Century of Light | Page 8

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 the words of Shoghi Effendi:
He Who, in His own words, had entered prison as a youth and left it an old man, Who never in His life had faced a public audience, had attended no school, had never moved in Western circles, and was unfamiliar with Western customs and language, had arisen not only to proclaim from pulpit and platform, in some of the chief capitals of Europe and in the leading cities of the