A new version of the Bahá’í Reference Library is now available. This ‘old version’ of the Bahá’í Reference Library will be replaced at a later date.
The new version of the Bahá’i Reference Library can be accessed here »
Speech of Professor Michael Sadler |
We have met together to bid farewell to
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and to thank God for his
example and teaching, and for the
power of his prayers to bring Light into
confused thought, Hope into the place of dread,
Faith where doubt was, and into troubled hearts,
the Love which overmasters self-seeking and fear.
|
Though we all, among ourselves, in our
devotional allegiance have our own individual
loyalties, to all of us ‘Abdu’l-Bahá brings, and has
brought, a message of Unity, of sympathy and of
Peace. He bids us all be real and true in what we
profess to believe; and to treasure above
everything the Spirit behind the form. With him
we bow before the Hidden Name, before that
which is of every life the Inner Life! He bids us
worship in fearless loyalty to our own faith, but
with ever stronger yearning after Union, Brotherhood,
and Love; so turning ourselves in Spirit,
and with our whole heart, that we may enter more
into the mind of God, which is above class, above
race, and beyond time.
|
Professor Sadler concluded with a beautiful
prayer of James Martineau.
35
|
Mr. Eric Hammond said the Bahá’í movement
stood for unity; one God, one people; a myriad
souls manifesting the divine unity, a unity so
complete that no difference of colour or creed
could possibly differentiate between one Manifestation
of God and another, and a sympathy so
all-embracing as to include the very lowest,
meanest, shabbiest of men; unity, sympathy,
brotherhood, leading up to a concord universal.
He concluded with a saying of Bahá’u’lláh, that
the divine cause of universal good could not be
limited to either East or West.
|
Miss Alice Buckton said we were standing at
one of the springtimes of the world, and from that
assembly of representatives of thought and work
and love, would go out all over the world
influences making for unity and brotherhood The
complete equality of men and women was one of
the chief notes of Bahá’í teaching.
|
Mr. Claude Montefiore, as a Jew, rejoiced in
the growth of the spirit of unity, and regarded
that meeting as prophetic of the better time to
come, and in some sense a fulfillment of the idea
expressed by one who fell as a martyr to the
Roman Catholic faith, Sir Thomas More, who
wrote of the great Church of the Utopians, in
which all varieties of creeds gathered together,
having a service and liturgy that expressed the
36
higher unity, while admitting special loyalties.
|