Herbert Grevenius, the Swedish literary critic, came to the same conclusion. Grevenius had written of Buchman, before meeting him, as a 'pocket Caesar issuing his dictates from afar with self-assured power and perfection'. After watching him for some days at an assembly in Sweden, he wrote, 'Well, I never knew Caesar, but I don't think he was in the least like Frank Buchman. It is not his lightning smile that forms his secret. His epigrammatical sayings, his briskness, his ability to hold a meeting in his hand and yet disappear into the background - none of these really tells you anything about the real Buchman. Look closely at a photograph of him, and you will see something in his expression, a sort of listening apart, and for once the camera does not lie. Sit a few days and study his face. You will be amazed how often he appears to be questing, at a loss, not to say helpless. And he does not try to conceal it. His enormously active life is built on one thing only - guidance for which he is on the watch every moment. He is a sail always held to be filled by the wind.'16

Buchman never spoke of himself as a mystic, although it seemed obvious to those who saw much of him that he often - even unconsciously - gained pre-knowledge of events and unusual insight into people's characters in his times of listening. He never used big words about himself or his experiences, mainly perhaps because he was so convinced that anyone who was willing to put it to the test could find the same relationship with God as he had. He expressed his relationship with God in terms which anyone could understand, by reducing it to a matter of Speaker and listener. He tried, again and again, to present it in metaphors which were in tune with the age as it developed. Thus, early on, he referred to Edison inventing the light bulb and bringing illumination into every home. Later he used the metaphors of the telephone, of wireless or of the 'electronics of the Spirit'. Yet his claim, for every willing listener, was constant - that 'adequate, accurate information can come from the mind of God to the mind of man. That is normal prayer.' 'Waiting and watching for the Living God to break through the shadows of the night,' he said, 'I came to know the Holy Spirit as the light, guide, teacher and power. What I am able to do, I do through the power that comes in the early hours of morning quiet.'

It was easy for the intellectual to think him over-simple; but behind his words was a hidden depth of experience which the Oxford theologian, B.H. Streeter, for instance, recognised. Streeter once remarked, 'You have got to make Christianity so simple that even an intellectual can understand it.' In a copy of his rewritten Warburton Lectures, The God Who Speaks,17 he wrote: 'To Frank Buchman - apart from you, much herein would be written otherwise.'

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