Prof. Jowett of Oxford, Master of Balliol, the translator of Plato, studied the movement and was so impressed thereby that he said: “The Babite (Bahá’í) movement may not impossibly turn out to have the promise of the future.” Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter quotes Prof. Edward Caird, Prof. Jowett’s successor as Master of Balliol, as saying, “He thought Babism (as the Bahá’í movement was then called) might prove the most important religious movement since the foundation of Christianity.” Prof. Carpenter himself gives a sketch of the Bahá’í movement in his recent book on “Comparative Religion” and asks, “Has Persia, in the midst of her miseries, given birth to a religion that will go around the world?”

In as much as a fellowship of faiths is at once the dearest hope and ultimate goal of the Bahá’í movement, it behooves us to take cognizance of it and its mission. . . . Today this religious movement has a million and more adherents, including people from all parts of the globe and representing a remarkable variety of race, color, class and creed. It has been given literary expression in a veritable library of Asiatic, European, and American works to which additions are annually made as the movement grows and grapples with the great problems that grow out of its cardinal teachings. It has a long roll of martyrs for the cause for which it stands, twenty thousand in Persia alone, proving it to be a movement worth dying for as well as worth living by.

From its inception it has been identified with Bahá’u’lláh, who paid the price of prolonged exile, imprisonment, bodily suffering, and mental anguish for the faith he cherished—a man of imposing personality as revealed in his writings, characterized by intense moral earnestness and profound spirituality, gifted with the selfsame power so conspicuous in the character of Jesus, the power to appreciate people ideally, that is, to see them at the level of their best and to make even the lowest types think well of themselves because of potentialities within them to which he pointed, but of which they were wholly unaware; a prophet whose greatest contribution was not any specific doctrine he proclaimed, but an informing spiritual power breathed into the world through the example of his life and thereby quickening souls into new spiritual activity. Surely a movement of which all this can be said deserves—nay, compels—our respectful recognition and sincere appreciation.

. . . Taking precedence over all else in its gospel is the message of unity in religion. . . . It is the crowning glory of the Bahá’í Movement that, while deprecating sectarianism in its preaching, it has faithfully practiced what it preached by refraining from becoming itself a sect. . . . Its representatives do not attempt to impose any beliefs upon others, whether by argument or bribery; rather do they seek to put beliefs that have illumined their own lives within the reach of those who feel they need illumination. No, not a sect, not a part of humanity cut off from all the rest, living for itself and aiming to convert all the rest into material for its own growth; no, not that, but a leaven, causing spiritual fermentation in all religions, quickening them with the spirit of catholicity and fraternalism.