But personal conviction and political pressures do not always coincide. The issue was becoming as hot for the legislators in Washington as it had been in Westminster, and was stoked to roasting heat by a section of the press.

The beginnings at Mackinac had been fruitful, but for Buchman it had been a tough summer. As so often he was dissatisfied, feeling the need of a new depth of spiritual experience and a new way of reaching the mind of the country. 'We need the medium to give a richer spiritual life to America,' he said. 'I want to go away and find a whole new vision, an expression of what we need to bring to the nation.'

He decided to go for a few days' rest to a small hotel in Saratoga Springs in New York State, a place where he had spent a holiday in his student years. He arrived a weary man, with no clear idea of what he should do or what resources he would be left to deploy. 'I don't know what the future holds,' he told some friends quietly.'I have a sense I am going to be attacked physically. I have no fear about it, but I want you to know what I feel may happen.'

Buchman arrived in Saratoga Springs in late November 1942. On 20 November he had news of the death of two friends, one the son of the London business man Austin Reed, killed in action, the other a notable suffragette and Republican grande dame, Mrs Charles Sumner Bird, who with her granddaughter, Ann, had played a major part in putting on You Can Defend America in Boston in August 1941. Buchman was devoted to them and had just written the granddaughter encouraging her to get to know the women leaders of the Garment Workers' Union in her city: 'I think this development is akin to that which came to your grandmother through the suffragette movement. Some people here are dying on their feet because their only goal seems to be the end of a cigarette and the next cocktail. You are truly doing what happened in the New Testament. I remember some lines when I was a boy: Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose true, and dare to make it known!

For Daniel you have only to put in the name "Ann". There are people who won't understand, but I would rather rave the appreciation of those four hundred Garment Workers than all the modern tittle-tattle which all of us have to listen to, but not always agree to.'1

That evening in Saratoga Springs, in a relaxed and radiant mood which brought the sense of eternity into the room, he talked with a few friends about the two who had died: '"The memory of just men made perfect!" Many funerals are so unnatural and inadequate. They should breathe what is necessary into the next generation. What a joy to have people who will give you a setting at your passing which will make others rise up and lake on your work.'

He said the benediction which he loved most: 'The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.' Then he went to his room. 'He was', recorded his secretary, 'supremely happy with a deep sense of the triumph of death in Christ.'

Next day, walking down the hotel corridor to go out, he suddenly collapsed. The local doctor, Dr Carl Comstock, was there within ten minutes and found he had had a stroke, which had impaired his speech and paralysed the right side of his body. However, half an hour later Buchman was speaking a little. Shortly afterwards, he sat up, and then, with his younger colleagues too astonished to stop him, he got up and walked to the bathroom and returned to bed unaided. Comstock, told of it later, said he had never heard of anything like it. But the prognosis was bad, and with local nurses away at the war and an influenza epidemic in the town, nursing would be difficult.

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