Mountfort Mills Meets the Guardian

'Abdu'l-Bahá passed away in Haifa on 28 November 1921. In His Will and Testament He named His grandson Shoghi Effendi, then a student at Oxford, as the Guardian of the Cause. Shoghi Effendi returned to Haifa at the end of December 1921.

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In March 1922 two American believers, Mountfort Mills, a New York attorney, and Roy Wilhelm, travelled to Haifa at the Guardian's summons. On 22 April 1922, at the Feast of Riḍván that opened the national convention in Chicago, Mills was the first of the returned pilgrims to speak, and the *Star of the West* printed his words.

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He told the friends that they had met believers in Haifa from Persia, India, Burma, Egypt, Italy, England and France. He described Shoghi Effendi, dressed entirely in black, as a touching figure, and asked his listeners to think of what he stood for: a youth, left by the Master's Will as Guardian of the Cause, before whom lay the problems of the entire world.

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Mills said they had woken in Haifa without any sense of sadness; that feeling was entirely gone. The Master's Spirit, he said, was present with greater intensity and power, and at the centre of it stood this youth:

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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 went on to speak of how humble, meek and selfless the Guardian was, and of how the problems brought to him from all parts of the world were met and solved in the most informal way. He passed on the Guardian's wish that the friends avoid sectarianism and work for the deepening of the Cause before its expansion.

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*A retelling based on **Star of the West**, Volume 13, No. 4 (May 17, 1922), Louis G. Gregory's report of the Bahá'í Congress and Fourteenth Annual Convention. For the fuller account, see the original.*

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