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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
10 stories on this theme.
A short paraphrase from the Baha'i Stories Blog about a letter the young Guardian sent in early 1922 to the small Bahá'í community of Australia, then concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne — one of the first messages sent in the new ministry, encouraging the friends to hold steadily through the change.
Shoghi Effendi's own narration, in *God Passes By*, of the events of late 1921 and early 1922 — the Master's passing, the discovery of the Will and Testament naming the young Shoghi as Guardian, and the formal beginning of the Formative Age of the Faith.
A young man far away at school received sad news, hurried home, and discovered that a sealed letter had named him to care for the whole Bahá'í Faith.
A young man named Shoghi was studying far from home when sad news arrived — and only later did he learn that a special task had been waiting just for him.
In His Will and Testament 'Abdu'l-Bahá named His grandson Shoghi Effendi the Guardian of the Cause of God — "the sign of God," "the chosen branch," "the priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas." The young man who received this towering station asked only to be known by the simple name his Grandfather had used, and signed himself, in lifelong humility, the servant of the threshold.
About a year before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh set down in His own hand the Kitáb-i-'Ahd — His Book of the Covenant, His Will and Testament. During His final illness He placed it in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's keeping, and nine days after His passing it was read aloud to the gathered believers. In it, in words beyond all dispute, Bahá'u'lláh bade His family and His kindred turn their faces toward the Most Mighty Branch.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* preserves a moment from Shoghi Effendi's boyhood in 'Akká: a small barefoot figure in a doorway, eyes on his grandfather, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá's slow nod of recognition that the bond between them was not only physical, but something else.
In Rúḥíyyih Khánum's biography *The Priceless Pearl* she describes the moment in November 1921 when a young Shoghi Effendi, reading the cable in Major Tudor Pole's London office, learned that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had passed — and how, only on his return to Haifa, the opening of the Master's Will revealed an office he had never imagined for himself.
In the December 1921 and January 1922 issues of the Star of the West, the editors gave their readers the bare cable that had reached Chicago on the 29th of November and then, in the issues that followed, the fuller accounts of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's last days written by the household in Haifa.
In 1922 the Star of the West printed Mountfort Mills' account of his visit to Haifa in the months following 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing — the first encounter of a Western pilgrim with the new Guardian of the Cause, Shoghi Effendi, then only twenty-five years old and already, in Mills' words, *the center of the world today.*