Young in Face: Mountfort Mills Meets the Guardian

The 28th of November, 1921, had brought to the Bahá'í community the deepest grief in its short Western history. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had ascended in Haifa. The American friends, learning the news by cable across the Atlantic, were unprepared. The household at Haifa, learning shortly afterwards that the Master had named His grandson Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Cause, was equally shaken.

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The young man named in the Will and Testament was twenty-four years old, a student then in Oxford, and he came home in January 1922 to find awaiting him an office no one in the history of religion had previously held.

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By the spring of 1922 the first Western pilgrims were beginning to find their way to Haifa to greet him. Mountfort Mills, a New York attorney who had served the American Bahá'í community for over a decade and had made earlier pilgrimage to the Master, was among the very first.

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His account, printed shortly afterwards in the *Star of the West,* is one of the earliest Western descriptions of the new Guardian.

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> He is indeed young in face, form and manner — yet his heart is > the center of the world today.

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Mills' tribute caught the paradox the Faith would have to live with for the next thirty-five years of Shoghi Effendi's ministry. The Guardian was, in his physical bearing, what he had always been: a slender young man with dark eyes, careful courtesy, quiet voice. The pilgrims who arrived expecting some extraordinary visible majesty were, almost without exception, struck instead by an impression of restraint and youth.

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Yet in the spiritual centre of the gathering — in the way that significant decisions were made, in the way that the work of the Cause across continents was now organized and given direction — the Guardian had become already, even in his first months, the axis around which the Bahá'í world turned.

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Mills' phrase was not flattery. He was a careful and unsentimental American attorney. He had known the Master in 'Akká. He had spent his adult life giving accurate testimony in courts of law. What he wrote home was what he had seen.

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The *Star of the West* printed the account because the friends in America needed it. Most of them would never make pilgrimage. They needed, by way of careful witnesses like Mills, the picture of the new Guardian that would carry them through the long years ahead. In a single sentence — *young in face, form and manner; yet his heart is the center of the world today* — Mills gave them the picture they would carry, and we still carry, of the twenty-five-year-old to whom the work of three decades had already passed.

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