This step forward was not to make him or his ideas any more popular among the complacent or the relative moralists; but it was to give an impetus to his thinking and his operations during the coming years. Conscious acceptance by a group of people of the role of an 'ideology' did entail temptations to self-importance and self-effort. To Buchman it remained simple: 'The whole gospel of Jesus Christ - that is your ideology.' But he would have to carry with him a group of people not all of whom yet had his grasp of the root experience of this ideology, an undertaking demanding courage and wisdom of no ordinary kind and the extent of which he may or may not have comprehended during those summer days among his friends.

The previous day he had led his first meeting since his illness. But although he spent much time talking with individuals and small groups, he took little public part in the summer-long Assembly that year. He first went off the island - for a dentist appointment during which he did 'quite a lot of walking and stair-climbing' - on 13 September. The next morning he called in two friends to write down thoughts which were coming to him, 'the first time for some weeks and flowing just like the old days'. 'Thoughts came for the next steps for the fight,' one of them recorded. 'He felt again at grips with the problem. He hates more than anything to feel that there is no place where we can get on the attack.'4

Buchman spent the winter quietly in Sarasota, Florida, the guest of a hotelier who had been to Mackinac and who put a small hotel near the Gulf of Mexico at his disposal as, in the usual way, the number of people round him grew. Here he cultivated many friendships, old and new. Artur Rodzinski, the newly appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and his wife Halina spent Christmas with him. Cissie Patterson, the proprietor of the Washington Times-Herald, had evenings where she invited Adlai Stevenson and the Chicago composer, John Alden Carpenter, and her editors to meet him. He also became fast friends with many of the famous Ringling Circus troupe whose winter headquarters were in Sarasota, and was much taken by the family life, the integrity and the sheer courage of the circus people.* But he refused to do anything public in the community. This baffled some of those around him.

(* Asked whether he would prefer to see Mr Ringling's famous horses or the Fat Woman, he immediately opted for the latter.)

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