His exhortations could, however, lead to overstatement by colleagues trying to please him, and sometimes by Buchman himself when he repeated the evaluations of others without having them researched. Something which was an important factor in the solution of a problem became, in common speech, the answer to the whole affair. In his speeches he was careful seldom or never to make a personal claim about such situations, but quoted the public opinions of politicians, newspapers or other authorities on the spot. But in his later speeches, drafted by others though always read to and altered by him, inaccuracies did at times get through. In one speech, for example, it was said that the Times of India had 'carried a full page' of MRA news when in fact Moral Re-Armament had inserted it as a paid full-page advertisement. The editor of the Times of India quite properly pointed this out in a letter to the London Times'9 It became almost an international incident. When I next met the drafter of the speech I asked him how such a silly mistake had been made.

'Mistake?' he said. 'It was carried by the paper. That's what they say in America.'

Upon small incidents like this Buchman's opponents, with a near monopoly of the press in some countries, built up an illusion that all the achievements attributed to Buchman - and which he attributed to God - were exaggerations if not plain lies. What made this particularly ironic was the fact that, at the deepest level, such 'results' meant little to Buchman personally. He felt a tremendous urgency to get the potency and relevance of God through to everyone, and that many were so secularised that they would only pay attention to practical results - but this very urgency sometimes provided ammunition which defeated his own intentions.

There were times when Buchman felt shaken in his belief, that God had left him. 'I'm lost,' he said at one such period. I’d be surprised if you weren't sometimes,' the person with him replied. This feeling is well known to anyone who tries to orientate his or her life towards God. In Buchman's case he was also very often on unfamiliar ground, reaching out for the next step for some person or some large group of people. As well as feeling lost, he was frequently fearful. 'No fear' recurs constantly in his written or dictated thoughts. Once in the middle of a meeting he suddenly said, 'Oh, no fear, it's so stupid,' and stood up and shook himself to be rid of it. It seems to have been a mixture of ordinary human fears - of making mistakes, getting plans wrong, missing God's direction - and a more mystical fear. 'Do you fear the love of God?' a friend once asked him. 'Yes,' he replied, with emphasis. This is a fear presumably only known to those who have come close enough to the love of God to understand its power. And there is no doubt that the relationship with God was the one which Buchman most assiduously cultivated for himself and most urgently wanted to share with other people.

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