O My Brother - The Story of a Search After Truth

For William Hellaby, a Unitarian minister, acceptance of the Bahá'í Faith would bring loss of home and livelihood for a family with three young children. This thoughtful, challenging and touching account by Madeline Hellaby, relating how she and her husband investigated the Faith, is of interest not only to Christians but to anyone who is interested in the nature of moral decision-making.

“‘The vitality of man’s belief in God is dying out in every land,’ wrote Bahá’u’lláh in the 19th century . . . The meaning . . . is not that men are becoming atheists, but that God has ceased to matter . . . this attitude reflects an uncertainty about fundamentals. We do not quite know where we stand . . . In a world of vast and terrifying scientific discoveries, with the nations poised perilously on the edge of a precipice . . . The average man has still, I think, a vague belief in God . . . We need to discover the hidden spiritual issues of our time and to concentrate our thoughts on them. For in the end it is these hidden stirrings to which we shall have to find an answer.”

One morning in war-time Britain a schoolteacher gives a little yellow pamphlet to a fellow bus passenger. And so William Hellaby, a life-long seeker after truth, is launched on his first investigation of the Bahá’í Faith, but in the end he decides instead to train for the ministry in the Unitarian church. After a ten-year interval, and now recently married to a woman whose family’s Unitarian church membership goes back 200 years, Billie embarks with his wife on his second examination of the Bahá’í Faith. Their studies throw new light on Gospel teachings, challenge long-held ideas and beliefs, and bring them closer to Christ than ever before. Growing commitment to the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh faces them with moral decisions and the fact that acceptance of the Bahá’í Faith will bring loss of home and livelihood for a family with three young children, and plunges them into crisis. Eventually, even Grandpa becomes interested . . .

This thoughtful and challenging account, in which Madeline Hellaby relates how she and her husband investigated the Bahá’í Faith, will appeal particularly to readers wishing to understand something of the questions facing students of the Faith from Christian denominations.

Pages: 176
Dimensions: 210 x 138 mm (8.5 x 5.5 in)
Weight: 282 g
ISBN: 978-0-85398-498-6