It was a real risk. Few people, perhaps, would have endured those years and remained faithful to their calling, particularly as Beaverbrook was assiduous in his offers of renewed employment which would, he hinted, lead to an editorship. Howard could have done with the money, but he felt that his work with the Moral Re-Armament team in Germany and elsewhere was the place for him, whatever his place with Buchman.

Once or twice through those years, Buchman and Howard sat and listened for guidance together. Each time Buchman's thought for Howard came in the verse of Augustus Toplady's hymn:

Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy Cross I cling;

Naked, come to Thee for dress;

Helpless, look to Thee for grace;

Foul, I to the fountain fly;

Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

Once Howard asked him, 'How long shall I go on in this state of darkness and despair?' Buchman replied. 'I just don't know. It's your decision, not mine.'

At last, one day in Berlin, Howard decided that, no matter what it meant, he was going to-do what God asked of him. He told his friends in Berlin that he wanted to make this decision before God, and did so, on his knees, with them.

This decision was at once put to the test. A telegram arrived from Buchman inviting all those in Berlin except Howard to join him in Switzerland. Howard returned to spend the summer at his farm in Suffolk with his family, and he found himself able to help people spiritually more effectively than before.

'After two months,' writes Howard, 'an invitation came to join Buchman. He was polite, but no more than that. The barriers were still up. He wanted to see whether I really meant my decision or whether I still depended on any living man's favour. Then, after some weeks, as I walked along the passage, I felt an arm through mine and heard Buchman's voice beside me: "Just like old times, isn't it?" That was all.'

One day in Rome the two men talked over those difficult years and Howard apologized for 'running away from Buchman'. 'Yes, I felt you did that,' said Buchman. 'I think it has been all as much my fault. I could have made things easier for you. I could have talked to you early on, but I lacked the strength, or maybe it was not the time.' Howard said that one came to the place where, without conscious sin, one just did not know where or how to turn. 'I understand that,' said Buchman, 'and I felt it in you, but always and always I knew you would change.' 'You know,' he added, 'I have had to be ready to risk every relationship in life, seven days a week, for the last forty years. Otherwise our work would not be where it is in the world today.'2

During his days in the wilderness, Howard sometimes wondered whether there were other, less altruistic, motives in Buchman's treatment of him. 'I remember the idea crossed my foolish heart', he wrote to Roger Hicks, 'that Frank might be piqued by the attention then paid to my writings and so wanted to keep me down or limit my field of action.. . But the plain truth and the real point is that for a long, long time I did not want to be like Jesus in my heart, I wanted to go on being like Howard in my heart, in my heart as well as in many other parts of my anatomy. And the atmosphere Frank creates around him is the hardest place in which my way can have its right of way. That is what folk really get up against.'3

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