At Caux Padmanabhan, who spoke only Malayalam, was a keen observer of everything. After three days he remarked that there was a strange atmosphere at Caux. 'What is that?' he was asked. 'It's a sense of purity,' he said. 'The extraordinary thing is that it can exist in a place where there are so many Christians.' 'You see, a Christian to us', he added, 'is a fat Englishman with a cigar in his mouth, one of our girls on his arm and a bottle of whisky in his pocket.'

One evening the Kerala delegation saw Pickle Hill in the Caux theatre. Their reaction was, 'This play has been written for us.' A Catholic leader went directly to Padmanabhan and apologised for his bitterness against him. A few months later the Catholic Archbishop of Trivandrum described the outcome in a message to Buchman: 'History will record our permanent gratitude to Mannath Padmanabhan... for creating the unity of all the communities following his return from Caux.'7

Throughout that summer in Mackinac, despite the success of the assembly, Buchman seems to have been deeply uneasy about his team. This unease can, indeed, be traced back much further, certainly to 1957. While preparing for Mackinac that year, he had said to some of the Americans and Europeans with him, 'Are we all actually changing people? Some of you are so starched and boiled and ironed - we just need to change and put on clean clothes. Only one person can cancel sin, and that's Jesus.'

He was to return to the attack more forcibly at various times during the 1959 assembly. 'I get the impression you think things can be achieved without changing people,' he said in May. 'We are here to renew our commitment and to free ourselves of debris. A man is either alive or dead. Either changing people or not. Feathery men - we've got some in the fellowship. Bossy women make cowards of men. Impure men make bossy women. Have any of you refused to take on the basic needs of nations? Countries easily become fields in which we work rather than becoming forces to remake the world... Whatever I have done hasn't been me. I got up early and there was always the divine thought. It must be your secret. The Holy Spirit just dropping His truth. That's Christ's promise: "He that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."'

This unease was still with him in October. He seems to have felt that many of his colleagues had become dependent on each other and had lost the infectious spirit that changes lives, and that this was leading, as numbers grew, to an institutionalism which he had always aimed to avoid - what he called a 'movement-mindedness'. 'Some of us', he said at this time, 'may have bluffed too long now to be genuine enough to save our nations. Judas felt tremendous remorse. But Peter repented. Judas was in love with his interpretation of the message Christ proclaimed. To love the idea of Moral Re-Armament is no substitute for the love of God who washes us, sets us free and sets us to work.

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