In the figure of `Abdu’l-Bahá we can look to the world outside and follow a living, historical, ‘perfect Exemplar’, this “…most perfect bounty… sent…down in the form of a human temple.” Images of perfection distilled in one man. We can observe and marvel at this ‘Orb of the beauty of the great’. `Abdu’l-Bahá embodied, in both content and style, a unique conception of human excellence. While not free from the vulnerability of human lives to fortune, while not protected from the mutability of circumstance, while never distant from the existence of opposition and conflict in His commitments, while consistently challenged by the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation, His was a human story which, while sufficiently distant from our experience, counts as a shared extension of all of humanity’s experience.
