Through the years many lives were indeed transformed, and Buchman's whole-time colleagues included people who had had homosexual tendencies but who had found a freedom which enabled them to use their lives for constructive ends. His approach to sex, in whatever form, was always the same. He believed it to be a natural gift of God to be used under His direction, not indulged in promiscuously. He understood the progression from indulgence to addiction, and regarded such addiction as a spiritual captivity, or, in plainer words, sin. 'Sin is the disease, Christ is the cure, the result is a miracle,' was his response to every level of such captivity. He was neither shocked nor prurient. He never condemned, still less exposed people. He felt that his task was to offer a cure which would set free people's creative qualities for the good of others and the world at large.

He did believe that active homosexuality was in danger of producing other problems of greater seriousness than itself: an exclusive attitude which kept out all other people and took precedence over every other loyalty, a vicious attitude to those outside the circle, and the squandering of often gifted lives. He also came to notice that some homosexuals had a crusading zeal for their way of life which, as in the case mentioned above, often brought them into collision with his work. But he never doubted that every person who wished could be liberated.

In the September of 1926 Buchman was in Geneva. He had lunch there one day with Nehru. By this time Nehru had read Life Changers, but had confessed in a letter that, despite Gandhi's influence, 'the way of faith does not fit with my present mentality'.27

While in Rome that February the talk was all of Mussolini, who had come to power four years before, and the social improvements which he was initiating in those early days. Buchman wrote to him asking for an interview. 'My mission is the development of constructive leadership in different countries,' he wrote.28

He also sent Mussolini a copy of Life Changers. 'Do not consign this book to a museum,' he said in a covering note to Mussolini's secretary. 'Suggest to His Excellency that he keep it for his son, Vittorio, for reading when he is a suitable age.29

Later Buchman heard Mussolini speak in Perugia and apparently was impressed - 'He said some excellent things,' he wrote to Mrs Tjader30 - but appends no comment on a subsequent interview which, from someone as ebullient as Buchman, appears to indicate that it was a failure or at least a disappointment. Years later, when Stanley Baldwin, as Prime Minister, asked him his impressions of Mussolini, he paused as if searching for the right word and then said, 'He seemed to me a poseur.'

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