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Updated: June 18, 2025
For sensuous Cleopatra's smiles Mark Antony thought the world well lost; for false Helen's favors proud Ilion's temples blazed, and the world is strewn with broken altars and ruined fanes, with empty crowns and crumbling thrones blasted by the selfsame curse.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand the qualities or objects that enlist the devotion and compel the worship of humanity. Travelers in the Orient tell of majestic fanes, whose mighty walls and countless columns are rich with elaborate carvings.
The kings of Persia lived at Babylon for a part of the year. These princes may well have been indifferent to the preservation of the national fanes, they may even have hastened their destruction, as Xerxes is said to have done, in order to punish and humiliate the rebellious Babylonians.
The hideous monstrosities in the shape of cathedrals, churches, and chapels that have been built in this country during the past century or two are abundant proof, were any needed, that the faith and piety whose outward and visible manifestation is to be seen in Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster, and various other noble architectural fanes is no longer with us; it has gone, and, apparently, inspiration with it.
If thou'rt a Christian in deed and thought, Loving thy neighbour as Jesus taught, Living all days in the sight of Heaven, And not ONE only out of seven, Sharing thy wealth with the suffering poor, Helping all sorrow that Hope can cure, Making religion a truth in the heart, And not a cloak to be worn in the mart, Or in high cathedrals and chapels and fanes, Where priests are traders and count the gains, All God's angels will say, "Well done!"
"Nay," said he who had escaped thence, "if my experience suffices not to deter you, learn that they who have known Truth can never taste of Illusion. Illusion is for life's golden prime, its fanes and pavilions may be reared but by the magic wand of Youth. The maturity that would recreate them builds not for Illusion but for Deceit.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s supreme joy is in observing that a number of leaves from among the handmaidens of the Blessed Beauty have been educated, that they are the essence of detachment, and are well-informed of the mysteries of the world of being; that they raise such a call in their glorification and praise of the Greatest Name as to cause the inmates of the Fanes of the Kingdom to become attracted and overjoyed, and that they recite prayers in prose and poetry, and melodiously chant the divine verses.
The loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and Custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare.
Ye in the age gone by, Who ruled the world a world how lovely then! And guided still the steps of happy men In the light leading-strings of careless joy! Ah, flourished then your service of delight! How different, oh, how different, in the day When thy sweet fanes with many a wreath were bright, O Venus Amathusia!
I love to sit in these majestic fanes, abstracting them from the superstition which does but desecrate them, and gaze upward to their lofty, vaulted arches, to drink in the impression of architectual sublimity, which I can neither analyze nor express. Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.
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