At first sight, it seems odd that both Buchman and a practical politician like Hsu Ch'ien should be so persistent in this matter. However, Sun's action was not just a moral weakness but was leading to political weakness. The son of the President of the Parliament which elected Sun Yat-sen President and Generalissimo showed me, in 1983, a photograph of Sun among the parliamentary leaders with his secretary, Ching-ling Soong, sitting beside him in the place of honour, and his wife several seats away. Sun's insistence on this arrangement, he told me, shocked his father and Sun's other colleagues. The Soong family were also 'horrified', according to Emily Hahn, when their middle daughter announced her intention of marrying Sun Yat-sen, because 'she was going against the conventions of both Christianized and non-Christianized society in China'.37 The whole affair weakened Sun's position. It contributed to the intrigues which led to the legislature stripping him of his military powers and transferring the government to an Administrative Committee of which he was only one in seven. In May 1918, when this Government Reorganising Bill was passed, Sun resigned and left Canton for Shanghai.

In June Buchman and Sun were travelling on the same train in Japan. Sun heard that Buchman was on the train and sent for him. Buchman wrote Hsu that 'he seemed mellow and very responsive to every suggestion …. You did a courageous thing in speaking so frankly to him. You possess the fearlessness of a Lincoln... I believe God is going to use you in bringing about His great plan for China.'38

Buchman's message, meanwhile, was as straightforward as ever. 'If sin is the disease,' he told an audience of missionaries in Shanghai, 'we must deal with sin. Sin first of all in ourselves, the "little sins" that rob us of power and keep us from being able to go out in deep sympathy to men in sin. Ill-will towards others, jealousy, ambition, self-will, criticism. And then sin in others. We fail to get at the sin which is keeping a man from Christ. Fear often holds us. We say we are too reserved, that no one should infringe upon another's personality … and all the time there are men about us who long to share the deepest things in their hearts... The woman at the well had no feeling that Jesus had infringed upon her personality when He put His finger upon the cause of her heartache.'

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