and merciful and a lover of my kind.” But his affirmation does not make it so. Whatever modicum of these qualities he may possess has come to him as a result of this law whether he acknowledge it or not. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá clarifies this point. "Moreover, if you reflect justly, you will see that these good actions of other men who do not know God are also fundamentally caused by the teachings of God; that is to say, that the former Prophets led men to perform these actions, explained their beauty to them, and declared their splendid effects; then these teachings were diffused among men, and reached them successively, one after another, and turned their hearts towards these perfections. When men saw that these actions were considered beautiful, and became the cause of joy and happiness for mankind, they conformed to them.” The laws of the universe do not admit of exceptions to suit man’s limited comprehension or his desires. But in man, without his conscious cooperation the spiritual results are meagre, and cannot weather the severe testing humanity is beginning to experience.

Without heavenly assistance man does not become a radiant being, receiving that divine guidance which enables him to transcend difficulties. It is impossible for man to accept calamity joyously, or expend his life with rapturous abandon for the love of God and the establishment of a better world order unless he has reached out consciously and experienced this transformation of motive and character which distinguishes the dweller in the celestial kingdom.

This is both a scientific and a spiritual experience. In the terminology of the Sacred Books it is called the second birth. It is being born out of the matrix of the self-centered, ever-demanding [Page 194] ego into the realm of spiritual expression, of loving and serving, in other words into the celestial kingdom. It is being born of the water of life and the fire of the love of God, through the instrument of the Creator’s choosing, His holy Messenger. This is the perfect result of conscious and mature prayer. Prayer, so simple and natural a part of man, that Jesus says of it “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” Prayer, so far-reaching and so profound that no progress throughout the whole realm of creation is possible except through its agency, nor can all eternity serve to plomb its depths.

Behold, O man, the universe itself bowed at the throne of God, and thou didst look askance. Wilt thou alone refuse to take thy rightful place? Kneel in contrition, then arise in joyous wonderment. Gaze down the vistas of that never-ending life He now bestows on thee. Brought into harmony with all the spheres, the cares of life no longer harass thee. Thou hast reached out in prayer, and God hath answered thee.

---

In the beginning of every Revelation adversities have prevailed, which later on have been turned into great prosperity. . . . Say: O people of God! Beware lest the powers of the earth alarm you, or the might of the nations weaken you, or the tumult of the people of discord deter you, or the exponents of earthly glory sadden you. Be ye as a mountain in the Cause of your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Glorious, the Unconstrained. . . . Say: Beware, O people of Babel, lest the strong ones of the earth rob you of your strength, or they who rule the world fill you with fear. Put your trust in God, and commit your affairs to His keeping. He, verily, will, through the power of truth, render you victorious, and He, verily, is powerful to do what He willeth, and in His grasp are the reins of omnipotent might. . . . I swear by My life! nothing save that which profiteth them can befall My loved ones. To this testifieth the Pen of God, the Most Powerful, the All-Glorious, the Best Beloved. . . . Let not the happenings of the world sadden you. I swear by God! The sea of joy yearneth to attain your presence, for every good thing hath been created for you, and will, according to the needs of the times, be revealed unto you.—BAHÁ’U’LLÁH.

[Page 195]

THE GOOD SOCIETY

Book Review

ALICE SIMMONS COX

“WE belong to a generation that has lost its way. Unable to develop the great truths which it has inherited from the emancipators, it has returned to the heresies of absolutism, authority and domination of men by men. Against these ideas the progressive spirit of the western world is one long, increasing protest.”

With this passionate statement of appraisal Walter Lippmann, upon returning from the London Economic Conference in 1933 voiced his own protest against the tides of tyranny and collectivism that he sees engulfing humanity. With it he introduced his latest book, “The Good Society.” Knowing not whence his own thought would eventually lead him, he set out to analyze world conditions in the hope that by proceeding from his main premise—the conviction that the world has not entered the era of a prosperous and peaceful society of which pre-War peoples had felt assured —he would discover some light of understanding. In the study and meditation he planned to do he hoped to find the true criterion by which to measure the shifting values of our time. At first worried and perplexed, but always seeking the polestar that might lead men out of their bewilderment and despair, he followed through to an illuminating conclusion: that men must learn once more of that divine pattern whereby they were created so that, obedient to the laws of human evolution, they may take their fate from the hands of many lesser gods and entrust it to the One Creator and Designer of all life.

OTHER GODS

“The dissolution of faith had been underway for generations,” he states, “but in 1914 there took place a catastrophic unsettlement of the human routine. The system of the world’s peace was shattered; the economy which was the condition of its prosperity was dislocated. A thousand matters once left to routine and taken for granted became questions of life and death.

“In the darkness there was desperate need for light. Amid overwhelming circumstance there was a desperate need for leading. In the disorder, as men became more bewildered in their spirits, they became more credulous in their opinions and more anxiously compulsive in their actions. Only the scientists seemed to know what they were doing. Only government seemed to have the power to act. The conditions could not have been more favorable to the reception of the [Page 196] myth (of the providential, collectivist state) . . . The need for authority was acute, yet the authority of custom, tradition and religion was lost. In their extremity men hastened to entrust to government, which can at least act decisively and impressively, the burden of shaping their destiny. In science there was knowledge. In government there was power. By their union an indispensable providence was created and the future of human society contrived and directed. . . . All the things lacking in the actual world were projected upon the imaginary state that men so desperately desired.”

“For more than two generations,” he continues, “an increasingly coercive organization of society has coincided with an increasing disorder. It is time to inquire why, with so much more authority, there is so much less stability; why, with such promises of greater abundance, there is retardation in the improvement, in many lands a notable lowering, of the standard of life; why, when the organization is most nearly complete, the official idea of civilization is the least catholic. The argument that it is the chaos which compels the resort to authority cannot be true,—even though in an immediate situation it may be the only remedy for a present evil,—because, if it were true, the increase in coercive organization during the past three generations ought to have brought some increases in stability. But actually the disorder is greater than when the remedy began to be adopted and there is, therefore, an overwhelming presumption that it is coercion which is creating the chaos it purports to conquer. . . .”

“Men may have to pass through a terrible ordeal before they find again the central truths they have forgotten. But they will find them again, as they have so often found them again in other ages of reaction, if only the ideas that have misled them are challenged and resisted.”

INVIOLABLE MANHOOD

That all men of the electorate must find this truth, and not only that, but must make it a habit of thought and deed, Mr. Lippmann believes. Whatever the program of government and economy that might be conceived, however wise it might seem, it will not be adopted and supported, he is sure, “until it receives an impulse from the deepest energies of the human spirit. But today, as in other periods of disorder, the strongest convictions are held by men who, whether they mean to or not, aggravate the disorder. The cause of civilization . . . (rests) upon helpless forebodings of disaster, and an impotent longing for peace and dignity. . . . Though (the masses of men) feel that they are sinking into barbarism, their judgment is confounded, their minds disoriented in the tangle of abstractions, technicalities, claims and counter-claims through which they are supposed to find their way.”

In considering the free and flourishing new society founded by Englishmen in America, the writer came to wonder if the leaders of those years might not have “possessed an insight which we have lost. . . . I began to ask myself whether perhaps in reasoning about the problems of our time [Page 197] we had lost vital contact with self-evident truths which have the capacity to infuse the longing to be civilized with universal and inexhaustible energy.”

What are these self-evident truths that may perhaps be the standard for which men seek whereby they may measure the worth of those methods by which at the present time they are being exploited and the autonomous essence of their manhood violated?

Are men to be treated as inviolable persons, or as things? Here emerges the issue, concludes Mr. Lippmann. Here the struggle between barbarism and civilization must always be fought. This is the basic self-evident truth, not an opinion or a rationalization from animal desires. It is the touchstone of civilized judgment. Stated a little differently, it is the Golden Rule.

“In the long ascent (of social progress) there is a great divide which is reached when men discover, declare and acknowledge, however much they deny it in practise, that there is a Golden Rule which is the ultimate and universal criterion of human conduct. For then, and then only, is there a standard to which all can repair who seek to transform the incessant and indecisive struggle for domination and survival into the security of the Good Society.”

The great spiritual seers of the ages whose words have been potent in the evolution of society, such as Brahma, Buddha, Confucius and the Christ, Mr. Lippmann is cognizant, taught that men are inviolable persons whose relationships can be happy, creative and prosperous only through recognition of this truth. The ancient Stoics spoke quietly also of this matter, but in terms intelligible only to the elite. But “to the masses of the western world the news that all men are more than things was proclaimed by the Christian Gospel and celebrated in its central mysteries. . . . The influence of that gospel has been inexhaustible. It anchored the rights of men in the structure of the universe. It set these rights apart where they were beyond human interference. Thus the pretensions of despots became heretical. And since that revelation, though many despots have had the blessings of the clergy, no tyranny has possessed a clear title before the tribunal of the human conscience, no slave has had to feel the hope of freedom was forever closed. For in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence—that is to say, an immortal soul—which only God can judge, a limit was set upon the domain of men over men. . . . Upon this rock they have built the rude foundations of the Good Society.”

This humanist ideal, observes Mr. Lippmann, came down in the crash of the last century attack on superstition, bigotry and obscurantism. Along with God, the soul and moral law men relegated justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. Pseudo-science could not, when dissecting man, find a human soul. “In the fury to explain men rationally there was explained away their essence, which is their manhood. . . .” Moral criteria were obscured. Life became aimless and turbulent.

“The denial of the human soul was the perfect preparation for these revivals of tyranny.”

[Page 198]

FRAMEWORK FOR JUSTICE

A major portion of the book, following the analysis of collectivism as it manifests in the providential states of Europe and shows its influence now and then in abortive schemes in the United States, is given to study of the modern economy of the division of labor and the type of social organization that must evolve throughout the world if the benefits of industrial science are to be preserved. Through interesting and convincing argument the writer arrives at several very definite technical conclusions in respect to economy and political control. To the reader who has already learned by way of this review the generalizations about the Golden Rule, these may appear as simple corollaries of that fundamental spiritual axiom. But to the writer they were the means of approach, the movements observed in human progress which led him to his final association of material factors with the spiritual law. To the Bahá’í they will appear in striking resemblance to certain major principles of Bahá’u’lláh’s divine economy.

A summary of the writer’s chief conclusions might be as follows:

1) The capitalistic system of free enterprise is the only one we know of suitable to the method of labor specialization by which wealth is increased and the world lives at a higher standard. But this system needs to be controlled in order that it remain free. It is not inherently free as we have found in a day of big industries, big banking, labor organization and mass production.

2) Control must be by the people, not through a transfer of their sovereignty to officials or even to the state, but by common law guaranteed by popular constitutional agreement, and enforced by judicial process.

3) Public officials must be servants of the social order, chosen by a definite system of representation or by appointment, with delegated powers but with actions subject to review by judicial process.

4) The people’s control of modern economy must become unified throughout the world in matters that effect the general welfare, this to be accomplished through the establishment of a universal common law and a world government representative of the federated nations.

THE GREAT SOCIETY

A state that is conceived to operate in this manner can dispense justice among individuals through legislation that covers the vast complex of social needs without danger that it become bureaucratic or tyrannical. The safe-guards are in its constitutional framework of reciprocal rights and duties if the people themselves understand that therein lies the charter of their brotherhood. The natural problems then arise, Mr. Lippmann explains, where the social order is not consistent with the requirements of the division of labor, which because of human inventiveness never remain static. Here the collectivists would interfere with the exchange economy, but the truly wise state attempts no direction of the market through ownership of deeds, through regulation of wages and prices, through regimentation of food and labor. It should on the other hand alter relationships of [Page 199] property privileges to keep the natural law of supply and demand operating. It was at this point that the promise of liberalism of the last century became waylaid. The confusion of mind was in respect to the relation of law and property and human activities. The liberals began to use laissez-faire doctrines relative to property. “The error was in thinking that any aspect of work or property is ever unregulated by law. The notion that there are two fields of social activity, one of anarchy and one of law, is false.” As a result liberalism was impotent to prevent the evils of economic privilege, coercion and authority, which could have been abolished by changes in the laws that allowed protection to special interests through tariffs, discriminating subsidies and franchises, special charters and later union coercion. The astounding progress of the nineteenth century was stopped. Men turned for help in many instances to the ideals of collectivism not foreseeing the impossibility of their realization.

Liberalism has not been on a bypath, however, Mr. Lippmann believes. “It was halted . . . on the main road of human progress. The liberals (1750-1850) had come upon the fundamental clue to the only kind of social order which can in fact be progressive in this epoch. They had discerned the true principle of the mode of production which the industrial revolution was introducing. They had understood that in the new economy wealth is augmented by the division of labor in widening markets; and that this division of labor transformed more or less self-sufficient men and relatively autonomous communities into a Great Society. . . . It has not occurred to men before that the Golden Rule was economically sound. . . . So it was not until the industrial revolution had altered the traditional mode of life that the vista opened at the end of which men could see the possibility of the Good Society on this earth. At long last the ancient schism between the world and the spirit, between self interest and disinterestedness was potentially closed, and a wholly new orientation of the human race became theoretically conceivable and, in fact, necessary.”

Not only is collectivism inconsistent with the division of labor which depends for its life on exchange of goods in comparatively free markets, and not only must it call on tyranny to enforce any semblance of operation within state boundaries, but it is militaristic both abroad and at home. Only by a military regime and only while scarcity exists can a state be kept under the domination of providential planners. Mr. Lippmann believes that the history of collectivism proves this to be true.

Collectivism has reversed the movement toward federation, Mr. Lippmann points out. Modern federative activities first appeared as an integrating nationalism reaching out “for unity among particulars by cultivating a common consciousness, whereas the current nationalism emphasizes an increasingly exclusive particularism. So while the older nationalism (1776-1870) was the support of political unification (British Empire, United States, Italy, German States), the new nationalism is the agent of disunion.”

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THE WAY TO PEACE

Many enlightened progressive men today believe there is no other way to peace than through centralization of power, says the author. There is no other way within a totalitarian state. But for a world trusting in the justice of the supremacy, not of supreme officials or of state power, but of international law that is common to all states, alike, fixing the reciprocal relations of each, there could, he feels assured, be a lasting peace. He implies that to attain this end constitutionalism must become an intuitive habit of all minds, the normal condition of behavior within states and between states.

To maintain a constitutional order men must be much more truthful, reasonable, just and honorable than the letter of the laws, he warns. “There must be more than legal prohibition against arbitrariness, against overreaching, deception and oppression. . . . Only by adhering to this unwritten higher law can they make actual law effective or have criteria by which to reform it. . . .”

“For what purpose is it then that all government or any government is established?” Why do men struggle for centuries to find that world-wide polity that Mr. Lippmann prophesies they may yet earn? In passages of peculiar eloquence he answers this question. We quote them for the inspiration they may give:

“We may think of the creative, productive, and adaptive energies of mankind as struggling to release themselves from the entanglements and perversions, the exploitation and the smothering, the parasitism and the obfuscation and the discouragement of aggressive impulses. Men are moved to plant, but the seeds bear fruit with difficulty, so rank are the weeds which choke them. The cutting back of the weeds, the clearing of little spaces in which good things can grow, has been the task of human emancipation. Its method is to restrain arbitrariness. But its object is to disengage the human spirit in order that it may flourish. . . . It stakes its hopes on the human spirit released from and purged of all arbitrariness. It does not say what such a spirit can or will or ought to make of men’s lives. For men have never yet known but little of such freedom. And they cannot hope to imagine that they have not yet known. But they have known enough of freedom to know that the arbitrary power of men over men is parasitical, that it perverts, that it sterilizes and corrupts. . . .

“The testament of liberty does not contain the project of a new social order. It adumbrates a way of life in which men seek to reconcile their interests by perfecting the rules of justice. . . . Its ideal is a fraternal association among free and equal men. To the initiative of individuals, secure in their rights and accountable to others who have equal rights, liberalism entrusts the shaping of human society. . . . Liberalism commits the destiny of civilization, not to a few politicians here and there, but to the whole genius of mankind.”