AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

While increasingly aware of the dangers developing in and from Germany during the middle and late 1930s, Buchman believed, with Solzhenitsyn fifty years later,1 that the basic cause of the approaching disaster was that 'we have forgotten God'. Some countries were building their entire system on the denial of God and on total moral relativism, and millions of people in the so-called Christian countries had adopted the same basis for their private lives. Their leaders had often become practical atheists in public affairs, whatever their private profession. Of the League of Nations Buchman remarked, 'It is failing because it is not God-arched'; and of certain Church leaders he said sadly, 'Where is the strategy of the Holy Spirit?'

Most of Buchman's time was spent in the democratic countries around Germany, in Britain and in the United States, which involved many crossings of the English Channel and the Atlantic. He was striving, without haste but with urgency, to convince both the people and their leaders that obedience to the will of God was the only adequate basis for the ordering of society. He believed - over-optimistically as it turned out - that the danger would spur enough democrats to change, and that the totalitarians might note this and alter their ways.

In September 1935 Buchman was invited to their country by Swiss who had worked with him in Scandinavia. Switzerland's folksy President, Rudolf Minger, welcomed him and his 250 companions. He asked himself, said Minger, whether there was any way out of 'the world's dilemma'. 'The answer', he went on, 'is a courageous "Yes". What is needed is the changing of lives through a new spiritual power so strong that it reconciles conflicting forces and produces brotherhood and solidarity. It is in attaining this goal that the Oxford Group sees its task.'2

The usual wide variety of meetings, large and small, took place. In Geneva they varied from gatherings of doctors, the unemployed, university professors and hoteliers, to the night when Calvin's cathedral and one of the city's largest halls both overflowed. The response was much the same in city after city.

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