This sense of urgency caused him to produce three major public pronouncements in three months that summer. All were reproduced in dozens of newspapers throughout the world, as full-page paid advertisements. He chafed at what he regarded as a press boycott, and felt that this was the only way to get his message through.

The first of Buchman's three statements, in April 1961, was headed 'All the Moral Fences are Down'. It had been stimulated by a talk, at which I was present, between him and Sir Richard Livingstone, a one-time Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Livingstone had said to him, 'When you and I were young there were moral fences. We did not always keep to them, but we always knew when we had crossed them. Today all the fences are down.' Buchman gave vivid instances of how people all over the world were starting to rebuild the moral foundations of their nations by starting with themselves. He ended by quoting the answer of an American admiral when queried by cynical colleagues why he had three times attended assemblies of Moral Re-Armament. 'I learned', the admiral had said, 'what an ideology means - to start doing what we should have been doing all along and to do it all day, every day, for the rest of our lives.'

'Solid Rock and Shifting Sand', in May, was a report of a widespread series of initiatives. Beginning with what El País of Montevideo described as 'the greatest ideological offensive undertaken on the Latin American Continent', led by the Japanese play The Tiger, he ranged through similar campaigns in Asian and African countries and concluded with his own challenge, 'The world is on the knife-edge of decision. We must go all out to save our nations.'

On 4 June 1961 he gave what turned out to be his final call - an autobiography and testament in one, entitled 'Brave Men Choose'. It concluded: 'This is the word of a man on his eighty-third birthday who has spent a long life up and down the world, meeting and knowing men, who has seen the development of two materialist ideologies and the devastation of two world wars, the retreat of freedom and now the advance of a mighty answer ... There is no neutrality in the battle between good and evil. No nation can be saved on the cheap. It will take the best of our lives and the flower of our nations to save humanity. If we go all out for God we will win.'7

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