Century of Light | Page 9

North American continent, the distinctive verities enshrined in His Father's Faith, but to demonstrate as well the Divine origin of the Prophets gone before Him, and to disclose the nature of the tie binding them to that Faith.(22)
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No more brilliant a stage for the opening act of this great drama could have been desired than London, capital city of the largest and most cosmopolitan empire the world has ever known. In the eyes of the little groups of believers who had made the practical arrangements and who longed for the sight of His face, the trip was a triumph far surpassing their brightest hopes. Public officials, scholars, writers, editors, industrialists, leaders of reform movements, members of the British aristocracy, and influential clergymen of many denominations eagerly sought Him out, invited Him to their platforms, classrooms, homes and pulpits, and showered appreciation on the views He expounded. On Sunday, 10 September 1911, the Master spoke for the first time to a public audience anywhere, from the pulpit of the City Temple. His words evoked for His hearers the vision of a new age in the evolution of civilization:
This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a paradise.... You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept men ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity.
The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion. War shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great Peace shall come; the world will be seen as a new world, and all men will live as brothers.(23)
After an additional two months' stay in Paris and a return to Alexandria for a winter sojourn and the recuperation of His health, 'Abdu'l-Bahá sailed on 25 March 1912 to New York City, arriving on 11 April of that year. At even the simplest physical level, a programme packed with hundreds of public addresses, conferences and private talks in over forty cities across North America and an additional nineteen in Europe, some of them visited more than once, was a feat that may well have no parallel in modern history. On both continents, but especially in North America, 'Abdu'l-Bahá received a highly appreciative welcome from distinguished audiences devoted to such concerns as peace, women's rights, racial equality, social reform and moral development. On an almost daily basis, His talks and interviews received wide coverage in mass-circulation newspapers. He Himself was later to write that He had "observed all the doors open ... and the ideal power of the Kingdom of God removing every obstacle and obstruction."(24)
The openness with which He was met permitted 'Abdu'l-Bahá to proclaim unambiguously the social principles of the new Revelation. Shoghi Effendi has summed up the truths thus presented:
The independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition; the oneness of the entire human race, the pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic unity of all religions; the condemnation of all forms of prejudice, whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must exist between religion and science; the equality of men and women, the two wings on which the bird of human kind is able to soar; the introduction of compulsory education; the adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations; the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship; the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of religion as a bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal of all mankind--these stand out as the essential elements of that Divine polity which He proclaimed to leaders of public thought as well as to the masses at large in the course of these missionary journeys.(25)
At the heart of the Master's message was the announcement that the long-promised Day for the unification of humanity and the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God had come. That Kingdom, as unveiled in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's letters and talks, owed nothing whatever to the other-worldly assumptions familiar from the teachings of traditional religion. Rather, the Master proclaimed the coming of age of humankind and the emergence of a global civilization in which the development of the whole range of human potentialities will be the fruit of the interaction between universal spiritual values, on the one hand, and, on the other, material advances that were even then still undreamed of.
The means to achieve the goal, He said, had already come into existence. What