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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Bahá'u'lláh forbids:
Bahá'u'lláh
