That practice honored throughout civilization of keeping things dear and men cheap, is tragicalIy evident here on all sides. Such tattered people! Such degrading labor! My gorge rises as I see men burdened like camels, almost breaking under loads that only a horse would carry in America.

There is the sense that the scene is occurring in its pitiless sordidness and constant reiteration as of two thousand years ago, while that stern Voice of accusation and summons rings athwart the centuries: “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. . . . Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” (Matthew 23 :4-23.) Oh, God, how long—how much longer will it be before we lift ourselves above that moral plane that permits us to live delicately in the midst of the want and of the suffering of our brother man!

I wander into a shop attracted by a Turkish necklace. A very beautiful young man, about the age of one of my own boys, waits on me. I take him to be a Hindu. “What is your nationality?” I ask. “I am a Jew,” he answers. “Oh,” I exclaim with unaffected pleasure, “it always makes me so happy to meet a Jew ! We must never forget that it was you who gave us the noblest conception of the human mind—that of one God the loving Father of all mankind!”

“What, what is this?” he shouts in great excitement, “are you giving away our goods?” With an imperious gesture the boy replies, “Say not a word! This woman is our friend. I will make it all right with you,” and with ill-expressed thanks I hurry away to conceal my emotion. It recalls to me, as such things always do, what a man in prison once said to me: “What all this world is dying for, is a friend!”

In the Shrines this great sense penetrates me—the realization that Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are our changeless Friends, common to all and special to each. In moments of strength and hope and enthusiasm, it is our great flair to work under their direction, to spend ourselves, to use our insight and vigor for the accomplishment of their ends. But in those moments when fatigue and disappointment harass us, in those moments that psychology refers to as “collapse,” where can we turn in our doubt and desperation but to those Mighty Beings who shine like majestic Suns along man’s path!

Nothing can ever happen to me now that can thwart me, in imagination, from burying my face in the jasmine-strewn threshold at Bahjí and knowing as a definite part of my spiritual equipment, forever, that “God will assist all those who arise to serve Him.”