Personally, I prefer to think of Buchman as a prophet set in an apocalyptic age, an era when God is being pushed into a private ghetto and where moral standards are slipping, a time when civilisations show signs of disintegration and the world itself feels in danger of extinction.

Like prophets through the ages he brought to his day a diagnosis which cut across contemporary fashion. Not all his prophecies of doom or of deliverance have been fulfilled, but his thought had an accuracy and a universality about it which pierced through to peopleof all kinds in every continent. He said little that was new, but he made old forgotten truths suddenly seem relevant to successive generations. For example, Dr Karl Wick, editor of the Swiss daily Vaterland, wrote that he had 'brought silence out of the monastery into the home, the marketplace and the board room.'4

In answering my startled enquiry whether he really thought, as he had said to me, that 'Buchman was a turning-point in the history of the modern world', Cardinal König* wrote: 'In the last century, there was a feeling among intellectuals that we could build a better world without God. Then came the First World War, and many felt that many things had gone wrong. Buchman was among them, and he began to think what could be done. His great idea was to show that the teaching of Jesus Christ is not just a private affair but has the great force to change the whole structure of the social orders of economics, of political ideas, if we combine the changing of structures with a change of heart. In that sense he opened a completely new approach to religion, to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and to the life of modern man.'5

(*Cardinal Franz König, Archbishop of Vienna, is a leading authority on Eastern Europe and on the relationship of Christianity to other faiths. According to Mary Craig (Man from a Far Country, Hodder and Stoughton, 1979, p.175), he was the general choice for Pope at one point during the Conclave of October 1978, but declined.)

König, who never met Buchman, based his assessment on his own observations in recent years: 'Wherever Moral Re-Armament is active there emerges a new world - in small circles first, but the activity shows how great the force is ... If I consider the information which comes to me from all over the world, I see changes which are visible and social effects which are tangible. This must come from the faith of the man who was at the beginning, otherwise I could not explain what has happened since in so many places. "By their fruits you shall know them." From the fruit you go back to the root.'6

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