'Then I went out and I met a young man, just a young blade. He said, "How about a walk?" We walked by Derwentwater. I told him of my experience, that revelation of the Cross of Christ which met my instant need. And before we reached the end of that walk, he, too, had the same experience.'

'We need a passionate pursuit of the individual,' he continued. 'It is those who are for God and those against Him. If you are in the mainstream of God's will for you, you don't depend on results. It is God who gives the results.'

Some sincere Christians have wondered how Buchman could return again and again to his Keswick experience, and at the same time help men like U Nu and Abdel Khaiek Hassouna in their personal and public lives without demanding that they join the Christian Church. It was certainly not because his faith in or dependence on Christ lessened with the years - quite the contrary.

The key seems to have been that Buchman was dedicated to help the people he met to take the next step which God was revealing to them. His friends of other religions knew what he believed and what he tried to live - and were attracted by it. He respected their sincere beliefs, and knew that they had often absorbed a distorted idea of Christianity from the way they had seen people from so-called Christian countries live. He saw his part as demonstrating the beauty and relevance of Christ's living presence in a person or a community - and leaving the Holy Spirit room to work in their hearts as He wished. He was sure that God could make His will known to anyone, just as He did to the Jews in the Old Testament, and that He did not enquire first whether the person seeking Him was a Christian, a person of some different faith or, like the Ruhr Communists, of no faith at all. So, in the deepest sense, he did not aspire to proselytize, but to put people in touch with the Spirit which 'blows where it likes'.

So, with U Nu, he concentrated on helping him to believe he could receive guidance. To the Ghanaian Muslim leader, the Tolon Na, he had simply remarked, 'When did you last steal?' When he emerged, still a good Muslim, from the violent reappraisal of his life into which this one remark had pitched him, the Tolon Na had put right everything in his life which he could see that he had done wrong. He often explained that the Cross meant to him that when God's will crossed his will, he must choose God's will.

'The genius of Moral Re-Armament,' writes the German theologian, Professor Klaus Bockmühl, 'is to bring the central spiritual substance of Christianity (which often it demonstrates in a fresher and more powerful way than do the Churches) in a secular and accessible form. Hence the emphasis on absolute moral standards. But the direction of the Holy Spirit is just as essential.' 'The genius', adds Bockmuhl, 'is in the balance of the two.'8

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