AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

They listened to Hambro's account of the Oxford Group's impact in Norway with astonishment. Then he added, 'To most politicians there comes a day when they are bound to contrast the result of their work with the vision of their youth, contrast the things they longed to do with the things they thought they had to do. They will understand me when I say that no man who has been in touch with the Group will go back to his international work in the same spirit as before. It has been made impossible for him to be ruled by hate or prejudice.'9

At the luncheon, Hambro told Buchman that he was going to America to address the Scandinavian communities there. Buchman saw further possibilities. 'Some feel', he wrote to Hambro with his customary high expectations, 'that you have in your hands the possibility of shaping the spiritual destiny of America, and that you will be doing a service that will heighten all your previous important plans ... You know that Roosevelt has sent out a questionnaire to all the clergy in America, and I am afraid the answers have not been satisfactory. Time 10 carries in its last issue a picture of Minger, the President of Switzerland. Beneath it, speaking of the visit of the Oxford Group, is the line, "He commended his callers' conviction." You remember his statement that "You are showing the world the way out of the present crisis". Now that is what Roosevelt wants to know. America has not given him the answer. Can Carl Hambro, with the background of the last year, give him the answer?'11

Hambro accepted Buchman's suggestion. He spoke in many cities, ending with a powerful speech in the New York Metropolitan Opera House. Everywhere he made clear his strong opposition to Nazi Germany and his irritation at the lack of urgency in the democracies in the face of its threat; everywhere, too, he brought the news of what he had seen happening through the Oxford Group. 'Politics', he said, 'must be an effort to render possible tomorrow what is impossible today ... The Oxford Group is at work stretching the limits of the possible further out, fixing the eye on wider horizons, setting the clear-cut peace of the absolute demands of Christ up against the restlessness of the relative, removing the barriers between man and man, between nation and nation.’12* Hambro did not see the President, but consulted at length with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and other politicians. His statements and interviews gave many a new perspective on the Oxford Group, and prepared the way for Buchman's next moves in his own country.

(* The Jewish Advocate of 1 November 1935 commented editorially: 'The contribution of the Oxford Movement (sic) is a vision of what might be, a vision of social regeneration through the cultivation of the idealism of mind and spirit. More power to the Oxford Group, which is growing by leaps and bounds and whose objective is ... to translate the Ten Commandments into the realities of everyday life.')

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