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[Page 279]

WORLD ORDER

NOVEMBER 1939

A NEW WORLD ORDER

Shoghi Effendi

BAHÁ’Í TEACHINGS ON PEACE

National Spiritual Assembly

HAS MANKIND REACHED MATURITY?

Kenneth Christian

THE VALLEY OF CONTENTMENT

Mardiyyih Nabil Carpenter

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Don T. MacNally

[Page 280]

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

NOVEMBER 1939 VOLUME 5 NUMBER 8

A NEW WORLD ORDER • SHOGHI EFFENDI ...................................... 281

THE BAHÁ’Í TEACHINGS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE • NATIONAL SPIRITUAL ASSEMBLY ... 283

HAS MANKIND REACHED MATURITY? • KENNETH CHRISTIAN ....................... 292

THEY MET THE DAWN, II • ALICE SIMMONS COX ............................... 297

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW • LILYAN FANCHER-BUSH ..................... 301

THE VALLEY OF CONTENTMENT • MARDIYYIH NABIL CARPENTER ................... 306

AMERICAN INDIAN • OLIVIA KELSEY ......................................... 309

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN • DON T. MacNALLY .................................. 315

WHAT IS A BAHÁ’Í? • ROBERTA V. KALEY .................................... 318

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, Annemarie 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: 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, Ill.

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.

November 1939, Volume 5, Number 8

[Page 281]

WORLD ORDER

November 1939 Volume 5 No. 8

A NEW WORLD ORDER

TEN years of unceasing turmoil, so laden with anguish, so fraught with incalculable consequences to the future of civilization, have brought the world to the verge of a calamity too awful to contemplate. . . . Such has been the cumulative effect of these successive crises, following one another with such bewildering rapidity, that the very foundations of society are trembling. The world, to whichever continent we turn our gaze, to however remote a region our survey may extend, is everywhere assailed by forces it can neither explain nor control. . . .

Humanity, whether viewed in the light of man’s individual conduct or in the existing relationships between organized communities and nations, has, alas, strayed too far and suffered too great a decline to be redeemed through the unaided efforts of the best among its recognized rulers and statesmen—however disinterested their motives, however concerted their action, however unsparing in their zeal and devotion to its cause. No scheme which the calculations of the highest statesmanship may yet devise; no doctrine which the most distinguished exponents of economic theory may hope to advance; no principle which the most ardent of moralists may strive to inculcate, can provide, in the last resort, adequate foundations upon which the future of a distracted world can be built. . . .

It is towards this goal—the goal of a new World Order, Divine in origin, all-embracing in scope, equitable in principle, challenging in its features—that a harassed humanity must strive. . . .

How pathetic indeed are the efforts of those leaders of human institutions who, in utter disregard of the spirit of the age, are striving to adjust national processes, suited to the ancient days of self-contained nations, to an age which must either achieve the unity of the world, as adumbrated by Bahá’u’lláh, or perish. At so critical an hour in the history of civilization it behooves the leaders of all the nations of the world, great and small, whether in the East or in the West, whether victors or vanquished, to give heed to the clarion call of Bahá’u’lláh and, thoroughly imbued with a sense of world solidarity, the sine quâ non of loyalty to His Cause, arise manfully to carry out in its entirety the one remedial scheme He, the Divine Physician, has prescribed for an ailing humanity. Let them discard, once for [Page 282] all, every preconceived idea, every national prejudice, and give heed to the sublime counsel of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the authorized Expounder of His teachings. You can best serve your country, was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s rejoinder to a high official in the service of the federal government of the United States of America, who had questioned Him as to the best manner in which he could promote the interests of his government and people, if you strive, in your capacity as a citizen of the world, to assist in the eventual application of the principle of federalism underlying the government of your own country to the relationships now existing between the peoples and nations of the world. . . .

Some form of a world Super-State must needs be evolved, in whose favor all the nations of the world will have willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining internal order within their respective dominions. Such a state will have to include within its orbit an International Executive adequate to enforce supreme and unchallengeable authority on every recalcitrant member of the commonwealth; a World Parliament whose members shall be elected by the people in their respective countries and whose election shall be confirmed by their respective governments; and a Supreme Tribunal whose judgment will have a binding effect even in such cases where the parties concerned did not voluntarily agree to submit their case to its consideration. A world community in which all economic barriers will have been permanently demolished and the interdependence of Capital and Labor definitely recognized; in which the clamor of religious fanaticism and strife will have been forever stilled; in which the flame of racial animosity will have been finally extinguished; in which a single code of international law—the product of the considered judgment of the world’s federated representatives— shall have as its sanction the instant and coercive intervention of the combined forces of the federated units; and finally a world community in which the fury of a capricious and militant nationalism will have been transmuted into an abiding consciousness of world citizenship—such indeed, appears, in its broadest outline, the Order anticipated by Bahá’u’lláh, an Order that shall come to be regarded as the fairest fruit of a slowly maturing age. . . .

For Bahá’u’lláh . . . has not only imbued mankind with a new and regenerating Spirit. He has not merely enunciated certain universal principles, or propounded a particular philosophy, however potent, sound and universal these may be. In addition to these He, as well as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá after Him, have, unlike the Dispensations of the past, clearly and specifically laid down a set of Laws, established definite institutions, and provided for the essentials of a Divine Economy. These are destined to be a pattern for future society, a supreme instrument for the establishment of the Most Great Peace, and the one agency for the unification of the world, and the proclamation of the reign of righteousness and justice upon the earth.

SHOGHI EFFENDI.

Excerpts from “The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh.”

[Page 283]

THE BAHÁ’Í TEACHINGS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE

1. THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH IS AN INDEPENDENT RELIGION

UNDER the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of religious worship in most western nations, which in practice has enabled a great number and wide variety of groups to incorporate as religious bodies under the statutes provided by the several States, the fundamental question what in reality constitutes a religion as distinct from an ethical, philosophical or humanitarian movement does not arise. We are aware of no criterion in law or custom by which this distinction can fairly be applied, though we recognize the weight of public opinion which more or less consciously limits the term religion to sects derived historically from Christianity or Judaism, while passively tolerating the legal rights asserted by communities descended from other racial faiths having continued life and vitality in the Orient. The public influence of faiths other than Christianity or Judaism has never become a religious issue in Canada or the United States on account of the effective restrictions imposed by the Immigration Acts.

Our petition involves the claim that the Bahá’í Faith is an independent religion, not an off-shoot or mere creedal or ritualistic variation of any former religion. It stands upon the same spiritual foundation as Christianity, Judaism and all other recognized independent religions of history. This foundation is the life and teaching of a Prophet, divinely inspired, imbued with the power of the Holy Spirit and providentially come to re-establish the reality of divine law for His age and cycle.

An essential part of the mission of Bahá’u’lláh was to reveal the true nature of religion. His teachings identify religion with the gospel written or spoken by each successive Prophet, the effect of which has been to inspire faith and regenerate human beings, releasing the power necessary to create a new and higher civilization. In each cycle, the motive of true faith is gradually weakened, civilization becomes materialistic and the Prophet’s universal message is replaced by human creed and the formalities of human organization.

Bahá’u’lláh supplies the clue to the meaning of history in this teaching, which asserts that civilizations rise and fall according as a society lives by divine or materialistic standards of reality. In the Bahá’í gospel, the oneness of humanity—the end and aim of the spirit of this new age—is an ideal whose attainment is dependent upon recognition of the identity of all the Prophets as successive manifestations of the one God. Religious exclusiveness and intolerance in former, [Page 284] dark ages has made vast societies denounce the very source of the faith upheld by other societies and, in denying its divine origin, has sanctioned that bitter religious strife which in turn is the ultimate sanction of economic and political war.

“Today the religion and the law of God is this: the people of the world must not make the various creeds and different sects pretexts for hatred. Those strong and mighty principles, laws and pathways have appeared from the one Dawning-place, and have shone forth from the one refulgent Horizon; and their differences have been in accordance with the exigencies of times, epochs, centuries and ages. Gird up the loins of endeavor, so that perchance religious dissension and strife may, through your efforts, be reduced to nothingness among the inhabitants of the world. Arise for the love of God and man in this important Cause! Intolerance and religious hatred are a consuming fire, which cannot be extinguished without divine aid.”

This spiritual principle, which declares that Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and the other Prophets are bearers of the one same Light, is wholly new and organically different from any religious tenets of the past. None can attribute it to any previous Revelation. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said: “The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion.”

In revealing the common, divine origin of all faith, Bahá’u’lláh provides a true, spiritual bond uniting all human beings, irrespective of their nation, race, class or creed. This constitutes the sound basis on which alone world peace can be raised, for this spiritual bond makes human brotherhood a divine law, and replaces the ancient sanctions of antipathy and strife by new sanctions of cooperation and amity.

But the validity of Prophethood has historic proofs simpler and more obvious than the profound significance of the new principles revealed in a sacred gospel. The independence of the Bahá’í Faith is firmly established upon the unparalleled suffering inflicted upon Bahá’u’lláh and His followers, as upon His Forerunner, the Báb. Two rulers, and the leaders of Muḥammadanism, combined in effort to extinguish this Light. The course of this persecution, carried on in Persia and Turkey during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when those nations were each governed by one supreme and irresponsible monarch, restored the reality of the early days of Christianity, when faith stood steadfast against oppression and gave eventual victory to a new vision of God. As Jesus freely offered His spirit of new life to the religious representatives of the old order, but was arrogantly spurned, with the result that Christianity arose in complete integrity and independence, so Bahá’u’lláh sought to guide His community along the path of knowledge but was resisted by the combined forces of church and state.

Exiled from Ṭihrán to Baghdád, from Baghdád to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Adrianople, and thence for the remainder of His life immured in the prison city of [Page 285] ‘Akká, Bahá’u’lláh found no place in the old order on which to build His teaching of peace and unity, and therefore, like the Prophets before Him, raised up a new community of faith which bears His Name.

By this degree of persecution a cause is marked and signalized as a true religion, distinct in character and ultimate influence from any other type of movement or organization. If Christianity is a religion, by the life of its Founder, by the faith and sacrifice of its believers, by the new life it released for the unity of a host of people previously disunited and in strife; so the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh is a religion, the return in our age of the providential spirit that inspired Jesus, Moses, Muḥammad.

2. THE BAHÁ’Í GOSPEL IS THE SPIRIT OF PEACE

In view of the bloody history of Europe and of the Orient, and the participation of well nigh every religious sect in war and strife over along period of time, the principle of peace can not tenably be held to be fundamental in any previous religion. The principle of love has been the spirit and motive of all religion, and peace can only rest soundly upon love; but the application of peace as a religious principle binding upon entire communities is, except for a few notable exceptions, a modern discovery and a re-interpretation of ancient doctrine in the light of a changed condition of the world. For in previous ages it was held that God’s love reached only the members of one or another exclusive sect.

The Bahá’í Faith, however, needs no re-interpretation or philosophical extension to lead to the principle of peace. World peace to Bahá’ís is no mere passive ideal, listed in a catalog of articles of faith, but the fundamental element of the teaching itself. It was to inaugurate the age of peace that Bahá’u’lláh came to humanity, and His Cause divides the centuries of strife from the day of unity and reconciliation. Innumerable quotations from Bahá’í writings attest this truth.

“Victory neither has been or will ever be opposition to any one, nor strife with any person; but rather what is well-pleasing is that the cities of men’s hearts, which are under the dominion of the hosts of selfishness and lust shall be subdued by the sword of the word of wisdom and of exhortation. Everyone, then, who desires victory, must first subdue the city of his own heart with the sword of spiritual truth and of the Word, and must protect it from remembering aught beside God; afterwards let him turn his efforts toward the citadel of the hearts of others. This is what is intended by victory; sedition has never been nor will ever be pleasing to God. . . . If you are slain for His good pleasure, verily, it is better for you than that you should slay.”

“In this present cycle there will be an evolution in civilization unparalleled in the history of the world. The world of humanity has heretofore been in the stage of infancy; now it is approaching maturity. Just as the individual human organism, having attained the period of maturity reaches its fullest degree of physical strength, and ripened intellectual faculties, so [Page 286] that in one year of this ripened period there is witnessed an unprecedented measure of development, likewise the world of humanity in this cycle of its completeness and consummation will realize an immeasurable upward progress.”

“The powers of earth cannot withstand the privileges and bestowals which God has ordained for this great and glorious century. Peace is a need and exigency of the time.”

“The most important principle of divine philosophy is the oneness of the world of humanity, the unity of mankind, the bond conjoining East and West, the tie of love which blends human hearts. . . . For thousands of years we have had bloodshed and strife. It is enough; it is sufficient. Now is the time to associate together in love and harmony.

“All the divine Manifestations (Prophets) have proclaimed the oneness of God and the unity of mankind. They have taught that men should love and mutually help each other in order that they might progress. Now if this conception of religion be true, its essential principle is the oneness of humanity. The fundamental truth of the Manifestations is peace. This underlies all religion, all justice. The divine purpose is that men should live in unity, concord and agreement and should love one another. Consider the virtues of the human world and realize that the oneness of humanity is the primary foundation of them all.”

These few excerpts from Bahá’í sacred literature make it clear, we trust, that this Faith is more than a movement upholding peace as one of many objects some of which may, in actual operation, nullify the attainment of world peace for the sake of partisan victory. Rather do we understand and whole-heartedly accept the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh as the true spiritual expression of universal peace, the “Most Great Peace” foreseen by Bahá’u’lláh as the turning-point of human evolution, which means not only peace between armed states but also peace between religions, races and classes.

The Light shed by Bahá’u’lláh upon the modern world has been, we are convinced, the source of the new, widespread human hope that peace can be attained. Any sincere student of His utterance will freely admit that their fundamental tenets, such as the equality of men and women, the establishment of a universal auxiliary language, the harmony of science and religion, the spiritual solution of the economic problem, and the organization of a world order, revealed by Bahá’u’lláh as elements of His gospel to mankind, have been taken up by great numbers of people wholly unconscious of their source and made the predominant ideals of this generation.

3. CONTROL OF MEMBERSHIP IN THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

Successful operation of the Act under which this petition is made requires, we fully realize, some degree of administrative control within the petitioning religious body sufficient to identify its members and prevent the rise of claims for status as members of the body on the part of persons insincerely or unjustifiably seeking to enjoy some result of that status.

[Page 287] The National Spiritual Assembly therefore deems it advisable to point out that the accompanying Declaration of Trust and By-Laws provide this administrative control to an unusual degree.

Membership in the Bahá’í body of America is secured by persons meeting a definite standard of faith applied by the local elective body of nine persons known as the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of that town or city. Each local Spiritual Assembly is charged with the responsibility of admitting only such applicants as after due examination it finds have made adequate study of the Bahá’í teachings, possess thorough knowledge of their meaning and are sincerely desirous of uniting with the Bahá’í community. All memberships are then contingent upon approval by the National Spiritual Assembly of the actions taken by the local bodies. Members duly enrolled may at any time, for just causes, have their names stricken from the local and national list.

This procedure, which clearly makes for the utmost sincerity and also understanding on the part of Bahá’ís, rests upon the significant fact that the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh has no clergy or priests. Its aim is to produce communities among people deemed spiritually equal, not to divide the religious society into professional and lay elements.

Bahá’í worship thus has no ritualism and formality, for Bahá’u’lláh has made the aim of religion identical with the best and highest living of life. It has been on account of this simplicity and lack of those material and visible marks so long identified with religious practice and worship that certain people have refused to consider the Bahá’í Faith a true religion, overlooking the significant fact that in the early days of Christianity the same simplicity obtained. Another ground on which recognition has been withheld by occasional critics of the Faith is its rise in a Muḥammadan civilization. By terming the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh “an off-shoot of Islám” they would reduce it not merely to insignificance but stigmatize it as a potential enemy of Christendom. How a Faith which Islám has sought for more than fifty years to destroy can be identified with Islám this attitude does not explain; nor does it explain how the gospel of Christ can be made to justify a deliberate and official hostility to any religious community upon earth. We emphasize again, as a most vital matter, the Bahá’í teaching that world peace must be established upon “unity of conscience” before any formal, political measures can have real effect.

This teaching was presented by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in a letter addressed to the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, The Hague, dated December 17, 1919, from which we quote the following excerpt:

“At present Universal Peace is a matter of great importance, but unity of conscience is essential, so that the foundation of this matter may become secure, its establishment firm and its edifice strong. . . . Although the League of Nations has been brought into existence, yet it is incapable of establishing Universal Peace. But the Supreme Tribunal which His Holiness [Page 288] Bahá’u’lláh has described will fulfill this sacred task with the utmost might and power. And His plan is this: that the national Assemblies of each country and nation—that is to say parliaments —should elect two or three persons who are the choicest men of that nation, and are well informed concerning international laws and the relations between governments, and are aware of the essential needs of the world of humanity in this day. The number of these representatives should be in proportion to the number of inhabitants of that country. The election of these souls who are chosen by the national Assembly, that is, the parliament, must be confirmed by the upper house, the congress and the cabinet and also by the president or monarch, so that these persons may be the elected ones of all the nation and the government. From among these people the members of the Supreme Tribunal will be elected, and all mankind will thus have a share therein, for every one of these delegates is fully representative of his nation. When the Supreme Tribunal gives a ruling on any international question, either unanimously or by majority rule, there will no longer be any pretext for the plaintiff or ground of objection for the defendant. In case any of the governments or nations, in the execution of the irrefutable decision of the Supreme Tribunal, be negligent or dilatory, the rest of the nations will rise up against it, because all the governments and nations of the world are the supporters of this Supreme Tribunal. Consider what a firm foundation this is! But by a limited and restricted League the purpose will not be realized as it ought and should.”

4. THE BASIS OF THE BAHÁ’Í PETITION

In submitting this petition the National Spiritual Assembly wishes to avoid giving the impression that the followers of Bahá’u’lláh have religious justification for any rigid and narrow anti-social attitude or for any negative program of non-cooperation. On the contrary, the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh, while renewing and confirming the fundamental religious doctrine of love, has enlarged this doctrine from the realm of individual action to the realm of social principle. Bahá’ís desire and pray for exemption from military duty not because they would stand aloof from the movement of society as a whole but because they would serve the supreme good of humanity, the attainment of universal peace. No mere self-righteousness, but intention of rendering full and complete obedience to the will of God, is the basis of our present petition. We feel profoundly that the active spirit of peace is a motive higher and more useful to our fellowmen than the attitude recently identified by the term pacifism.

Permit us to point out that since the birth of the Bahá’í Faith, the institution of war has broken all social bounds and become uncontrollable, a scourge afflicting all peoples alike and removing real distinction between victor and vanquished. It can not be confined to the achievement of the aims set up by any public policy, but when unloosed is a destructive flood which can overrun the entire civilized world. This is the clear lesson of the [Page 289] recent European War, and we encounter everywhere the conviction that any future war would be far more uncontrollable and far more destructive. Therefore, in upholding an active doctrine and policy of peace the Bahá’ís stand not against any due and legitimate action of their civil government but stand resolutely against that all-encompassing anarchy and social chaos which war now is. In view of the worldwide destructiveness latent in war at this time, that resolute stand, we are convinced, exemplifies the highest and most useful form of loyalty any religious community can achieve both for its fellow-citizens and for mankind. For the uncontrollability of modern war transforms it from a function of public policy into the supreme enemy of the human race. What urgent need, then, for a new and fresh assertion of religion capable of removing the veils of tradition, overcoming superstition in both its obvious and subtle forms, and giving humanity a reality on which the structure of peace can be raised.

The inmost heart of the Bahá’í teaching on the Most Great Peace, as we conceive it, is that Bahá’u’lláh has made the preservation of peace a divine command incumbent upon kings, rulers and parliaments for the protection of humanity, while the Prophets of ancient times, the world being then unprepared for public peace, made peace a command addressed to the individual conscience. Thus, until this blessed age of fuller Revelation, the people of religion have been bitterly tormented by the obligation to make choice between individual conscience and public policy—a decision not merely difficult on the plane of reason, but necessarily compelling the community of the faithful to decide between subserviency to brutal materialism on the one hand and outlawry on the other. We hail the adoption of the Kellogg-Briand pact as the first step on the part of civil governments to recognize the principle that public policy must be established upon an ethical basis. The existence of this Pact, indeed, now makes it possible for the Bahá’í community to assert its doctrine of universal peace in a petition to its government, and not merely repeat the claim of individual conscience advanced by communities descended from Prophets of former times.

In conclusion we would refer briefly to the service already rendered by the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh to this structure of peace.

In addition to the local Bahá’í communities existing in Canada and the United States, similar communities exist in many countries of Europe and the Orient. In their relations one with another, these communities already manifest universal peace in practice as well as principle. The original diversity of the members of this Cause represented all the extremes of diversity found in the world today—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian and Hindu; white, brown, yellow and black; American, English, French, German, Swiss, Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Burmese, Chinese, Japanese and other nationalities; rich and poor, scholar and illiterate.

Despite such diversity, which carried within it all the potency of long-established suspicion, antagonism and [Page 290] strife, the Bahá’í community finds itself united in a common faith which prevails over every artificial distinction and acquired difference. On a small scale, in fact, the secret of universal peace has already been learned, and the art of cooperation made to replace the instinct of strife. A world become gravely anxious in the face of so many evidences of revolution and war may well seek of this humble community the reasons for its unshatterable amity and accord.

It is of more than historical significance that Bahá’u’lláh directed His doctrines of peace in the first instance not merely to the original small group of devoted followers but to the kings and rulers of mankind. During the years 1868, 1869 and 1870, Bahá’u’lláh addressed letters to the heads of governments proclaiming the rise of the era of peace and calling upon the rulers to assemble and take measures to eliminate the possibilities of future war. Thus, in the communication sent to Queen Victoria, Bahá’u’lláh wrote:

“Take ye counsel together, and let your concern be only for that which profiteth mankind and bettereth the condition thereof. . . . . Regard ye the world as the human body which, though created whole and perfect, has been afflicted, through divers causes, with grave ills and maladies. Not for one day did it rest, nay its sickness waxed more severe, as it fell under the treatment of unskilled physicians who have spurred on the steed of their worldly desires and have erred grievously. . . . That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of the world is the union of all its people in one universal Cause, one common Faith. This can in nowise be achieved except through the power of a skilled, an all-powerful and inspired Physician.”

We can not conclude this statement without calling attention to the high and indeed unique mission attributed in Bahá’í writings to North America as the destined instrument through which universal peace is to be established upon this stricken earth. Thus, in a letter written to American Bahá’ís during the European War, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá declared that “The continent of America is in the eyes of the one true God the land wherein the splendors of His light shall be revealed, where the mysteries of His Faith shall be unveiled, where the righteous will abide and the free assemble.” Again, speaking at a meeting held at New York on April 16, 1912: “May America become the distributing center of spiritual enlightenment and all the world receive this heavenly blessing. For America has developed powers and capacities greater and more wonderful than other nations. While it is true that its people have attained a marvelous material civilization, I hope that spiritual forces will animate this great body and a corresponding spiritual civilization be established.” Even more specifically in the course of an address delivered before the New York Peace Society, on May 13, 1912, “Praise be to God, in all countries of the world peace lovers are to be found and these principles are being spread among mankind, especially in this country. Praise be to God, this thought is prevailing and souls are continually arising as defenders of the [Page 291] oneness of humanity, endeavoring to assist and establish universal peace. There is no doubt that this wonderful democracy will be able to realize it and the banner of international agreement will be unfurled here to spread onward and outward among all the nations of the world.”

Indeed, the essential aims of the Bahá’í Faith were stated in these words uttered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the congregation of the Church of the Messiah, Montreal, on September 1, 1912: “The world is in greatest need of international peace. Until it is established, mankind will not attain composure and tranquillity. . . . I pray God that these western peoples may become the means of establishing international peace and spreading the oneness of the world of humanity. May you become the cause of unity and agreement among the nations. May a lamp be lighted here which will illumine the whole universe with the oneness of the world of humanity, with love between the hearts of the children of men, and the unity of all mankind. I hope that you may become assisted in this supreme accomplishment; that you may raise the flag of international peace and reconciliation upon this continent; that this government and people may be the means of spreading these lofty ideals. . . .”

That this mission, surely the greatest ever offered to any nation or people in the history of the world, may be fulfilled before war can again break out and overthrow the very pillars of civilization, is our heart-felt prayer.

---

Behold the disturbances which, for many a long year, have afflicted the earth, and the perturbation that hath seized its peoples. It hath either been ravaged by war, or tormented by sudden and unforeseen calamities. Though the world is encompassed with misery and distress, yet no man hath paused to reflect what the cause or source of that may be. Whenever the True Counsellor uttered a word in admonishment, lo, they all denounced Him as a mover of mischief and rejected His claim. How bewildering, how confusing is such behavior! No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union. The Great Being saith: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one Branch.—BAHÁ’U’LLÁH.

[Page 292]

HAS MANKIND REACHED MATURITY?

KENNETH CHRISTIAN

THERE’S never a dull moment in the modern world. Witness the fact that America presents two World’s Fairs in one season. Witness the greatest mass migration in history in Spain, as over a million people flee their homes. Witness the devastating war in China, a legal war because undeclared. Witness the irresistible march of science and aviation, knitting ever tighter the physical bonds uniting the modern world. And through all this evidence of simultaneous progress and retrogression, witness the political, religious, economic, and social hatreds that divide men into antagonistic and warring groups.

The chaos and confusion of modern times makes certain the statement that the members of the human race have not yet reached maturity. An analysis would show us three reasons why this is so.

First, because we are not consciously integrated as a human race. The average individual today is conscious first of family loyalty. This loyalty is frequently sufficient justification for committing unjust acts toward other people. Next, the average individual is conscious of loyalty to a particular locality. To boost the industry of his locality, he would frequently favor laws and political acts which would bring suffering to other people. Probably next, the individual is conscious of his racial and religious loyalty. If this is so, somewhere in his mind is a quite marked feeling of superiority over other religious groups and almost certainly he condones the competition between denominations and the inefficiency, striving and lack of spiritual force which results from sectarianism. But the bond of loyalty which has greatest emotional appeal is unquestionably national loyalty. Here the average citizen, in his love for his country, is the victim of whatever policy is advanced by the major political parties. And in the name of patriotic symbols, many citizens are swept into political movements which in times of clear thinking, they realize are detrimental to the welfare of the nation. An inspection of these political, religious, national and family bonds will show quite clearly that the dominant loyalty is not justice, but the furtherance of one group and the dominance of that group over others.

Most people will subscribe quite glibly to the ideal of justice, but they have not thought through completely enough to see that any phase of sectarian action is a type of group action which must inevitably bring about injustice [Page 293] to those groups which are defeated. Until some change is brought about in people which causes them to think of others, in fact, of all people, as human beings first, rather than as members of different racial, political, and religious groups, injustices in the modern world will continue. We cannot be integrated as a human race until we consciously acknowledge the humanity of all people.

Second, mankind has not reached maturity because the world has not yet recognized a workable basis for unity. There are two major methods for achieving unity now being pursued by the great nations of the world. One group would unite the world by force, suppressing deliberately and ruthlessly all groups and individuals who would choose to think differently. The other group attempts to unite people by compromising differences. This method is one whereby problems are solved temporarily as economic and political pressure shifts. Neither method would primarily serve the just interests of all the people concerned. Each method would enhance the prestige of one group over another, and because a nation must “save its face,” it is considered justified that people are condemned to suffer, either in economic or actual warfare.

A workable and fair basis for unity in the modern world would need to guarantee and to state explicitly certain rights and privileges that all men can share. The right of free thinking and the expression of opinion would need to be constantly upheld. Every economic and political move would need to be thought of in terms of human values and human consequences. Moreover, the difficult political problem of sovereignty would need to be solved by the principle of federation, a working principle of development which has been proven practical in the experience and history of the American people.

Third, mankind has not yet reached maturity because the idealism of adolescence has not yet been reinforced by the practical realism of maturity. It would seem safe for us to say that the great majority of people always have been and continue to be idealistic. For we may quote the great political leaders of history to show that they recognized the latent idealism of the populace. The Roman politician, Quintus Cicero, recognized that people hold very high standards for the men whom they elect to office. Cicero clearly advised that a politician should have those characteristics admired by the people and make them, on the surface at least, part of his own personality. The great political theorist, Machiavelli, strongly advised all public leaders “to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright.” A ruler should strive consciously to build up in the eyes of the people a reputation for these values. And although Machiavelli proceeds to state that the ruler may act in an opposite manner if he wishes, yet the importance of these virtues in the eyes of the people, he stresses again and again All public leaders have seen the necessity for clothing their acts in idealistic symbols and slogans. No great leader has ever risen to power who has not, in some manner, appealed to the idealism latent in the minds and hearts of his followers.

[Page 294] But this idealism has been very much like the idealism of an adolescent who will be very fair in some of his acts and very unjust in others. For the adolescent does not see the carry-over between the ideal and the act; between the theory and the practice. Unfortunately, mass psychology operates on that fact. Individual leaders sway their followers by emotional appeals to idealistic concepts. And the acts into which they are led are acts which most of them, as individuals, would never think of committing. Few individuals would ever think of murdering another man, and yet in the frenzy of war, we give medals to the individual soldier who has personally killed most of the enemy. Under such conditions, we laud the scientists who invent methods of large scale destruction. All of this is done under the cloak of idealism.

The mature individual man tries to see a problem as it actually is, tries above all not to be swayed emotionally in solving it, and then seeks a solution on the basis of the facts he can obtain. This is what is meant by practical realism. To get our public leaders to follow a cool-headed method of solving problems would require a change of heart, both on their part and on the part of the mass who support them. And this change of heart would require a different vision—a vision of world social problems in terms of human values and human beings, not in terms of group prestige and group warfare. Until this change comes about, the natural idealism of people will be used to trick and defeat mankind and to cause more and more social injustice.

Since individuals are the units of any civilization, we see that mankind hasn’t reached maturity because there are not enough individual men and women who are mature. We would, therefore, need to have more and more individuals who think in terms of humanity, who seek a basis for world unity that will not destroy the rights of large groups of people, and who strive to see problems, not emotionally, but with the practical realism of maturity.

In 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in speaking to an English audience said, “This is a new cycle of human power.” For this century has seen the large scale development of inventions which have completely changed our methods of communication and transportation, and so changed human life that every mode of thinking and every way of action has been seriously challenged. Although most people confess not to know where the world is going, or what it will be like in another quarter of a century, hardly anyone will question the fact that a very different world is in the making. Bahá’ís are interested in a particular phase of the present world change.

They are interested in the contributions which religion can make to what they believe is the inevitable unification of the world. A study of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh reveals that His message as a Messenger of God was to demonstrate the complete application of religion in life. Bahá’u’lláh stressed again and again, in various books and tablets, that this age was a time when words and nice religious sentiments were not sufficient, [Page 295] in fact, were quite secondary in importance. This He proclaimed to be the age of action and deeds. The measure of a man’s religion is what he does, not the neat sentiments he might be capable of uttering. Therefore, for Bahá’ís, religion has an entirely different emphasis and starting point than that accepted by the majority of people.

Bahá’u’lláh further claimed that the ultimate solution to the problem of war lay in the influence of religion in uniting men, and uniting them on the principle of the oneness of mankind. On the basis of this principle, Bahá’u’lláh sketched the outlines for a world civilization. And He advanced the claim that from His teachings would rise a new type of society which would unite men firmly enough to enable them to solve the terrific problem of war. Bahá’u’lláh stated that in this age, mankind would reach maturity and that the forces of change would work relentlessly in every phase of life to bring about this maturity.

Obviously, this is a stupendous claim. It is startling to many people when first they hear of it. And it is, therefore, only just that people ask what Bahá’u’lláh has given which makes logical His claim. An answer to this question might fall into four parts.

First, Bahá’u’lláh has removed some of the greatest barriers which separate men into opposing groups and factions.

Some of the barriers which have marked the path of human progress are: geographic limitations, difficulties of communication and transport, differences of language, sectarianism in religion, agrarian and sectional economies—suited to the nationalistic state prior to the machine age, exaggerated racial differences, opposing cultural habits and concepts, and various limited concepts of patriotism. Of these obstructions to unity, science, in the last few decades, has practically removed the obstacles of geographic limitations, of transport and communication, and it has fatally undermined the system of national economics. Bahá’u’lláh, through the power of His writings, has been able to readily unite men and women separated by the barriers of language, of antagonistic religious backgrounds, of different racial and national origins, of opposed cultural patterns. The first social fruits of His influence are the hundreds of groups found in all parts of the world—groups of men and women united through the potency of religion. This is a social phenomenon to be found nowhere else.

Second, Bahá’u’lláh has demonstrated the oneness of truth.

In former periods of history, the meagerness of records, the slowness of communication, and the lack of accurate scholarship in translation, cultivated and strengthened the belief that the great religious communities of the world had little or nothing in common. But Bahá’u’lláh showed in His writings, two decades before scholarship in comparative religions came into being, that there is only one religion, which has been revealed by God through great Prophetic Beings who lived in different ages of history. The followers of religion have created and emphasized differences. In some [Page 296] cases, misunderstanding has been the result of historic accident; in others, differences have been deliberately cultivated and perpetuated by the professional clergy. . . . With great simplicity and irrefutable logic, Bahá’u’lláh cuts this bewildering Gordian knot and shows the unfolding plan of God through the ages. Thus, men find a natural basis for unity with the members of all the world’s religious faiths; and men find a simple loyalty, far removed from theological vagaries and dispute; and men find a new vision as they see divine purpose in all human life.

Third, Bahá’u’lláh has advanced the principles and outlines for construction of a world society.

It is obvious that moral men cannot live happily in an immoral society, nor can a world be unified and at peace, if the men who dwell in it continue to think and act in sectional and factional terms. Any discussion, then, of the problems relative to peace between nations must, sooner or later, center upon an actual plan. In the Bahá’í teachings are to be found necessary social principles to make practical the uniting of ever-larger groups of men. And Bahá’u’lláh has shown how justice, in the highest moral sense, can be achieved through a system of international federation very similar to that found in American democracy. This system of World Order represents the greatest social application of the truths of revealed religion to be found in all history.

Fourth, Bahá’u’lláh has supplied the dynamic which is creating new, mature men and women.

On all sides, we hear present-day speakers and commentators say that men must be “changed” if impending chaos is not to prove fatal to civilization. Such was also the analysis of Bahá’u’lláh seventy years ago, for at that time He wrote: “When the lamp of religion is hidden, only confusion and chaos will follow.” . . . The world has changed rapidly and to such an extent that only men with a different viewpoint and a new vision can safely inhabit it. Men must change to fit a world united by science and where all peoples are completely interdependent. Bahá’u’lláh is awakening in countless people a sense of world citizenship through the love of God. This spiritual unity cannot be broken by physical persecution, by the attacks of enraged clergy, or by the scorn of the indifferent. Unity through the love of God is a force that is socially creative and makes practical the realization of Bahá’u’lláh’s vision for the future of mankind.

Here, then, is the consummation of all religious truth, the wedding of idealism with the social needs of our age. Here is not smug, traditional separation, but the challenging and actual basis for world unity. The maturity of mankind will be realized as the teachings and principles of Bahá’u’lláh produce more and more people who are not only physically mature, but also mature in heart and mind.

[Page 297]

THEY MET THE DAWN

ALICE SIMMONS COX

“Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God is endowed with such potency as can instill new life into every human frame. . . . Through the mere Revelation of the word Fashioner, . . . such power is released as can generate . . . all the manifold arts which the hands of man can produce.”

II.

THE best-known of all prophetic English verse has been the New Year song of Lord Tennyson, After the death of his dearest friend in 1833 Tennyson began writing In Memoriam: through the spring of his soul flowed exquisite words and thoughts. We choose one stanza of “Ring Out, Wild Bells” to show how near the poet was to the Spirit of God, Who even then was directing the affairs of earth, swiftly, toward a glorious goal. There is at the end a suggestion of the need of leadership from the Christ Spirit. This was as close as the consciousness of the poet could come to understanding of the unknown but approaching Advent of the Báb (a new Manifestation of God) which in reality, as Tennyson recognizes, must take place symbolically in every soul that is to attain spiritual life. He saw clearly the need of such a transformation in the soul of humanity, and held hope for its accomplishment. Was his inspiration coming from the invisible world of the spirit where such change had already been put in motion?

“Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand:

Ring out the darkness from the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.”

(pub. 1850).

In the year of his death (1882) Tennyson approached, in Akbar’s Dream, a vision of the essence of unity necessary for the new civilization which at times he was certain would emerge from the international confusion of the age. In a few flawless lines we discover that which he had learned: the need of oneness of faith in adoration of one God.

“—I dreamed

That stone by stone I reared a sacred fane,

A temple, neither Pagod, Mosque nor Church,

But loftier, simpler, always open-doored

To every breath from heaven, and Truth and Peace

And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein.”

In the same year that Bahá’u’lláh ascended, ending His mission on earth, and releasing from the upper realm hosts of divine forces for the assistance of men of faith, did Tennyson himself answer the call of “sunset [Page 298] and evening star” with the hope that he would see his “Pilot face to face.”

Thus Tennyson knew much about a mighty stirring in the soul of the world.

PERFECT MAN

So sensitive was Robert Browning to the new spiritual impulse moving through all creation that in 1844 when he was thirty-two years of age he was writing the immortal words of Saul. In Old Testament setting he gives with joyous faith and vigor the gripping story of a soul in struggle to find and recognize the Christ, the focal center between God and man of a full-flowing abundant Life. Hear the dynamic movement of these selected lines:

“He who did most, shall bear most;

the strongest shall stand the most weak.

’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for!

my flesh that I seek

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it.

O Saul, it shall be

A Face like my face that receives thee;

A Man like to me,

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever:

A Hand like this hand

Shall throw open the gates of a new life to thee!

See the Christ stand!”

(1845, 1855).

Bits of conversation related by biographers tend to reinforce our interpretation. If in later years when, with philosophic mind, Browning attempted to prove his religious conceptions of individual integrity and of spiritual progress he seemed less certain of his ground, it is all the more significant. Then he was intellectually struggling to use the immature arguments of an infant science to support his intuitive perceptions. When he had depended on inspiration and an open-mind in the Dawn years of the middle of the century, he saw the Christ as Incarnate Love. Had this merely implied the historical Christ we would have no reason to feel Browning tuned in to the new Spirit of the Dawn; but read again his lines in Saul—words welling up from a heart energized with its own spiritual discovery. Here is profound realization of the reality of Prophethood as the Source of divine attributes, the Sun of the Word of God which impregnates the latent capacities of men and helps them, through faith, to reach the apex of human development in Christ-like living. In the front of progress, not behind in history, stands the Saviour as a divine Symbol, the Perfect Man. Could this have been subconscious acknowledgment of the new Prophet of God, who at that time was summoning the world to Him? For in Essence the Manifestations of God are one. Browning knew the Reality by the former Name.

Shelley, on the other hand, had not completely escaped the humanistic ideal, one quite alluring to independent minds in the night-season of an old Dispensation. He too experienced the exuberant awakening of inherent spiritual abilities but seems to have understood this as the full Light of Life—the creative elán of an emergent evolution.

[Page 299]

Recognize he did even in a highly materialistic and rigidly institutionalized age the eternal sovereignty of spiritual Law and the corollary that man must himself make effort if he would find the true God and be free, but the goal to be gained was to him the bright but circumscribed image of perfect man created by his own mind. “Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory! ’Twas the hope, the prophecy, which begins and ends in thee (man).”

“Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains

Yet unsubdued by man’s reclaiming hand.

Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,

Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue

The gradual paths of an aspiring change:

For birth and life and death, and that strange state

Before the naked soul has found its home,

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal.”

(Queen Mab, 1813).

Because of Shelley’s clearness of vision as to the course of the future century toward happiness and universal accord,—a precosity of mind far in advance of his time,—we are drawn to seek the cause of this misconception concerning the source of the blithe and brilliant spirit that surged through his veins, making him a wanderer in an unsatisfied quest of ideal beauty, a seer of events and an impetuous reformer, all in one. This is what we find: His misinterpretation of the manner in which the Divine Beauty came to him was not so much a fixed and immovable idea arising, as it sometimes does, from human ego, but an advanced step in his own movement toward the true God and freedom from institutional and doctrinal religion. Seeking spiritual liberty and love and thus opening the channel of his soul to inspiration, he had not yet in the immaturity of his second and third decade of living come into view of the central Day-Star of life: the Prophet station. (He died at 29.)

“In pursuance . . . of the principle that for everything a time hath been fixed, and for every fruit a season hath been ordained, the latent energies of such bounty can best be released and the vernal glory of such a gift (spiritual illumination) can only be manifested, in the Days of God,” Bahá’u’lláh has said.

“Hear me, ye mortal birds!” He calls out. “In the Rose Garden of changeless splendor a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither. Arise, therefore, and with the whole eagerness of your souls . . . endeavor . . . to breathe the sweet savors of holiness and to obtain a portion of this perfume of celestial glory. Whoso followeth this counsel will break his chains asunder, will taste the abandonment of enraptured love, will attain unto his heart’s desire, and [Page 300] will surrender his soul into the hands of his Beloved. Bursting through his cage, he will, even as the bird of the spirit, wing his flight to his holy and everlasting nest.”

Bahá’u’lláh’s Call had not yet been raised when Shelley made his search; nor had the Báb’s. The Flower was still hidden in the recesses of God’s inscrutable wisdom, not yet unveiled for men’s eyes. But its fragrance had been sensed by the poet “across immeasurable distances.” Here was not yet for him the Sunrise, but in the invisible world he found an early Dawn.

Shelley’s earthly fate was to be an exile from friends who clung to the decaying order. But he bequeathed to the thought of his day an unalterable confidence in the final supremacy of the Spirit of Love, when humanity will attain the fulfillment of its destiny.

“—Futurity

Exposes now its treasure; let the

Sight renew and strengthen all thy fading hope.

O human Spirit! Spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace. . . .

The habitable earth is full of bliss. . . .

To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man’s best nature there.

Every heart contains perfection’s germ.”

(Queen Mab, 1813)

Thirty years after Shelley’s earth songs ceased, Bahá’u’lláh gave forth the promise for the essence of which the English poet had so devotedly labored:

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

And Bahá’u’lláh likewise showed the Way and released the energies of God whereby this most great evolution could be accomplished.

“O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of my munificence and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth, rid yourselves of all attachment to all created things, and would gain such a knowledge of your own selves —a knowledge which is the same as the comprehension of Mine own Being, ye would find yourselves independent of all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner and outer eye, and as manifest as the revelation of My effulgent name, the seas of My loving-kindness and bounty moving within you. Suffer not your idle fancies, your evil passions, your insincerity and blindness of heart to dim the luster, or stain the sanctity, of so lofty a station.”

(To be continued)

[Page 301]

“YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW”

LILYAN FANCHER-BUSH

Is humanity doomed to extinction? Is mankind headed for oblivion? Is man going to be completely destroyed by the chaos rampant in the world today—chaos caused by fear and hate, revenge and lust, greed and avarice? Is there any hope—hope that out of this chaos and disorder, this disunity and inharmony, a new civilization will grow?

To the keen observer, pessimist though he may be (and who today is not?), there is evidence that man is striving toward a better civilization than has ever before been known.

What, after all, is civilization, but the cumulative results of man’s efforts in each phase of life—social, economic, political, scientific, intellectual, artistic, spiritual—phases of life which have, heretofore, been motivated, in the main, by human impulses, human desires, and human instincts?

This new civilization, signs of which are, even today, unmistakable if faint, will not be merely a pattern similar to the old, nor will it be the old, brushed off and polished up, to look like new. Neither will it be different from the old in a matter of degree—however favorable that degree might be—but it will be different in kind.

And therein lies the secret of the coming civilization,—a civilization which will be moulded by human impulses, human desires, and human instincts, —but also a civilization which will find its motivation and inspiration in a power greater than human— either individual or collective human.

Surely all of man’s past history points to this one fact, if to no other, —that life upon this earth must be put upon a different kind of basis, or life on this earth must cease. Surely man has never before faced a darker hour than the one he now faces.

Heretofore, conflict and discord have not threatened, as they do today, the whole of the human race. Civilizations have collapsed, it is true, but, at the time of their decadence, somewhere, in another part of the world, a new civilization has already begun.

And that is also true of the present day. Out of this world collapse of civilization, out of this present chaos, will come a new civilization—new in every aspect and phase—because man is slowly but surely working toward a world community, based upon a world fellowship. A world civilization which shall be new, not only in the outer manifestations of life, but new in motivating spirit. For, the coming civilization—and who can doubt, dark though the present picture, that man [Page 302] is at last on the threshold of maturity —will be a spiritual civilization.

AND what of the qualities which will be essential in this coming spiritual civilization (civilization is beginning to be an overworked word)? We shall need self-sacrifice; which, I hasten to add, will not have any of the dreary connotations of the past under the coming New World Order. Putting consideration for others ahead of consideration for oneself has, in the past, been rather a solitary business. But, you see, in the New World Order (substitute for “spiritual civilization,” at last), that will be the rule rather than the exception. And not the ineffectual, “dear Alphonse and Gaston” type of consideration, either, which is funny enough in print, but apt to be fruitless in practice. Because, the spirit of self-sacrifice —the consideration of the whole, in preference to the consideration of a part—will lead to the betterment of the whole.

We shall need to achieve a common understanding. A common understanding based upon man’s desire for the betterment of the whole. Again, a new spirit will be the motivating power. We have enough common understanding of the old type, heavens knows. It is the “common understanding” of the Occidental that the Oriental is tricky—a Kiplingesque, “heathen-Chinee” type of understanding. It is the “common understanding” of the White Race that it is superior to the Dark Races. It is the “common understanding” of the European that the American is uncultured, uncultivated. It is the “common understanding” of the North that the South is indolent. But enough —it is obvious that today man is united by the “will to hate” more than the “will to love.” Ask any of our prominent dictators. It is sufficient to say that the common understanding of the New World Order will be a recognition of the worth which every race and creed, every nation and class, has to contribute to the betterment of the whole.

We shall need unity of purpose in our New World Order. And if we have the spirit of true self-sacrifice— the good of the whole preferential to the desires of the few—and a true common understanding—recognition of the real worth of the contribution of each part of that whole—we shall achieve unity of purpose. Purpose being the goal toward which humanity is striving, unity being the method used in that striving. Again, a new spirit. This will, of course, lead to the abolishment of personal animosities and prejudices—pettinesses which man, in his new maturity, will throw off. For the betterment of the whole.

We shall need a spiritual world fellowship. It is rapidly being proven today (has been proven, in many instances) that any fellowship, without a spiritual foundation, is unworkable. World unity, international unity, is the next step for man. And no one needs be told that any and all manmade plans at work today are failing —rapidly and completely. We must have something deeper than an economic solution to the problems of life today—regardless of how far a stabilized, universal currency might go toward relieving human distress. We [Page 303] must have something deeper than a political solution to the problems of life today—regardless of how much a recognized and enforced world government could do in alleviating world disorder. We must have something deeper than a social solution to the problems of life today—regardless of the sincerity and unselfishness of that solution.

For our problem today is not solely economic, hence no economic solution can solve the whole problem. Our problem today is not alone a political problem, hence no political solution can adequately meet the entire situation. Our problem today is not only a social problem, hence no social solution can fill the need.

The only answer to our present day world conflict lies in a solution which presents a spiritual basis upon which, and from which, we can solve our economic difficulties, starting from a spiritual premise; a spiritual basis upon which, and from which, we can solve our political problem, starting from a spiritual premise; and a spiritual basis upon which, and from which, we can solve our social problem, starting from a spiritual promise. Man, united in one common bond of spiritual fellowship, meeting and solving, adequately and correctly, the problems of living, upon the common basis of a spiritual foundation.

MATERIAL civilization has, today, reached its highest peak in the history of man. Never before has every aspect of the physical life of man in this material world reached such a state of perfection. Manufacture, trade, production; communication, transportation; medical, scientific research; technical, social developments; —each and every one of them has advanced to a stage of development never before witnessed by man.

But it is not enough. That, too, is obvious. For material progress is but one of the methods by which man advances in this world. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that man’s ability to best use that which he produces has not kept pace with the production itself. That needs no elaboration. We find technical production, which should and could be used for the benefit and pleasure of man, through neglect and carelessness, being used for the destruction and suppression of the human race. We find that same technical production, which should and could be used for the betterment and relief of a suffering humanity, being used, intentionally and deliberately, for the destruction and exploitation of man. We find the field of medical research, trying to prolong and better human life, combatting the indifference and callousness of an outworn and outmoded social system. We find the field of scientific research, on the one hand trying to better man’s physical and material life, and, on the other, working frantically to obliterate, by any and every method, the very life which it is trying to save.

I said above that material civilization was not enough for man. Nor is it. The desired result of life on this earth—the place of man in the great scheme of things—is not attained, has never been attained, cannot be attained, and will not be attained until [Page 304] material civilization is combined with spiritual civilization. With the realization that the spirit motivating both is one and the same, and that the material progress of this world is but one aspect, one emanation, from that spirit. Until we have those qualities of self-sacrifice, common understanding, unity of purpose, and world fellowship, so firmly and fully developed in our lives that they become man’s “first nature” (rather than his “second nature”), our material civilization will continue to destroy, rather than advance us. For, if we persist in a purely materialistic way of life, and of living, how can we lay claim to being the highest form of created life on this earth (it’s a debatable point, I’ll grant you)?

The characteristic of the mineral world is the law of cohesion. The characteristic of the vegetable world is the power of growth, plus the law of cohesion. The characteristic of the animal world is the possession of sense perception, plus the power of growth, plus the law of cohesion.

The human world has the possession of sense perception; it has the power of growth; it has the law of cohesion. But the human world—man —also has more than these. Man has ideation, power of thought, intellectual potentialities and achievements, intelligence of perception; he is capable of discovering the mysteries of the Universe; he has “conscience.” And he has—and this is man’s characteristic —access to the Word of God.

A STUDY of history shows us that at periodic intervals there appears in the world men called “prophets” or “manifestations of God,” with a Message for humanity. Such men as the Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus the Christ, Moses, Muhammad. A further study also shows that these men appear at a time of chaos—when civilization, as such, is rapidly disintegrating. We also find that with the appearance of these “Manifestations” a new civilization is born.

Heretofore, this has not been a world-wide process, but has been more or less confined to limited areas; that is, to the “known” world of that particular time.

However, with the discovery and gradual settlement of the New World; with the coming and spread of the Industrial Revolution; with the tremendous progress of material civilization; —we have reached the place, today, where the whole world is the “known” world,

We have also come to the place where our world civilization has not only reached its highest peak, but has already entered its period of decadence. From this, our natural conclusion, in the face of factual knowledge, would be that this is the logical time for the appearance of another “Manifestation of God,” with a Message for the entire human race.

And such is the case. The New World Order—the Bahá’í Plan for world unification—the Divine program promulgated by Bahá’u’lláh, for a universal civilization—has already begun in many parts of the world today.

The Message brought by Bahá’u’lláh contains within it the answer to all of the problems besetting mankind today. It contains within it provisions [Page 305] for settling our economic difficulties. It contains within it a system of government —local, national, international. It contains within it provisions for settling our social problems.

It is a way of life for the individual; it is a plan for man’s relation to man; it best defines man’s place within the community, and tells him, definitely and completely, how to fulfill that place. It is a program for national and international relationships. It defines and explains man’s relationship to God, and God’s to man.

Individually and collectively, in every aspect of life—social, economic, political, etc.—it is the way of life for man. It is not a panacea; for, unlike anything else within the world today, offered for the solution of our problems, it gives man a solid foundation upon which to build a true civilization, and tells him, explicitly, how to best attain that objective.

Within the Message of Bahá’u’lláh lies not only the best answer to world conditions of today, but therein lies the only answer. For man there is either continued chaos and disintegration, or there is the divine plan for universal fellowship as promulgated by Bahá’u’lláh. And surely there can be but one answer.

One of a series by members of Bahá’í Youth Group.

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Who, contemplating the helplessness, the fears and miseries of humanity in this day, can any longer question the necessity for a fresh revelation of the quickening power of God’s redemptive love and guidance? Who . . . can be so blind as to doubt that the hour has at last struck for the advent of a new Revelation, for a re-statement of the Divine Purpose, and for the consequent revival of those spiritual forces that have, at fixed intervals, rehabilitated the fortunes of human society? Does not the very operation of the world-unifying forces that are at work in this age necessitate that He Who is the Bearer of the Message of God in this day should not only reaffirm that self-same exalted standard of individual conduct inculcated by the Prophets gone before Him, but embody in His appeal, to all governments and peoples, the essentials of that social code, that Divine Economy, which must guide humanity’s concerted efforts in establishing that all-embracing federation which is to signalize the advent of the Kingdom of God on this earth?—SHOGHI EFFENDI.

[Page 306]

THE VALLEY OF CONTENTMENT

MARDIYYIH NABIL CARPENTER

“Fair-seeming to men is the love of pleasures from women and children, and the treasured treasures of gold and silver, and horses of mark, and flocks, and cornfields! Such the enjoyment of this world’s life. But God! goodly the home with Him.

“Say: Shall I tell you of better things than these, prepared for those who fear God, in His presence.”

IT seems unfeeling to write of contentment at a time when civilization as we know it is in the process of being destroyed.

We and our contemporaries are facing greater tribulation than any generation has ever known before. Our loves and plans, our hopes and desires, are wiped away. Faces vanish. Hands hold ours for the last time. The house that we built crumbles. The child that we bore is shot down. Even our own bodies desert us—they were not made for war. The eyes are not bullet-proof, the lungs cannot breathe gas. And beyond this, the mind cannot hold all the blood— all the death, all the accumulated pain of millions of human beings. It darkens and fails, and then we are alone in immensity. The world recedes, and all familiar things.

For a long time now, Bahá’u’lláh has prepared us for world catastrophe. Of all the peoples in the world, we are the only ones to whom such preparation has been given. Our fellows either refused to believe that calamity was coming, or else planned to manipulate the chaos for their own purposes. But we have known for a long time now that out of this necessary, ultimate ordeal the “consciousness of world citizenship” would be born.

For many years now we have been disciplined in the ways of contentment. We have been taught that the blessings of this life are precarious and brief. Living in a generation which looks only to the good things of this world—the bright clothing and the music; the love, the children; gardens in summer; fame, their voice over the radio, their name in neon— we have learned that the desirable things of life are only a prelude, soon-ended. We have loved these things, but only provisionally, knowing we should lose them. We go on into the future with this knowledge. “If ye be seekers after this life and the vanities thereof, ye should have sought them while ye were still enclosed in your mothers’ wombs, for at that time ye were continually approaching them, could ye but perceive it. Ye have . . . ever since ye were born and attained maturity, been all the while [Page 307] receding from the world and drawing closer to dust . . . Will ye not, then, O heedless ones, shake off your slumber?”

We know that, in our present world, the safety areas are diminishing. They are vanishing like successive hill tops in a flood. Men hardly dare any more to love, to build, to open a shop. More brittle than ever, life breaks off in their hands. This is not surprising to us, because we always knew it was brittle. From the beginning, we had different values from those of our generation. We talked in terms of the spirit, we lived by an eternal calendar, not made of days and years. While we shared their world, their goings and comings, their operas and museums, Easter-services in lily-banked cathedrals, card-parties, trips to Paris—we had another world too, where all races prayed together; where harmony was a conscious exercise; where a new morality was in process of formation. We lived half in the future, when all peoples will have one school, one tongue, one God.

From the beginning we traveled toward the Fifth Valley, where we could feel the breezes of divine contentment wafting from the plane of the spirit.

In this stage of consciousness, a man is rich enough to dispense with all things. He may be living in a tenement or a pent-house, eating imported foods or standing in a breadline, he may have buried the person he loves best or he may be on his honeymoon, but he is rich enough to dispense with all things. Many nineteenth century writers who met the early Bahá’ís recognized this quality in them—this richness, this perfect independence. Some were sick or maimed, barefoot, living in caves on Mt. Carmel, but they seemed to be kings. For in this stage, the wayfarer beholds the Beauty of the Friend in everything. Even in fire, he sees the face of the Beloved. . . .

This fullness, this contentment, must distinguish us in the desolate years ahead. In the old days, Persian Bahá’ís would be picked off a crowded street and shot, because of a look, a reflection of light in their eyes. We too must drink as they did of what Bahá’u’lláh calls the wine of contentment. We must find what they found. And having done this, you would part from all and rejoin Him, offer up your life in His pathway and gladly give up your soul. However, there is none else on that plane whom one needs forget.

The Fifth Valley expresses in a few paragraphs what is the essence of faith in every age; what the Hidden Words states as “Forget all else but Me and commune with My spirit.” This is the secret of life, and when we learn it, we shall be Bahá’ís. We shall be like the martyr who laughed when they flogged him, because he could not feel the blows.

If we are to build world unity, we must first stop for a while in the Valley of Contentment. Because even beyond the world catastrophe, the greatest obstacle to a new civilization will be not hunger or nationalism or class warfare, but the inter-relationships of human beings. We are entangled in our fellow beings, and they in us. We are enmeshed and ensnarled in them. [Page 308] The only way to free ourselves from them, to be independent of them, is to contemplate that Reality which was brought us by the Prophets, revealed again in our time through Bahá’u’lláh. To approach that Reality, to commune with It, to see only It in the faces of those we meet. Otherwise we shall never survive our unconscious envy of them—their mind, their achievement, their gifts. Or our ignorant disregard of some of them. Or their too-human hatred of us. We shall never learn to build a harmonious world if we look at men and women and not at the Reality which they reflect.

This is a creative contentment which Bahá’u’lláh teaches in the Fifth Valley, not a folding of the hands, and forgetting. And not the fair-seeming contentment with pleasures from women and children, and flocks and cornfields. It is a dynamic contentment, it is the basis of our behavior as Bahá’ís. It is the being rich in the things of God, and poor in the rest. But how can we write of this, when Bahá’u’lláh says it can be revealed only from heart to heart, and confided from breast to breast.

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

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The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh . . . should . . . be regarded as signalizing through its advent the coming of age of the entire human race. It should be viewed not merely as yet another spiritual revival in the ever-changing fortunes of mankind, not only as a further stage in a chain of progressive Revelations, nor even as the culmination of one of a series of recurrent prophetic cycles, but rather as marking the last and highest stage in the stupendous evolution of man’s collective life on this planet. The emergence of a world community, the consciousness of world citizenship, the founding of a world civilization and culture . . . should . . . be regarded, as far as this planetary life is concerned, as the furthermost limits in the organization of human sociery, though man, as an individual, will, nay must indeed as a result of such a consummation, continue indefinitely to progress and develop. —SHOGHI EFFENDI.

[Page 309]

AMERICAN INDIAN

OLIVIA KELSEY

At first, in that place, at all times above the earth.

On the earth was an extended fog and there the great Manito was.

At first, forever, lost in space, everywhere, the great Manito was.

He made the extended land and the sky.

He made the sun, the moon, the stars.

He made them all to move evenly.

Then the wind blew violently and it cleared and the water flowed off far and strong.

And groups of islands grew newly and there remained.

“Walum Olum”

THE picture record brings the history down to the discovery of America and ends with these words: “At this time from north and south the whites come. They are peaceful, they have great things. Who are they?”

No written language, no historian has left to future ages the Indians’ report but “in records we catch a glimpse of him here and there” says Flora Warren Seymour “fighting, fraternizing, making trade or treaty or brandishing the tomahawk. . . . What would he have said of the Spaniard who came for gold and jewels and found in the southwestern desert the little fields of corn that were far more valuable? How did he feel about the Frenchman who adopted his canoes and trails and immemorial places of portage, roaming far across the northern forest in search for fur? What portent did he see in the English colonists who learned of him the worth of the maize and potatoes, the beans and pumpkin and tobacco, new to European palates, and who devoted broad stretches of land to their cultivation, pushing on and on into the wild country and subduing it to tillage?”

Of the Indian and his radiations in America the future must yield increasingly, as he emerges from the ruins of dead thoughts to function in the living organism of a world commonwealth. “History as well as Nature,” says Paterson, “displays a mysterious economy and whole races may lie fallow during centuries in order suddenly to burst into vigor.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has likened them to the Arabs, but compared with those warring tribes, immersed in the “rubbish of idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greek and Jew, with their wiredrawings,” He said their culture was infinitely superior.

The plight of the Arabian women [Page 310] when Muhammad came “like lightning out of heaven” was appalling. Omar, second of the Caliphates and son-in-law of Muhammad, is said to have expressed but one regret in his life and that was (after the revelation in the eighty-first Surih) “when the female child that was buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death”—when he remembered how his infant girl, with her little hand, had brushed the dust from his beard, as he was laying her in her grave.

In Indian communal life the child was an important factor, participating in its economic and social life. True, women were the drudges. If a squaw fell sick there was always the solacing thought, so naively expressed by the old Ottawa chief to Pére Marquette that “it made no especial difference whether they lived or died.”

“The Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages,” says Max Muller, “though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilization than they established. The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop. . . . When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilization, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were dwellers in the forest, can we hesitate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage?”

Potent among the qualities upon which order and stability are built is unity—the power of cohesion. It is the pivot of the regenerative principles of Bahá’u’lláh. Paul Radin says: “Nowhere, certainly not in America did any aboriginal people so completely subordinate every phase of their life to a few clear-cut principles as did the Eskimos. They possessed none of the basic features of the higher aboriginal civilizations—agriculture, pottery, textiles, a complex ritual and a complex organization of society—yet with the very little they did have they achieved a unity to be looked for in vain anywhere else in America.” In the Divine Plan revealed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for the west He said:

“Ye must give great importance to teaching the Indians, that is, the aborigines of America. For these souls are like the ancient inhabitants of Peninsular Arabia, who previous to the Manifestation of His Holiness Muhammad were treated as savages. But when the Muhammadic light shone forth in their midst, they became so illumined that they brightened the world. Likewise, should these Indians and aborigines be educated and obtain guidance, there is no doubt that through the divine teachings, they will become so enlightened as in turn to shed light to all regions.”

Of his ancient lineage no altogether satisfying answer has, as yet, been propounded. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, after forty-nine years of exhaustive research and more than twenty expeditions, has reached the following conclusions about man’s history in the Americas:

[Page 311] “American man springs from a Mongolian stock which crossed to the Western hemisphere from Asia on a land bridge which spanned what is now Bering Strait. Several waves of eastward migration produced, first, the South American Indian, then types found in Mexico and North America, and finally, the Eskimos. In spite of all claims to the contrary, these migrations were anthropologically recent. Dr. Hrdlicka thinks the first wave of immigration was certainly after the breaking up of the great northern ice field in sub-arctic zones, which took place about 35,000 years ago. Of the Eskimos Dr. Hrdlicka’s eight Alaskan expeditions have uncovered no remains which seem to date further back than the present Christian era. There are those who would quarrel with these opinions to point out that a more southern migratory route across the stepping stones of Pacific Islands was possible and that certain remains may date further back than Dr. Hrdlicka’s reckoning.”

Issuing from an ancient Revelation waves of spiritual force had impelled them toward their destiny to participate in the building of divine civilization in “a new cycle of human power.” The impact of the European upon the American Indian was about 1000 A.D. “Greenland had been discovered in the early part of the tenth century and the Greenland Eskimo must unquestionably have informed the white invaders that they had kinsmen in Labrador. . . . The Eskimo actually inhabited the whole of the northern part of the American continent, from Labrador to the Aleutian Islands and . . . with the exception of comparatively recent intruders along the Pacific Coast and in the region immediately to the north of the Great Lakes, these same Eskimo extended as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. . . .” says Radin.

“Over this whole area” he goes on to say “there is spread today an aboriginal Eskimo population having a very simple culture. That it was at any time much higher is extremely doubtful. Yet, simple as it is and apparently always was, it remains the classical example of intensive specialization among all primitive people.”

“To the south . . . extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Western Province of Manitoba . . . and along the whole Atlantic coast from New England to Virginia we would have encountered the Algonquins. In Virginia the picture changes completely. . . . A thousand years before . . . these wonderful people had played a great role, for they had been the recipient of influences that had come from the great and ancient Mexican and Central American civilization.” These were the Sioux. Great must have been the influence they exerted upon their fairly simple neighbors. The emphasis in their culture was their type of social organization (the tribe was subdivided into groups and each group was called after some animal) and the culture of maize. Their deities were worshipped throughout all America from Yucatan to northern Canada and everywhere they were regarded with particular veneration. Says Radin:

“South of Virginia and far inland, wedged in among Siouxan tribes lay another people, the Cherokee . . . [Page 312] speaking a language distantly related to that spoken by tribes within the territory of Texas, the Caddoan, best known to us from such modern representatives as the Pawnee. . . . The Tuscarora, related to the famous Iroquois, occupied the regions to the west and the north. . . . Throughout all this area maize was still the vital element in people’s lives. . . . Continuing our course south we finally reach the coast of Georgia and Florida where we find new tribes and new languages. In the year 1000 A.D. the people inhabiting these regions—the Choctaw, Creek and Seminole—were very recent intruders, having all migrated from the lower Mississippi. Their culture was essentially like that of the Sioux to whom they were also bound by ties of language. Yet in some ways their life was more like that of the ancestors of the Sioux, for agriculture was still their main and all-absorbing interest. . . . In contradistinction to the rather placid life of the Sioux, they seem to be infected by a spirit of nervousness and restlessness. And this was little to be wondered at. They had come from a region which was a veritable melting pot of nations.”

We have arrived at the Gulf of Mexico, which was for America what the Mediterranean had been for Europe. Here everything converged. “Here there was brought to a focus all the cultural movements that radiated from Yucatan, Central America and Mexico, as well as those suggestions and reminders that came from the West Indies and the distant coast of South America,” says Radin. “Along its shores and across its waters, culture after culture had invaded the United States. At what period the first Mexican invasion took place we have no means of determining. This much, however, is quite clear; that in the year 1000 A.D. the force of most of those Mexican invasions had long been spent. . . . On the whole what they possessed was more elaborate than that typical of the Sioux. . . . There were real temples, idols and a definite caste system.

“We now know, in fact, that these people were living amidst the ruins and debris of a still higher civilization. We have only to proceed northward along the Mississippi and make an occasional side-trip to the east of that great river to find the monuments of this departed people . . . some round, some terraced and some in the shape of animals. . . . Who were these mound builders? Unquestionably they were Indians. . . . Excavations have shown that some of the mounds were used for ceremonial purposes and for ceremonies possessing an elaborateness for which we can find no counterpart among the Sioux or the Creek today, or in the days of their greatest glory.”

It was the Pawnee (west of the Mississippi, more particularly along its southern courses) and their kinsmen who succeeded in welding together what was essentially a new culture and this in turn, exerted the most far-reaching influence upon all the tribes with whom the latter came into contact, principally, however, upon the Sioux, says Radin.

“Influenced somewhat by the mound-builders, they owed much to their own initiative and originality and the influences that reached them [Page 313] from the distant Toltecs. That culture, a few centuries later, through their kinsmen moved northward into the great plains between the Mississippi and Missouri and there elaborated a new and strange medley among the Algonquian tribes, Blackfeet, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. Thus they have brought us indirectly into contact with the most distinctive type of civilization—that of the Pueblo Indians. . . . Yet integrated and unified as was this Pueblo civilization, we now know that it represented but the end of a long and tortuous history.”

Their predecessors were the cliff-dwellers. . . . “Where . . . did this civilization come from? In one of the ruins copper bells and copper ornaments have been found, in another cloisonné work of a very specific kind. There is only one place in North America where they could have been made and that is southern Mexico and Yucatan. But there are other clues . . . such as certain specific details of architecture. And then, of course, we have the outstanding fact that maize was used. Maize, we know was first domesticated and cultivated somewhere in southern Mexico or Central America.”

The point to be remembered is that “the highest civilization attained by any native people north of the Rio Grande was built on the broad and rich basis furnished by people living far to the south. . . . Maize, cotton, and the architecture of the cliff-dwellers and their descendants, turquoise mosaics, copper bells, cloisonné ware —these were all Mexican in origin. . . . All roads converged upon the valley of Mexico.”

And instead of being at the end of our quest we are just at its beginning. Within about sixteen miles of the present site of Mexico City is the center of a civilization that preceded the Aztecs some three hundred years. They called it Teotihuacan and rising out of its valley are three enormous pyramids. Modern excavations at Teotihuacan have shown that it would be erroneous even to assume that the culture was indigenous. Further to the south we find in the state of Oaxaca a people speaking a language quite distinct from the Aztecs. Everything here bespeaks an old culture. Yet even for these people Zapotecs and Mixtecs, we must not postulate undue originality. However, we are here near the goal. If not the originators these Zapotecs and Mixtecs are at least the intermediaries between the founders of the Great Civilization. We come upon a crudely carved idol with archaic heiroglyphs and at last in the state of Chiapas right near the present borderline between Mexico and Guatemala, we are face to face with the long-sought goal among the ruins of the temple of Palenque.

Here at Palenque surrounded by densely wooded hills and overgrown by tropical vegetation, had once stood an imposing and fascinating city, one of the maturest expressions of Maya and Central American civilization. Nothing comparable to this Maya civilization is found anywhere to the immediate northwest. On the southeast, however, high civilizations extend practically as far as the Isthmus of Panama. Here in this tropical forest where mountains alternate with the [Page 314] jungle, all that was basic in the culture of the aborigines of North America originated. This was, above all, the original home of maize, without which there could have been no agriculture, little stability of organization, no concentration of population, no stone palaces, no complicated organization in government and ritual, and no perfection in the arts. . . . Lost sight of as Maya civilization became more and more complex, it regained its ascendancy as their culture spread to the north. Beyond the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico all social, economic and religious activities were to center completely around it. Where the cultivation of maize stopped, civilization stopped.

At the Isthmus of Panama we come to a break. . . . Just as all roads in North America seem to have converged upon the valley of Mexico and so ultimately upon the Mayas, so here in South America all roads seem to have converged upon the Incas of Peru and so, ultimately upon the great civilizations which the Incas had conquered. And just as in the case of the Aztecs and their immediate predecessors, so here in Peru the Inca conquerors were in their turn to be absorbed by their victims. It is, however, ridiculous to speak of any gradation in the achievement of the civilizations that stretched from Panama to Peru. Everywhere the same high level persisted. . . . In only one way can it have been said to be inferior (to the Mayas) namely, in the total absence of any system of writing comparable to the Mayan hieroglyphs. In architecture and in pottery it was the equal of the Mayas; in the working of gold, silver and copper, in the weaving of textiles immeasurably their superior. As in North America maize was extensively cultivated—but here it had to share its rule with the potato which was indigenous to Peru. . . .

Of their international relationship South America, on the whole, is believed to have borrowed more from the Central American civilization than did the latter from South America. “The great South American civilizations played for the rest of that continent a role analogous to that which the Maya had done for most of the North American continent. . . . In the Brazilian jungles all trails peter out, just as they had disappeared on the great plateau of Utah and Nevada.”

“God says in the glorious Qur’án ‘The soil was black and dried. Then we caused the rain to descend upon it and immediately it became green, verdant, and every kind of plant sprouted up luxuriantly.’”

And as the Hero-Prophet Muhammad, with “a word they could believe” changed those Arabian tribes into a nation “glancing in valour and splendor and the light of genius . . . shining through long ages over a great section of the world” so these brother-souls, after age-long wanderings, quickened by the living waters of a fresh Revelation from the Ancient of Days, “will become so enlightened as, in turn, to shed light to all regions.”

[Page 315]

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

DON T. MacNALLY

THIS world in which we live is apparent to us, as humans, only as observed by our five senses. The progress of our civilizations can be traced to our education in the use of these five senses, and we have become so imbued with our dependency upon these five senses, that we reject anything that cannot appeal to us directly through these routes.

Why we should limit the world to such a small field is traceable entirely to primitive experiences, which have dwelt wholly with conditions that we ourselves can cause, correct, or avoid. We list sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling as necessary to a normal being. Yet we neglect the greatest of all—the sense of thought!

A man may be deprived of all of the senses and yet be conscious in thought. He may even speak those thoughts. So, we have two more senses, thought and speech, which, though unlisted, raise us above the animal kingdom.

The reason for stressing thought as the greatest sense is that it will be necessary for us to think, if we are to follow the subject at hand. To begin with, God endowed man with these five primitive, material senses, so that he might not be handicapped by any other form of life with which he may have to compete, and equipped him also with the power of thought so that he might use them to his best advantage.

At a recent meeting, a highly intelligent young man questioned the existence of life after death. He could not believe in such a state and said that he would have to have actual proof of it before he could be convinced. He believed in the Darwinian theory of evolution, and that the chain of events ended with death. When asked why he believed in this theory he stated that science presented proofs that he could see for himself, but that religion could not prove one step in its teachings on creation.

We must admit that this man represented most of us in thought, but he was willing to express himself. So let us begin with the beginning as science proves itself, and follow step by step with religion as taught and explained in the Bahá’í teachings.

One of the Bahá’í principles is, that science and religion must agree, or one of them is in error. Science proves that this earth and all of its sister planets were at one time a part of the sun, and that through centrifugal force, or other means, were thrown off into space until they reached the limits of their respective gravitational pulls; thus remaining at their present distance from and encircling the sun [Page 316] in their orbits.

The temperature of the sun is known to be 5600 degrees centigrade. Now, if the earth were once a part of that sun it also had a temperature of 5600 degrees centigrade. Every housewife, nurse or doctor know that life cannot exist at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade (212 degrees fahrenheit). That is why preserve jars and medical instruments are immersed in boiling water to make them sterile.

Under such conditions it would have been impossible for life to have existed upon the earth before it separated from its mother star. Furthermore, life did not exist in the thin or void atmosphere through which the earth passed, nor in the torrid gaseous atmosphere enveloping the earth at that time.

True, the earth cooled, but still it was a sterile planet until, as Darwin proves, life began to make itself manifest in its lowest or simplest forms, evolving into more advanced stages, from mineral, through vegetable to animal kingdoms, thence manifesting itself into its highest physical form, Man. But, before this planet left the sun life was existent, existent in spiritual form, and Man was always potentially Man. Indeed, each form of life existed in spirit or thought, as it were, before what Man, with his limited mind, calls creation.

The human race, always existent, going through the stages of evolution, is like the boy going to college. He is unknown at the college until he arrives to take up his studies, but the college was always there for his improvement. He existed before he went to college, from whence he graduates in time, to return home to use his knowledge for the betterment of his own and others lives. The human race, too, has come to the highest grade of learning and experience. It had to learn all about life from the very beginning to its present standard. Here, we remember the words, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”

Man has evolved on a three dimensional plane, and has prepared himself so that he can accept the offer or opportunity of the higher planes, the spiritual teachings so necessary to guide him in his judgment and actions. He is free to decide whether he is satisfied with his present earthly, material experience, or whether he is willing to enter the university of higher learning and progress to the kingdoms of the higher and greater dimensions. The Old Testament records creation as the Word of God. Indeed this is so. We, as Bahá’ís, accept all things as the Word of God, and know that He is creation.

Bahá’u’lláh said that the names may be many and different, but, by any name He is God, totally beyond our praise and description. He, God, created the laws that make science an instrument by which we measure fact from fallacy, by which we can determine truth from error and by which we can trace the fossils that prove man’s ascent through the college of material experience, but with the knowledge that life is of God alone, and that no matter through which state or stage he evolved, Man was always Man.

From the Bahá’í Scriptures we read [Page 317] the following:

“O Temple of Holiness! Verily We have made Thy heart the store of knowledge of that which was and is and the rising place of Our science which We have ordained to the people of the earth and heaven that the beings would be filled abundantly through Thee, and by the wonders of Thy sciences, would attain the knowledge of God, the Able, the Supreme, the Great. Verily the science which is attributed to Myself was not known to any, nor will it be known by any soul, neither could it be endured by any one of the world. Should We produce but one word of it all the souls would be disturbed, the supports of all things be destroyed and the feet of the accomplished deviate. We have in our possession a science of which, should We convey but one word to the beings, every one would be made to believe in the Manifestation of God, and His Knowledge, and be acquainted with the secrets of all sciences, and attain a position whereby they would find themselves able to dispense with the sciences of both the ancients and moderns.

“We have also other sciences of which if We speak but a single letter the people will not be able to hear its mention. Thus we have informed you of the Science of God, the Knower, the Informed. Had We found vessels We would have laid in them the treasures of Knowledge and would have taught them that of which one letter will encompass the whole world.”

The proof of Man’s evolution to his present state of intelligence and form, leaving behind him evidence of other forms as mementos, or diplomas, of his advancement, does not deny the existence of God nor of life before we inhabited this planet. Rather, it proves beyond denial. With this record, revealed by science, who can intelligently state that it is all in vain, and that it all ends with what we call death?

Since Man cannot conceive of anything that cannot be measured with standards created by himself, it is difficult for him to stretch his material mind beyond his three dimensional earthly existence, or college of experience. Yet Professor Einstein tells us, and we believe, that there are many dimensions. We know of the fourth dimension, as it is now being used by scientists. We think, in the sixth dimension, where time and space become synonymous. Professor Einstein tells us that there are eight or ten dimensions. But these are not of material things as we know them!

For instance, the first dimension can be described as a straight line upon which a body may move forward and backward but with absolutely no side or lateral motion. To beings, if there were such, living on a one dimensional plane, there could be no other motions than back and forth. They could not conceive of a second dimension where movement would be free in any direction except up and down.

Beings, such as shadows, living in a two dimensional world could not possibly conceive of any existence that did not lay flat upon a surface. To them a third dimension would be inconceivable, therefore impossible. Yet we, living in a three dimensional [Page 318] world, can easily see the limitations of the former two dimensions.

That there is a fourth dimension, we know. That there are many more dimensions, we believe. Again we hear the words of Jesus, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” and, “I have many things to tell you but ye cannot bear them now.”

We have only to look through a powerful microscope or an equally powerful telescope to make us stop and think. Even with the naked eye, if we look at the night skies, studded with stellar orbs, hung but by His will, our three dimensional minds repeat the Words of Bahá’u’lláh: “Oh! God, My God, Increase my wonder and my amazement at Thee.”

An address delivered at Green Acre, August, 1939.

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WHAT IS A BAHÁ’Í?

ROBERTA V. KALEY

A Bahá’í is an individual who has “hitched his wagon to a star;” and that star is the radiant light of the Will of God for the establishment of His Kingdom upon this earth, as revealed by His Manifestation or Messenger for this age, Bahá’u’lláh.

The Cause of the Bahá’ís of the world consists of a Soul: which is the principle of the Oneness of Mankind; and a Body: which is the present administration, prelude to a New World Order.

As a Bahá’í, the individual functions differently than he ever has before. He possesses certain characteristics which make him different from other men. These characteristics are, principally, that the individual will or ego is socialized and sublimated to the community welfare. He is subject to the principle of consultation. He must learn the art of being impersonal. The individual personality is developed to its highest degree; not for personal edification or gain, but that he may be of the greatest service to his fellow-man. The true Bahá’í is a citizen of the world. And the true Bahá’í is a progressive thinker. His mind, instead of dragging its hind feet in history, projects itself forward into tomorrow, and his today serves as a training ground, a preparation, for a future World Order to supplant the crumbling and decadent systems of a dying era.

[Page 319] Every Bahá’í Community is comprised of a group of such individuals. And although there are, today, less than one hundred years since the Declaration of Bahá’u’lláh, Bahá’í Communities in approximately forty-three countries of the world, the development of the Faith, as to the actual number of active adherents, is relatively slow. The slow growth is the result of a particularly new and strange condition: In the Bahá’í Faith, there is no exclusive basis of selection as we have known it in the past. “In the world of art, for example, the selection has been limited to a certain number of people possessing specific talent, training, or sponsorship. In politics, eligibility has been measured by adherence to a party, or platform; and in the field of economics the basis of selection has been mutual power, or mutual misfortune, as the case might be.”

Because of the removal of this exclusive basis of selection, the advantage of customary privileges has been entirely removed with a result of absolute Free Association. This free association means: that the scientific mind finds a medium of communication with the mind simple and unlearned; that the man of great wealth engages in the same activity with the man of little or no means; that the literalist sees his brother in the mystic; that here is no bar between the Jew and the Christian, the Muhammadan and the Buddhist, the fundamentalist and the New Thoughter; and that here the color of the skin is irrelevant to the fact of kinship. Likewise, this free association automatically removes inhibitions, caused by fear; that fear caused by the defensive attitude (which is the all-too-familiar condition between man and his fellows)!

“A Bahá’í Community is a Unity of minds and hearts; an association of people entirely voluntary in character, established upon a common experience of devotion to the universal aims of Bahá’u’lláh, and agreement as to the methods by which these aims can be accomplished.”

Because of the great diversity in his local community, the Bahá’í becomes a true citizen of the world, for the barriers of the mind, resultant upon unconquered natural geographical barriers, have given way, as these physical barriers have given way to science which is factual knowledge.

In the past, organization has been a substitute for the principles of religion. The present administration of the Bahá’í Faith is the foundation stone upon which will be laid the New World Order, the organization for which was prescribed in detail by the Founder, to further and establish religion as the basic meaning of life; and the principles of this administration and Order represent the Science of Cooperation.

A Bahá’í, following his star, finds constant inspiration in the magnificent panorama of the history of his Faith. He may depend upon the written word of the Founder for definite instructions. The Bahá’í need not conform to dogmatic opinions set down as infallible law by any person or persons other than Bahá’u’lláh, whom the Bahá’í believes to be divinely appointed as the Great Revealer for this day, His son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who [Page 320] spent His entire life teaching and expounding and interpreting the writings and principles of His Father, or Shoghi Effendi, the present Guardian of the Faith, who was appointed to that place by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His will.

This unanswerable authority precludes the possibility of internal factionalism—the cause of the downfall of religions.

With the chief cause of dissension removed, the Bahá’í finds, in reality, a new way of living. Because of his radiant happiness at this discovery, the goal of his life becomes the dissemination of the knowledge of God’s Will, free to all who will search, and which brings to man, now, in this age of despair, as a physician to the dying, the fundamental and ageless truths of life—renewed and revitalized. His life-work becomes a work of love; his principles and aims represent the ultimate in altruistic endeavor, for he learns that only by turning to his Creator can man hope to grow and find the meaning of life and the reason for existence.

“Every individual should develop character; not because it is good to be good; but because righteousness is the only way to continuous success, happiness and power in a Universe founded on Moral Law.”

One of the early followers of the Fore-runner of Bahá’u’lláh, wrote a message to his students, which may well be applied to every individual Bahá’í today:

“O my beloved companions! How great, how very great, is This Cause! How exalted the station to which I summon you! How great the mission for which I have trained and prepared you! Gird up the loins of endeavor and fix your gaze upon His Promise. I pray to God graciously to assist you to weather the storms of tests and trials which must needs beset you, to enable you to emerge, unscathed and triumphant from their midst; and to lead you to your high destiny!”

Address given at Bahá’í Youth Conference, New York, January 1, 1939.

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The whole of mankind is groaning, is dying to be led to unity, and to terminate its age-long martyrdom. And yet it stubbornly refuses to embrace the light and acknowledge the sovereign authority of the one Power that can extricate it from its entanglements, and avert the woeful calamity that threatens to engulf it. . . .

Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. Nation-building has come to an end. The anarchy inherent in state sovereignty is moving toward a climax. A world, growing to maturity, must abandon this fetish, recognize the oneness and wholeness of human relationships, and establish once for all the machinery that can best incarnate this fundamental principle of its life.—SHOGHI EFFENDI.

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