On 18 July, still looking frail, he talked informally to several hundred people at the Assembly about the thoughts he had been maturing. 'Today', he began, 'I want to talk about great forces at work in the world.' He spoke of Karl Marx and how, gradually, Communism had become 'a tremendous force'. Then of Mussolini and Hitler and how their ideas had, at first, brought 'a seeming order'. 'So we have Communism and Fascism - two world forces,' he continued. 'Where do they come from? From materialism, which is the mother of all the "isms". It is the spirit of anti-Christ which breeds corruption, anarchy and revolution. It undermines our homes, it sets class against class, it divides the nation. Materialism is democracy's greatest enemy.'

Then he spoke of the concept of Moral Re-Armament as an ideology with a different origin 'where the moral and spiritual would have the emphasis'. 'Communism and Fascism are built on a negative something - on divisive materialism and confusion. Wherever Moral Re-Armament goes, there springs up a positive message. Its aim is to restore God to leadership as the directing force in the life of the nation... America must discover her rightful ideology. It springs from her Christian heritage, and is her only adequate answer in the battle against materialism and all the other "isms"...

'People get confused as to whether it is a question of being Rightist or Leftist. But the one thing we really need is to be guided by God's Holy Spirit. That is the Force we ought to study... The Holy Spirit will teach us how to think and live, and provide a working basis for our national service...

'The true battle-line in the world is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ. "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve."'2

The young Norwegian artist Signe Lund3 was there. 'I was riveted,' she recalled later. 'The speech came out of his guts. He knew that by launching out as an ideology, he was sending us as well as himself out into a dangerous world.' This was further clarification of the thought he had been reaching for at Visby, the understanding of the particular role of his work at a particular stage in the world’s history and of the direction in which he must be ready to go. It was a realisation that the war for the world would in future be fought out not between countries, economies or armies but between sets of ideas: that the basic divide was between materialist ideas of right and left on the one hand, and the moral and spiritual ideas at the heart of the world's great faiths on other. It was a vision of the battle between good and evil within the individual soul being reflected in the affairs of the world, and the acceptance that he and his small band of colleagues had a particular role to play in that battle.

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