At tea that afternoon Buchman related what had happened to him, and among those who heard the story was a Cambridge undergraduate. 'I want to talk to you,' he said to Buchman. They walked around Derwentwater. Before they returned the young man, too, had found a release similar to Buchman's. 'That was the first man that I ever brought face to face with the central experience of Christianity,' Buchman commented.* From that day Buchman began to help people, not from a position of rectitude but from the reality of knowing that he too was a sinner and that he had been forgiven.

(* Fourteen years later, passing through Liverpool, Buchman telephoned this man, who told him that the talk had 'regenerated the whole principle of his life'. His name is not known.)

From Keswick, too, Buchman wrote to his mother. He told her how he now knew that he was the seventh wrong man.

'I was awfully put out about your letter that you did not know sooner to forgive and forget,' she replied. ‘Put that out of your mind. We are counting the days till you come home.'5 It was some years before she measured the magnitude of what had taken place in her son's heart.

Back in America, the new Frank Buchman faced his first direct test. 'In church on Christmas morning, I saw sitting in front of me one of the very men against whom I had harboured ill-will. He had a bald spot on his head, and sitting opposite him in Committee meetings I used to think the letter "I" was written all over that spot. After the service, I reached out my hand and said "Merry Christmas". He could not meet my eye. But I had been kept from ill-will.'

Fifty years later, John Woodcock, the man who had helped Buchman to decide to resign on the morning after the hospice Board meeting, put the whole matter into longer perspective. 'I think we both felt that we were straight and they were wrong,' he wrote to Buchman. 'We do know now that what seemed to be the breakdown of your life's work was only the opening of the gate which God alone could open, through which we go to our real life's work.'6

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