ASIAN RECONNAISSANCE

He was apparently surprised and hurt by the reactions to him. At Christmas Howard Walter wrote to reassure him. 'Frank,' he said, 'just don't worry about all the things people say … your real friends who've seen your work - its fundamental, sacrificial reality - will never get these unpleasant reactions. You ought to go serenely forward.'20

Meanwhile a small group of men was gathering around him in what he called 'a companionship of fellowship and silence'. Among them were Motts son John, Howard Walter, and Sherwood Day, whom Walter had known in India. They supported Buchman's conviction that intensive work with individuals was the key to 'sustained evangelism', and that the first target should be China.

Their first objective, Buchman wrote to President Mackenzie in February 1917, was to transmit this passion for work with individuals to 'the leaders of China'. In Peking, for example, they hoped to bring together fifteen of the most influential Chinese Christians in the city and train them in the 'how' of Christian work. The fifteen were to include a general whom Mott had converted, an admiral, the Minister of the Interior, the Vice-Minister of Justice who had become a Christian the previous year, and the President of the Chinese Assembly, as well as a number of leading missionaries. The Hartford men, said Buchman, would then try to repeat these tactics in other Chinese cities. It was, he added, a superhuman task and they were attempting it only because they felt God had called them to it.21

It was, indeed, a bold programme. Buchman and his colleagues were planning to reform a vast country. Their principal target was its political leadership; and their principal co-workers were to be not other missionaries but influential Chinese. It was the first of Buchman's efforts to implement his conviction that a country, no less than a person, could become God-directed.

The plan seemed all the more ambitious in view of the anarchic state into which China had fallen. After a century in which the country had increasingly become the prey of European powers, the reigning Manchu dynasty had been overthrown by a revolution in 1912 and replaced by a republic under Sun Yat-sen. Within weeks, however. Sun's flimsy regime had also been swept away; and Yuan Shih-k'ai, the most powerful military figure of the old order, had seized power. Yuan himself died in 1916, leaving behind a pathetically weak and unstable central government in Peking, while Sun and his allies tried to keep alive the ideals of the Young Revolutionaries from a southern base in Canton.

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