The Covenant of God with Humankind
In
June 1877, Bahá’u’lláh at last emerged from the strict confinement of the
prison-city of ‘Akká, and moved with His family to “Mazra’ih”, a small estate a
few miles north of the city.106
As had been predicted in His statement to the Turkish government, Sultán
‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz had been overthrown and assassinated in a palace coup, and gusts
from the winds of political change sweeping the world were beginning to invade
even the shuttered precincts of the Ottoman imperial system. After
a brief two-year stay at Mazra’ih, Bahá’u’lláh moved to “Bahjí”, a large mansion
surrounded by gardens, which His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had rented for Him and the
members of His extended family.107
The remaining twelve years of His life were devoted to His writings on a wide
range of spiritual and social issues, and to receiving a stream of Bahá’í
pilgrims who made their way, with great difficulty, from Persia and other lands.
Throughout the Near and Middle
East the nucleus of a community life was beginning to take shape among those who
had accepted His message. For its guidance, Bahá’u’lláh had
revealed a system of laws and institutions designed to give practical effect to
the principles in His writings.108
Authority was vested in councils democratically elected by the whole community,
provisions were made to exclude the possibility of a clerical elite arising, and
principles of consultation and group decision making were established.
At the heart of this system was
what Bahá’u’lláh termed a “new Covenant” between God and humankind. The
distinguishing feature of humanity’s coming of age is that, for the first time
in its history, the entire human race is consciously involved, however dimly, in
the awareness of its own oneness and of the earth as a single homeland. This
awakening opens the way to a new relationship between God and humankind. As the
peoples of the world embrace the spiritual authority inherent in the guidance of
the Revelation of God for this age, Bahá’u’lláh said, they will find in
themselves a moral empowerment which human effort alone has proven incapable of
generating. “A new race of men”109
will emerge as the result of this relationship, and the work of building a
global civilization will begin. The mission of the Bahá’í community was to
demonstrate the efficacy of this Covenant in healing the ills that divide the
human race.
Bahá’u’lláh died at Bahjí on May 29,
1892, in His seventy-fifth year. At the time of His passing, the cause entrusted
to Him forty years earlier in the darkness of Teheran’s Black Pit was poised to
break free of the Islamic lands where it had taken shape, and to establish
itself first across America and Europe and then throughout the world. In doing
so, it would itself become a vindication of the promise of the new Covenant
between God and humankind. For alone of all the world’s independent religions,
the Bahá’í Faith and its community of believers were to pass successfully
through the critical first century of their existence with their unity firmly
intact, undamaged by the age-old blight of schism and faction. Their experience
offers compelling evidence for Bahá’u’lláh’s assurance that the human race, in
all its diversity, can learn to live and work as one people, in a common global
homeland.
Just two years before His death,
Bahá’u’lláh received at Bahjí one of the few Westerners to meet Him, and the
only one to leave a written account of the experience. The visitor was Edward
Granville Browne, a rising young orientalist from Cambridge University, whose
attention had originally been attracted by the dramatic history of the Báb and
His heroic band of followers. Of his meeting with Bahá’u’lláh, Browne wrote:
Though I
dimly suspected whither I was going and whom I was to behold (for no distinct
intimation had been given to me), a second or two elapsed ere, with a throb of
wonder and awe, I became definitely conscious that the room was not untenanted.
In the corner where the divan met the wall sat a wondrous and venerable
figure... The face of him on whom I gazed I can never forget, though I
cannot describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to read one's very soul; power
and authority sat on that ample brow... No need to ask in whose presence I
stood, as I bowed myself before one who is the object of a devotion and love
which kings might envy and emperors sigh for in vain! A mild dignified voice
bade me be seated, and then continued: — “Praise be to God that thou
hast attained!...Thou hast come to see a prisoner and an exile...We desire but
the good of the world and the happiness of the nations; yet they deem us a
stirrer up of strife and sedition worthy of bondage and banishment...That all
nations should become one in faith and all men as brothers; that the bonds of
affection and unity between the sons of men should be strengthened; that
diversity of religion should cease, and differences of race be annulled — what
harm is there in this?...Yet so it shall be; these fruitless strifes, these
ruinous wars shall pass away, and the ‘Most great Peace’ shall come...”110
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