It is related that His Holiness Christ -- may my life be a
sacrifice to Him! -- one day, accompanied by His apostles, passed by the corpse
of a dead animal. One of them said: ‘How putrid has this animal become!’ The
other exclaimed: ‘How it is deformed!’ A third cried out: ‘What a stench! How
cadaverous looking!’ But His Holiness Christ said: ‘Look at his teeth! How
white they are!’ Consider that He did not look at all the defects of that
animal; nay rather, He searched well until He found the beautiful white teeth.
He observed only the whiteness of the teeth and overlooked entirely the
deformity of the body, the dissolution of the organs and the bad odor.
This is the attribute of the children of the Kingdom. This
is the conduct and the manners of real Baha’is. I hope that all the believers
will attain to this lofty station.
- ‘Abdu’l-Baha (From a Tablet to Dr. N.G.
Skinner, Washington, D.C., revealed August 12, 1913, at Ramleh, Egypt; Baha’i
News, no. 46, November 1930)
