| Hand of the Cause born in 1887 in Torrington, Connecticut, USA. In 1909 he read Abbas Effendi, His Life and Teachings by Myron H. Phelps and accepted the Bahá'í Faith. He met ‘Abdu'I-Bahá in France in 1911. Holley wrote many books of poetry and in 1913 wrote the first of his books on the Bahá'í Faith, Baha'ism — The Modern Social Religion. In 1923 he was elected a member of the American National Spiritual Assembly. He served on that body until 1959, for 34 years as its secretary. Shoghi Effendi greatly valued Holley's qualities and abilities. He often expressed the wish that Holley would some day come to assist him in the Holy Land but the time was never right for this. |
It was Holley who titled the general letters of Shoghi Effendi to the Bahá'ís of America and the West, picking out such phrases as ‘The Promised Day is Come', ‘The Goal of a New World Order' and ‘The Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh'. He also put subtitles throughout the texts to facilitate their study, a practice of which Shoghi Effendi approved.
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| In 1951 Shoghi Effendi appointed Holley a Hand of the Cause. In 1959 he went to the Holy Land as one of the nine Hands of the Cause serving there. He died in July 1960 and is buried in the Bahá'í cemetery at the foot of Mount Carmel. |
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