MORAL AND SPIRITUAL RE-ARMAMENT

Buchman entered 1938 with a renewed sense of urgency. 'I am trying to find an approach that will give the message more intelligently to an age that needs it, but is desperately afraid of it,' he wrote at the time. He was looking for a thought that was simple enough for millions to grasp and realistic enough for national leaders to put forward. He also wanted to shake those who, having found a rich personal experience of faith through the Oxford Group, were hugging it to themselves, and to persuade them to enter the struggle to answer the problems of the wider world.

His uneasiness was leading him to another break-out similar to those which had made him stretch beyond the local ministry in Pennsylvania, beyond the care of the students in the American colleges, and beyond the standard missionary field. It was not a new public relations angle which he sought, but a new and larger commitment for himself and any who would go with him.

The seed thought he was seeking came to him from a Swedish Socialist author, Harry Blomberg. The Swedish Labour Party had been the most successful in Europe. Operating in a period of prolonged peace, it had brought prosperity and comfort to all classes. With these had come a sense of self-sufficiency and a general rejection, in intellectual circles, of any need for God. At the same time, some labour leaders there were aware that prosperity by itself had not brought happiness, while the rise of Communism and Nazism was forcing them to reconsider whether they could for ever stay aloof from the conflicts elsewhere. Thus, Dr Alf Ahlberg, principal of the trades-union-owned training school at Brunnsvik, had recently written, 'I would be thought a fool if I were to say to so-called practical politicians, "You talk of rescuing democracy. Excellent. But faith in democracy requires faith in God." Yet I am convinced I am more of a practical politician in this statement than any of those gentlemen realises. History confirms this and I am afraid is going to confirm it in a still more frightful way.'1

Harry Blomberg was one of Ahlberg's pupils. He had brought the philosophy of the Oxford Group, which had reached him through his fellow authors in Norway, to the steelworkers among whom he lived in Borlänge. His book Vi måste börja om (We must begin again)2 illustrated the dilemma which Ahlberg outlined. His theme was, 'I had come to a dead end, just as democracy had come to a dead end. I, too, had to begin again.' The book was an immediate best-seller. Commenting upon it, and upon Ronald Fangen's two new novels and Hambro's recent book Modern Mentality, the Oslo correspondent of the New York Times Book Review wrote in his survey of the literary scene in Scandinavia: 'The supremacy of the psychoanalyst, who drew his deductions largely from observations of those who were sick in body and soul, seems to be weakening. The healthy counter-trend is setting in, a challenge to mankind to resist unthinking mass appeals (of dictatorship) and develop the individualism which can counter present-day trends.'3

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When asked for a theme for the page on Sweden in the pictorial Rising Tide published that spring, Blomberg thought of the Swedish steel going to all the nations of Europe for their armaments and wrote, 'Sweden - the reconciler of the nations. We must rearm morally.'

Buchman received the Swedish edition of Rising Tide while spending a few days quietly in the Black Forest in Freudenstadt. Walking one afternoon in the Forest and preparing for his next moves in Britain, Blomberg's thought returned repeatedly to him, and with unusual force:

'Moral and spiritual re-armament. Moral and spiritual re-armament. The next great move in the world will be a movement of moral re-armament for all nations.'

Buchman was due to make a speech in East Ham Town Hall in London a few days later. Bill Jaeger's work in East London had been growing and penetrating the civic life of the area, to the point of becoming a steadying factor in districts where Fascists and their opponents were clashing in the streets. The attitude displayed by one Council member resulted in his becoming known in his borough as 'the councillor with the changed face'. He apologised to the Mayor, to whom he had not spoken for twenty years because of bitterness originating in a policy difference. 'Either something's gone radically wrong with him or something's gone positively right,' commented the Mayor, and soon afterwards fifteen Councillors of different parties issued a statement saying, 'An entirely new spirit of co-operation has come into our work as a Local Authority. This has resulted in a considerable saving of time in reaching decisions.'4

The effect of the Oxford Group in East London caught the attention of certain national labour leaders. A group of them had met several times to hear about it under the chairmanship of H. H. Elvin, Chairman of the Trades Union Congress in 1937-8. 'Why don't I have the power to change people like this?' the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons asked on one of these occasions. Now several mayors in the area were hosting a meeting of 3,000 to hear Buchman, who took this opportunity to launch Moral Re-Armament.

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'The world's condition', he began, 'cannot but cause disquiet and anxiety. Hostility piles up between nation and nation, labour and capital, class and class. The cost of bitterness and fear mounts daily. Friction and frustration are undermining our homes.

'Is there a remedy that will cure the individual and the nation and give the hope of a speedy and satisfactory recovery?

‘The remedy may lie in a return to those simple home truths that some of us learned at our mother's knee, and which many of us have forgotten and neglected - honesty', purity', unselfishness and love.

'The crisis is fundamentally a moral one. The nations must rearm morally...

'We can, we must and we will generate a moral and spiritual force that is powerful enough to remake the world.'5

Soon after this meeting Tod Sloan, a well-known East London militant who as a boy had canvassed for Keir Hardie when he stood for Parliament for East Ham, and in whose house Ben Tillett, Tom Mann and the 1899 dockers' strike committee sometimes met, saw a poster outside Canning Town Public Hall. It asked 'What is Moral Re-Armament?' and answered: It's not an institution, It's not a point of view, It starts a revolution by starting one in you!

He went in to the meeting and, as he later said, 'got a basinful'. He came to realise that his agitations on behalf of the unemployed and homeless, his fights for meals and boots for the school-children, essential activities which had sometimes landed him in gaol, had inadvertently taken a wrong turning. I’d always said that I loved my class and family . . . But I saw that the main thing I'd done was to teach them to hate. I'd said I was an idealist, but I'd made materialists out of them,' he said. One of the first things he decided to put to rights was his relationship with his wife.6 He later wrote to Buchman, 'The words, Moral Re-Armament, are God's property coined for His service and this is what goes into them - there will be no more unmoral bargaining, no more social injustice, no more conflict. Chaos cannot obtain if we work, live and practise Moral Re-Armament. It is a real laughing, living, loving, obedient willingness to restore God to leadership.’7

A few days after speaking in East Ham, Buchman visited Sweden. On arrival in Stockholm he told the press that his vision was that Sweden would become 'a reconciler of the nations' - a long step forward, in his view, from mere neutrality. He took part in King Gustav's eightieth birthday celebrations and, with his usual insatiable interest in public occasions and the character of public men, was present at the arrival, by boat or train, of most of the principal guests. The visit was in reality a reconnaissance on his part, as he had for three years been resisting invitations from many quarters to take a team to that country. When, for example, Archbishop Söderblom's son-in-law, Professor Runestam, who attended Hambro's house-party at Høsbjør, had pressed him to go there in 1935, he had answered, 'Are you clear what you want to accomplish? I think those who want to sponsor the work are beset by... misimpressions of its true character.'8 He had written to another friend, 'What I fear so much about Sweden is that what they want is something that will just be a "pick-me-up" for the Church . . . rather than the rebirth of everything in the Church. Men like these ... bishops and clergy are not willing to go through the pain of rebirth.'9

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Now that Blomberg and the steelworkers were coming forward, Buchman felt more confident. Even so, not everyone immediately took to him. Sven Stolpe, Blomberg's literary colleague, was 'horrified' when they met. He had first heard of Buchman in Norway 'through that marvellous team of brilliant men, Fangen, Wikborg, Skard, Mowinckel', and was expecting to be deeply impressed by this man to whom they all declared they owed so much. But Stolpe found him 'one hundred per cent American, ugly and so unintellectual'. 'He did not think logically and what he said often seemed to me naive and incoherent. He laughed and laughed and smiled all day. He was never solemn, and we Swedes are always very solemn about holy things.'

To his astonishment, however, Buchman asked him to interpret for him when he returned in August to hold the first Moral Re-Armament Assembly at Visby, on the Baltic island of Gotland.*

(* The wife of the Bishop on the island of Gotland, Torsten Ysander, consulted Buchman on the seating of a dinner party. Buchman said, 'Oh, I think we seat the changed and the unchanged alternately.' 'Where should I sit?' asked Mrs Ysander. 'Beside me, of course,' replied Buchman. 'And we both laughed uproariously,' added Mrs Ysander. (Frank Buchman— Eighty, p. 192.)

Stolpe protested: 'I've never been to England or spoken English or known any English people.'

'Oh, God will help,' replied Buchman, and Stolpe agreed to do it.

The crowds at Visby were all the greater because the visit had been so long delayed. They poured in until there was no building large enough to hold them except the ruins of the old church of St Nikolaus. Stockholms- Tidningen, then the largest Swedish daily, sent its aeroplane each day for pictures and reports. Yet Buchman believed it would be tough going, against the complacency of Swedish society and the cynicism among its intellectuals. Stolpe agreed. 'I have never known such hatred as there was towards Buchman from some present and from some who had sent them,' he said. 'This American coming to teach Christianity to good old Swedes!'

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Stolpe himself, meanwhile, was beginning to reassess Buchman. He was immediately impressed by the people who accompanied him. 'Buchman had dozens of the finest people you ever saw. Those boys and girls. Incredible! Absolutely convincing! You felt kindness, purity, absolutely clean air around them. They thought of others all the time and had nothing to hide. They never got you into a corner. They had a sort of absolute loyalty' to God, a burning conviction, yet laughing all the way,' Stolpe recalled forty years later.

Then he noticed Buchman's attitude to the workers whom Blomberg and he had brought with them. 'They interested him far more than the young lords. He made the two lots meet and like each other, torpedoing the twentieth-century nostrum of anti-class.'

What did all this say about Buchman? After a bit, Stolpe worked out his own explanation: I saw he was an inspired man, a kind of poet. Not a charmer, but someone guided by God. Why? I couldn't understand it. Then I remembered the Finnish poet Runeberg saying that if God wants to play a beautiful tune, it doesn't matter if He does it on a poor instrument. Buchman seemed to me the strangest instrument I had ever seen: but God had chosen him.'

The interpreting went well. ‘I never heard anyone lead a meeting like him. He always ended at the highest note. He was deeply serious, doing only one thing - and he had to do it. Your impression was, "Here is a man, a genius. There are ten thousand more gifted people in Europe, but he is enough for God to remake the world with."’10

The assembly started well. Many people found deep personal spiritual experiences, and there was good press coverage of the public speeches. But Buchman was uneasy. For most of one night he was awake, praying and listening for God's direction. His speech the next morning was made straight from his jotted notes of the night before, wrecked the apparent success of the proceedings, and presented the small-minded and complacent among his hearers with an uncomfortable dilemma.

'I am not interested, nor do I think it adequate,' he said, 'if we are going just to start another revival. Whatever thoughtful statesman you talk with will tell you that every country needs a moral and spiritual awakening. That is the absolutely fundamental essential. But revival is only one level of thought. To stop there is inferior thinking.

'The next step is revolution. It is uncomfortable. A lot of Christians don't like the word. It scares them. It makes them goose-fleshy. That's where some of your critics come from - goose-fleshy Christians with armchair Christianity. What the Oxford Group will give this and every nation is a spiritual revolution.'

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'The point is this,' Buchman continued. 'Are the Christians going to build a Christian philosophy that will move Europe? Are you the kind of Christians that can build that revolution? If you are not going on that battle front, I wish you well. I am not going to quarrel with you or criticise you. You do exactly what you like in the way you like. That's your idea of democracy. I don't say it's true democracy, but it's the popular practice of democracy ... Somewhere on the battlefront we will have the real revolutionaries.'

Beyond revival and revolution, he went on, 'There is a third stage, renaissance. The rebirth of a people, individuals and the rebirth of a nation . . . Some people do not like the idea of nations reborn, or of reaching the millions. They deride such a programme by calling it "publicity" ... All the publicity must be for destruction - or must it? Gospel means "good news", front-page news. But people object if it gets on the front page.'

One of the events which had generated this onslaught was an article in the important Stockholm daily, Dagens Nyheter, which mentioned 'the movement's loud-mouthed propaganda methods' and 'advertising about world revival'.11 Buchman felt that many present, including some who had found personal help through the Oxford Group, were sheltering behind the criticism in their desire to have a safe, restricted movement which would avoid public ridicule; and that some were also looking for a movement which would reassure them about their souls while allowing the pattern of their lives to continue much as before.

'I am going to promise you one thing,' he concluded. 'I am not turning back. I am not turning back, no matter who does, no matter what it is going to cost. If you join in this great crusade, you will get the way of the Cross. I am not going to lure you by hopes of material success. I am not going to lure you by saying you are going to be heroes. I am not going to lure you, although I believe that these lands can give a pattern on how to live. It is a personal experience of the Cross. It is not I, but Christ. It is not I at the head, but Christ who leads.'

He then suggested that people should not attend more meetings but should think it out alone. 'The thing you have got to decide is between you and God. Do it alone. Write it down if you want to. It is a deed, like the transfer of property - so you turn over your life to God, for full and complete direction as a fellow-revolutionary.'12

As a result of this speech, some decided to cease working with Buchman. Some even decided to kill his work if they could. Nils Gosta Ekman, who later became an editor at Svenska Dagbladet, records that some reacted against Buchman's challenge 'as against a personal insult or an espionage into their private defence secrets'.13

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A large number of Swedes, however, accepted his challenge to themselves and their country. They were a fair cross-section of the nation - teachers, farmers, steelworkers, clergy, students, authors and artists. Waldemar Lorentzon of the well-known Halmstad Group of painters experiened a reconciliation with his wife, and came to believe that 'art can be a powerful spokesman of a new morality'.14 A number of students at the Music Academy, among them some who were to become distinguished composers and initiators of new musical trends, met daily to learn how to put into practice what they had decided at Visby. Groups flourished from then on for some years in each of Sweden's four universities. Their conference at Undersåker in 1939 was a national event and provided the core of Buchman's Swedish full-time colleagues for the future. The next year 10,000 teachers presented an appeal for moral re-armament to the nation. The ideas summarised in their book, Icke för skolan utan för livet (Not for school but for life),15 gained a wide influence and were supported by the Minister of Education of the day. The churches also were deeply affected. Sweden's foremost hymn-writer, Anders Frostenson, says that the language used in sermons changed completely after the arrival of the Oxford Group.*

(* Six Nordic bishops summed up the continuing effect of this infusion in a message to Buchman on 10 January 1951: 'With its realistic faith in God, its ethical radicalism, its fellowship and its conquering spirit, Moral Re-Armament has made the original Christian elements of faith come alive in the midst of our modern secularised environment.’)

People who went home to other countries also began to tackle practical problems in their nations. Finns who had been at Visby mounted a national assembly at Aulanko in January 1939. Twenty years earlier Finland had been riven by a civil war between Whites and Reds, and intense bitterness lived on among those who had lost relatives in the fighting or been confined to detention camps by one side or the other. Leaders of both sides attended the Aulanko assembly. Bishop Eelis Gulin of Tampere repeatedly stated that reconciliations effected there were a significant factor in uniting the nation in the months immediately before the Soviet invasion later that year. 'God gave us a miracle,' he said in Australia years later. 'Many of us thank God for Frank Buchman as one of those used as His tools.'16

In Denmark some of those affected by the Oxford Group three years earlier had been seeking a way to tackle the country's most serious social problem - an unemployment rate of over 20 per cent. Alfred Nielsen, the wood industry employer from Silkeborg, remembers Buchman asking the Danes at Visby whether it was God's will for a fifth of the work force to be unemployed.

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'No,' they replied.

'Then go home and tackle it,' said Buchman. This was also a major theme of his speech in Copenhagen in late August on his way from Sweden to Switzerland.17 Some experiments had already been made, and Valdemar Hvidt wrote about them in Politiken18 while the Visby assembly was still in progress. The result was a national campaign. It began, according to the Scandinavian Review, when 'citizens in many towns, awakened to civic responsibility through the Oxford Group, began to tackle the problem of Denmark's 100,000 unemployed by spontaneous sacrifice'.19 The paper relates how the Socialist Prime Minister, Thorvald Stauning, 'expressed his own and the nation's gratitude for the surge of voluntary effort' and helped the initiators to gather a National Association for Combating Unemployment composed of fifteen prominent farmers, employers and trades union leaders, with Hvidt as chairman and Nielsen as an executive member. 'Each success in tackling unemployment', adds the Review, 'has been the outcome of a new spirit. The joint action of the fifteen is another instance of the putting aside of private and party ends for national service. The chief task, therefore, is to work constantly for that change in the individual throughout the country which calls forth new qualities of selfless national service.'*

(* The methods used in this campaign and its social effects are outlined from official documents at the end of this chapter.)

Meanwhile, in the international field, some of the politicians who had been influenced by Buchman were among those who created an organisation called 'the Oslo States'. This was an attempt by the smaller countries of Europe to unite to avert war. The originator of the plan was the former Norwegian Prime Minister, J. L. Mowinckel, who had been reconciled to Hambro during Buchman's Norwegian campaign. Another participant was the Finnish Foreign Minister, Rudolf Holsti, who, in July 1938, had told the American press that Buchman and the Oxford Group 'have been able to penetrate the highest political and economic circles, bringing people together'.20 Another, J. A. E. Parijn, the Dutch Foreign Minister, who had spoken at the Utrecht demonstration, had gone with Buchman to Sweden to prepare the Visby assembly.

The editor of The Spectator, Wilson Harris, noted in his personal column that the co-operation of Hambro and Holsti at the League of Nations was due to their association in the Oxford Group. Harris wrote, 'Alike in their relation to Dr Buchman, the Norwegian and Finnish delegates are very different in other respects ... But both are transparently honest men.'21

A few weeks after the Visby assembly, the Foreign Ministers of the seven 'Oslo States' met in Copenhagen. They decided to work towards a more active concept of neutrality than, for example, Switzerland, and hoped to be able to confront Hitler with a united voice. This was accompanied by a rapid re-armament in Sweden; but the Oslo States were thrown into confusion by the Soviet-Nazi Pact and failed to maintain their unity in the pressures of war.

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Some groups as well as individuals ceased to work actively with Buchman as a result of the launching of Moral Re-Armament. In Norway, for example, some who had come to rely for personal spiritual comfort on a weekly group meeting split away, calling themselves The Old Oxford Group. This also took place in other countries, sometimes on a considerable scale. Some maintained that Buchman's attention to matters not purely personal involved a change of principle. His own explanation was that if Moral Re-Armament was the car, the Oxford Group was the engine, and that individual change was the basis of both.

Others dissociated themselves because they thought Buchman was 'going into polities'. For Buchman, however, Moral Re-Armament was only the realisation of the aim he had enunciated to his students at Penn State and Hartford, which he redefined in 1921 as 'a programme of life issuing in personal, social, racial, national and supernational change'.22'The Oxford Group', he had often said, 'has nothing to do with politics, yet it has everything to do with politics, because it leads to change in politicians.'23

The individual withdrawal which Buchman most regretted was that of his old friend and travelling companion, Sherwood Day, who had worked closely with him for twenty-two years. During the winter of 1936-7, Day had pleurisy followed by pneumonia. During his slow recovery, he found himself increasingly reacting to some of his colleagues, to some attitudes, to some phrases. Was it right to consider that alcoholics were no longer part of their responsibility? Was the word 'moral' in 'Moral Re- Armament' misleading: did it imply self-effort and an end in itself? Was a fellowship becoming an establishment? Day eventually returned to the United States, became minister of a Presbyterian church, and settled to a life of steady usefulness with individuals, consciously leaving aside any attempt at a wider application of spiritual belief. Buchman missed Day personally, but never challenged his right to take a different path.

There were, of course, people who had found a transforming experience through the Oxford Group who felt a specific calling to work other than that undertaken by Buchman. One of these is Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychiatrist and best-selling author.* 'I owe him everything,' he said in 1982: 'all the spiritual adventure which has been in my life ... my own transformation, the transformation of our home, of our married life and our family life ... I owe him all my career, all the new orientation in the understanding of medicine and in our medical thought which I have been able to develop.'24

(* Since 1938 he has written eighteen books which have sold two million copies.)

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Interviewed in 1978, Tournier said that Buchman was the man 'who has had by far the greatest influence upon me of anyone in my life'. In 1932 lie had been a general medical practitioner, an orphan, a very closed man, who found it practically impossible to make personal contact with anyone. Meeting the Oxford Group in Switzerland had eliminated this problem and set him free, along with his wife, to help people spiritually. 'Then in 1937 I went to Oxford, for the only time, to a house-party,' Tournier continued. 'There Frank was interested in our applying our personal experience to our professional life. I had considerable experience of this area, but more like a laboratory experiment – I had started to bring about changes in patients without seeing the consequences for the future of medicine. I got a very clear conviction that God wanted me to devote the rest of my life to showing the effect of spiritual life on the health of people.'

After he returned from Oxford Tournier sent a printed letter to all his patients saying he would no longer function as an ordinary doctor, but would be available to help any person spiritually. 'I lost practically all my patients. Then slowly I built up a completely new clientele, and in 1938 I started to write Médecine de la Personne25 which I dedicated to Buchman.' Tournier felt so strongly about this dedication that he delayed publication in Britain for fifteen years rather than omit it as his publisher wished.

'My own road went differently, but I have always felt myself an integral part of the spiritual revolution Frank brought to the world. When Frank launched Moral Re-Armament I admired his courage in concerning himself with politicians and the prickly matters they have to handle. I think historians will see in him the man who launched a whole spiritual development of humanity rather than the founder of the movement of Moral Re-Armament. I think he was a prophet. I compare him with Wesley and St Francis. In the purely rational West, he restored the value of irrational human relations. Why was he opposed? For the same reason as Jesus and His disciples were opposed.'

Malcolm Muggeridge writes that for a long time he was puzzled by 'the extraordinary hostility which Buchman's Christian evangelism caused' in Britain. 'Yes, he's an American,' he says, 'but then so is Billy Graham, for instance, and I've never heard people denigrating Billy in quite such vicious terms as they did Buchman and MRA.

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' An experience I had some years ago shed light on the conundrum. I had been elected by the students of Edinburgh University to be their Rector, and when I went to Edinburgh to be installed I had a wonderful reception. Then some months later I was asked by the Students' Union to put in a request to the governing body of the University that contraceptives should be made freely available by the University Medical Unit. I refused to do this, whereupon I was subjected to abuse, to the point that I found it necessary to resign. In a farewell sermon in St Giles' Cathedral, I explained why I had done what I had, and received some private thanks, but none publicly. The conclusion I came to was that in a libertine society any attack on libertinism is anathema ... Tom Driberg was an inveterate enemy of MRA; readers of his posthumous autobiography will see why.'26

Appendix to Chapter 23:

Danish Campaign to Combat Unemployment

The official account of the origins of what was to become a national campaign states, 'During 1938 people in contact with the Oxford Group met and considered whether it was possible to activate private initiative to supplement public efforts.'27 The idea, in essence, was that it was everyone's responsibility to find work for others. 'When a stone is too heavy to move,' the lawyer Valdemar Hvidt said, 'break it into small pieces and get many to carry it.' Unemployment was a matter of conscience for everyone, where each town and village would take action to find work for its own unemployed.

The first experiment was initiated by Knud Oldenburg of the Department of Forest and Heath. Oldenburg had, for example, formed a flying corps of people from Jutland towns who were once thought unemployable. They thinned the copses which an earlier generation had planted along the Jutland coast to reclaim the land, work which had now become essential but which the peasant proprietors had not the capital to undertake. This enterprise, which reclaimed men, land and what proved in the coming war to be valuable fuel, was at first financed voluntarily, but quite soon the Ministry of Social Affairs, with trade union agreement, guaran- teed the men a small wage until the work became self-supporting. 'Oldenburg, once a man of great personal ambition, had learnt to transmute this energy into national service after his contact with the Oxford Group.'28

In December 1938 Hvidt, Nielsen and their friends obtained an interview with the Socialist Prime Minister, Thorvald Stauning. 'We have achieved much in the social field and I had hoped the social changes would make people responsible,' he said. 'What is needed is the change of attitude which you have experienced.' He suggested people - leading farmers, employers and union officials - who, if they worked together, could bring a solution. On 1 August 1939 the National Association for Combating Unemployment (LAB) was founded, with Hvidt as Chairman and Nielsen as an Executive Member. Speaking at the inaugural meeting in Copenhagen, the Prime Minister 'expressed his own and the nation's gratitude for the surge of voluntary effort which had culminated in the Association and which had brought to work together men from all camps and classes who previously found it most difficult to co-operate on anything'.29

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The German invasion on 9 April 1940 stimulated the Association to wider efforts. Every employed Dane meant one less who could be transported to work in German war industries. Many initiatives were taken. In the town of Vejle, for example, people had been postponing the painting of their houses, while there were twenty-five painters unemployed. All these became employed, and the demand for carpenters and joiners was so great that they were brought in from other towns.30 In 1944, in preparation for peace, 100,000 farms were visited to see what repairs and land improvements were needed, resulting in a register of 30,000 extra jobs.31 LAB continued in operation, under the same leadership, until 1965, when, through the improvement of the economy and other factors, the unemployment figure had declined from 20.1 per cent at its formation to 3.7 per cent.32

Commenting after the war the economist, Finn Friis, wrote, 'The words "change in mentality" have to be used in connection with this work. It brought a new understanding of the value of the worker and is leaving permanent traces on our post-war economy.'33

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 1 Del tredje Standpunkt (Denmark), November 1936, pp. 35-42. Article entitled 'The Christian Culture of Europe against Communism and Nazism'.

 2 Vi måste borja om (Wahlström and Windstrand, 1937).

 3 New York Times Book Review, 20 March 1938.

 4 Geoffrey Gain: A Basinful of Revolution - Tod Sloan's Story (Grosvenor, 1957). p 44.

 5 Buchman, pp. 45-8.

 6 Gain, pp. 28-38.

 7 Tod Sloan to Buchman, 27 November 1938.

 8 Buchman to Professor Runestam, 22 August 1935. Runestam later became Bishop of Karlstad.

 9 Buchman to Cuthbert Bardsley, 21 February 1937.

10 Conversations between Graham Turner and Mr and Mrs Stolpe in November 1976. In various books, published between 1938 and these conversations, Stolpe made many comments, both appreciative and critical, on different aspects of Buchman and his work.

11 Dagens Nyheter, 13 August 1938.

12 Buchman, pp. 53-8.

13 Nils Gösta Ekman: Experiment med Gud (Gummesons, 1971), p. 8.

14 Lunds Dagblad, 30 September 1941.

15 Icke för skolan utan för livet (Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag, 1943).

16 Speech in Melbourne, Australia, 25 December 1961.

17 At the Hotel Phoenix, Copenhagen. Unpublished record by Hans Wenck of the Danish Foreign Ministry, who was present.

18 Politiken, 14 August 1938.

19 Scandinavian Review, February 1940.

20 New York World-Telegram, 6 July 1938.

21 'A Spectator's Notebook', The Spectator, 15 December 1939.

22 Buchman, p. 3.

23 ibid., p. 33.

24 Paul Tournier: Vivre à I’écoute (Editions de Caux, 1984), p. 27.

25 Paul Tournier: Médecine de la Personne (Delachaux et Niestlé, 1940, 1983).

26 Malcolm Muggeridge to author, 17 February 1985.

27 I.andsforeningen til Arbejdsløshedens Bekämpelse (LAB), 1 August 1939- 1 December 1965 (Copenhagen, August 1966), p. 12.

28 Scandinavian Review, February 1940.

29 ibid.

30 LAB, p.21.

31 ibid., p. 28.

32 ibid., p.11.

33 Martin MSS.