‘Abdu’l-Bahá Abbas Makes First Speech

Persian Philosopher Says Spiritual Civilization Alone Can Produce Peace

Oldest Banker in New York, James Seligman Celebrates Eighty-eighth Birthday

From The Inquirer Bureau.

NEW YORK, April 14. — ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Abbas, the venerable Persian philosopher and religious leader, recently arrived here from Egypt, and head of the Bahá’í movement for the unification of religions and for the establishment of universal peace, made his first public address in America today at the Church of the Ascension on Fifth avenue. He spoke through an interpreter, his nephew, Dr. Ameon Ullah Fareed, taking as his subject “The Bahá’í Revelation”

The Rev. Dr. Percy Stickney Grant, rector of the church, introducing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who is an exile from his own country, welcomed him as “a messenger from the East, freshly bearing a message of the gospel of peace, good will, and love to all mankind.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá Abbas, whose long iron gray beard gives him the appearance of a patriarch, was dressed in the costume of the East. He said that he had found here that material civilization had progressed greatly, but the spiritual civilization had been left behind and that compared with this, all other means are too weak to bring about universal peace.