Impressions on ‘Abdu’l-Baha

The Vanishing of the Veil

Source: Christian Commonwealth, Vol. 33, 1 Jan. 1913, p. 261

The Christian Commonwealth was a weekly newspaper published every Wednesday. It was started in 1881 and had a very liberal outlook. On 13 September it printed, on its front cover, an article which included the interview between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Rev R. J. Campbell that had taken place on 5 September. The following week the front cover had another article, entitled ‘The Vanishing of the Veil’, about ‘Abdu’lBahá’s visit to St John’s, Westminster. Other issues also had substantial articles about His visits.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s return to England at the end of 1912 was noted by the {Christian Commonwealth}:

………. Abdul Baha is again in England on his way back from America to the Orient. London, the city where representatives of all races may be encountered, and the centre of a Government whose influence is felt at the far ends of the earth, has rarely sheltered a more significant and impressive personality than the leader of the Bahai movement… Even the Western stranger coming into the Master’s presence for the first time acknowledges an emotion akin to awe, and after a few minutes’ speech with him feels the stirring of a deeper spirit of devotion than the ordinary amenities of social intercourse are calculated to arouse. For Abdul Baha … is much more than a picturesque Eastern figure in the unromantic setting of Western civilisation. He is a prophet. A venerable figure of rather less than medium stature, clothed in long, flowing Persian garments, his white beard lying upon his breast, silver-grey plaited hair falling over his shoulders, dark, brooding, pitiful eyes that yet light up when a smile of singular gentleness and sweetness passes across his face, and a low, mellow voice whose tones are charged with a strange solemnity — that is the Master as the stranger sees him.