Century of Light | Page 8

to achieve eternal life. At the very
moment when this letter was read, together with the signatures at its
close, 'Abdu'l-Bahá experienced a joy so vehement that no pen can
describe it....(18)
An appreciation of the circumstances in which the expansion of the
Cause in the West occurred is vital for present-day Bahá'ís, and for
many reasons. It helps us abstract ourselves from the culture of coarse
and intrusive communication that has become so commonplace in
present-day society as to pass almost unnoticed. It draws to our
attention the gentleness with which the Master chose to introduce to
His Western audiences the concepts of human nature and human
society revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, concepts revolutionary in their
implications and entirely outside His hearers' experience. It explains the
delicacy with which He used metaphors or relied on historical
examples, the frequent indirectness of His approach, the intimacy He
could summon up at will, and the apparently limitless patience with
which He responded to questions, many of whose assumptions about
reality had long since lost whatever validity they might once have
possessed.

Yet another insight that a detached examination of the historical
situation to which the Master addressed Himself in the West helps
provide for our generation is an appreciation of the spiritual greatness
of those who responded to Him. These souls answered His summons in
spite, not because, of the liberal and economically advanced world they
knew, a world they no doubt cherished and valued, and in which they
had necessarily to carry on their daily lives. Their response arose from
a level of consciousness that recognized, even if sometimes only dimly,
the desperate need of the human race for spiritual enlightenment. To
remain steadfast in their commitment to this insight required of these
early believers--on whose sacrifice of self much of the foundation of
the present-day Bahá'í communities both in the West and many other
lands were laid--that they resist not only family and social pressures,
but also the easy rationalizations of the world-view in which they had
been raised and to which everything around them insistently exposed
them. There was a heroism about the steadfastness of these early
Western Bahá'ís that is, in its own way, as affecting as that of their
Persian co-religionists who, in these same years, were facing
persecution and death for the Faith they had embraced.
In the forefront of the Westerners who responded to the Master's
summons were the little groups of intrepid believers whom Shoghi
Effendi has hailed as "God-intoxicated pilgrims" and who had the
privilege of visiting 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the prison-city of 'Akká, of seeing
for themselves the luminosity of His Person and of hearing from His
own lips words that had the power to transform human life. The effect
on these believers has been expressed by May Maxwell:
"Of that first meeting," ... "I can remember neither joy nor pain, nor
anything that I can name. I had been carried suddenly to too great a
height, my soul had come in contact with the Divine Spirit, and this
force, so pure, so holy, so mighty, had overwhelmed me...."(19)
Their return to their homes became, Shoghi Effendi explains, "the
signal for an outburst of systematic and sustained activity, which ...
spread its ramifications over Western Europe and the states and
provinces of the North American continent...."(20) Fuelling their

endeavours and those of their fellow believers, and drawing into the
Cause growing numbers of new adherents, was a flood of Tablets
addressed by the Master to recipients on both sides of the Atlantic,
messages that threw open the imagination to the concepts, principles
and ideals of God's new Revelation. The power of this creative force
can be felt in the words with which the first American believer,
Thornton Chase, sought to describe what he was seeing:
His [the Master's] own writings, spreading like white-winged doves
from the Center of His Presence to the ends of the earth, are so many
(hundreds pouring forth daily) that it is an impossibility for him to have
given time to them for searching thought or to have applied the mental
processes of the scholar to them. They flow like streams from a
gushing fountain....(21)
These sentiments add their own perspective to the determination with
which the Master arose to undertake a venture so ambitious as to
dismay many of those immediately around Him. Setting aside concerns
expressed about His advanced age, His ill health, and the physical
disabilities left by decades of imprisonment, He set out on a series of
journeys that would last some three years, carrying Him eventually to
the Pacific coast of the North American continent. The stresses and
risks of international travel in the early years of the century were the
least of the obstacles to the realization of the objectives He had set
Himself. In