In the last entry in this diary, she noted, 'I was asked if I liked Dr Buchman. It seemed an unnecessary question, for in him I saw above all the realisation of a force which advances the Love of God, and this showed me how human personality is lost sight of in spiritual power.'*

(* In July 1935 Lady Antrim's daughter, Lady Sybil Smith (later Lady Bicester), offered to take Buchman to a Buckingham Palace garden party and introduce him to Queen Mary, whom she kept informed about his work. Buchman declined in a letter of 20 July:‘Ithought immediately of your husband, who might be bored by having me about or might feel he was committing himself more largely than he wanted to.')

Another of those who worked closely with Buchman in these years was Dr B. H. Streeter. He had flown three times to Denmark to assist in that campaign and reported his conclusions in a letter to The Times.40 Since throwing in his lot with the Oxford Group in1934 he had begun to be more interested in people and Buchman frequently sent individuals in need of help to him. He wrote to Buchman on one occasion about a talk with an editor who had come to question him in Oxford: 'I gave him my spiritual autobiography. I stressed the Gamaliel point - that Gamaliel did some good by protecting the apostles, but that if he had gone further and identified himself with them, it might have led the best element in the Pharisees to Christianity, and then the Jewish War and destruction of Jerusalem would not have occurred ... Gamaliel must take the credit not only for the good he did, but for the good he failed to do, the calamity he failed to prevent.'41

It was with shock that in September 1937 Buchman heard of the death of Streeter and his wife, Irene, in a plane crash on a mountain-top near Basle. The trip had been a second honeymoon with his wife, who for years had felt herself estranged by his cleverness and his advanced theology, for which she had small sympathy. He never found faith easy; but his years with Buchman put a foundation of experience under the fine structure of his thinking. 'I am sure I have learnt much about methods of presentation,' he had written to Buchman. 'If I had not met the Group, I might have died a distinguished theologian.'42

Buchman, who heard the news while visiting Ramsay Macdonald at Lossiemouth, flew immediately to Switzerland for the funeral. There he was given a statement which Streeter had been preparing for use on his return. 'I was drawn to the Oxford Group not primarily by failure to meet personal and family problems, but by my despair of the world situation,' Streeter had written. 'The more I saw of the trend of things, the less grounds I found for hope ... I saw how largely the moral energies of Christianity were demobilized, partly through the differences of opinion on points of doctrine or church organisation, but still more by the failure to realise in actual life the religious and moral ideals which Christians are unanimous in professing. The Oxford Group is recalling the churches to their proper task of saving the souls of nations as well as individuals.'

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