Return To England Of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Persian Prophet Coming Back To London After Visit To U. S.

Abbas Effendi, or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Servant of God), as he prefers to be called, is due to arrive in England on the Celtic on the 13th inst. By a strange coincidence he reaches London on the very day set for the peace negotiations.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá is known the world over as the Peace Prophet. With his father, the great Bahá’u’lláh, he suffered exile and willingly endured forty years in a Turkish prison rather than abjure his faith.

Bahá’u’lláh died in prison in 1892, and the universal religion which he revealed and which teaches how to attain to this “most great peace,” is being brought from the East to the West by the son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who, through the advent of the Young Turks’ supremacy, in 1908, gained his freedom. At that time the Young Turks’ Committee of Union and Progress released all the political prisoners of the Ottoman Empire.

Since then he has travelled much. He was in London last year. It is said that there are upwards of 3,000,000 Bahá’ís all over the world. Thousands have been thronging in America to hear his gentle message, which has constantly been alluded to by the Press as the most important religious movement of the age.” He is returning to the East, via London, and has been invited by wireless to address the students at Oxford.

Tolstoy refers to Bahá’u’lláh in one of his books. Speaking of the eternal enigma called life, and deploring the fact that we spend our entire earth allotment of time trying to solve the riddle, he goes on to add: “But there is a Persian prophet who holds the key.”

At the time of Tolstoy’s death he was in communication with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gathering material for a book on Bahá’u’lláh.

Gertrude Atherton, in her new book on English life, “Julia France and her Times,” makes her heroine visit Accre to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and learn from him the teachings which she epitomises as follows:

“The Bahá’í revelation makes its appeal to the brain, to the advanced thinker, to those that feel the need of a religion, but have long since outgrown all the silly old dogmas, with their bathos and sentimentalities, primarily intended only for the ignorant. Unity is right, freedom of the political as well as the spiritual conscience, in other words, the elimination of all that provokes war; which means universal peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. That is the keynote of the Bahá’í religion, as love was intended to be of Christianity. All the best principles of the religions are incorporated in this, all the barriers between them razed, and all the nonsense and narrowmindedness left out.”