It was in the course of these epoch-making journeys and
before large and representative audiences, at times exceeding a thousand
people, that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá expounded, with brilliant simplicity, with
persuasiveness and force, and for the first time in His ministry, those basic
and distinguishing principles of His Father’s Faith, which together with the
laws and ordinances revealed in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas constitute the bed-rock of
God’s latest Revelation to mankind. 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. The exposition of these vitalizing truths of the
Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, which He characterized as the “spirit of the age,” He
supplemented with grave and reiterated warnings of an impending conflagration
which, if the statesmen of the world should fail to avert, would set ablaze the
entire continent of Europe. (Shoghi Effendi, ‘God Passes By’)
