The two dissentients mentioned in the Daily Telegraph headline were General Sir Colin Jardine and Gerald Steel, the industrialist who had written the original outline of Moral Re-Armament's work in industry. They were only permitted to make brief formal statements in the report. In the Church Assembly debate Jardine protested amid 'cheers' at the impropriety which led Bishop Narborough and Canon Wickham to write to the press,36 while Steel wrote to the Secretary of the Council, 'Sentences (in the report) will be quoted out of their context - and certain derisory sentences in the report are the very stuff of which headlines are made.* Idealism and goodwill, on the other hand, are not "news", and references to the sincerity, courage and self-abnegation of the adherents of MRA are likely to appear in very small print if at all. I believe the publication will result in causing much distress to those men and women of goodwill, will be a set-back to their work and reflect little credit on the Church.'37

(* Some of these 'derisory sentences' do not seem to have been in the original text, but to have been added by a small editing committee. The Bishop of Sheffield in the Council meeting of 9 December 1954 tried to get two of them removed against Canon Hudson's successful defence.)

As far as publicity was concerned he proved a true prophet. Even though, following a spirited two-day debate, the report was not adopted but only 'received' by the Assembly, and then only with the proviso that 'this Assembly does not wish to record any judgement upon the merits or demerits of MRA',38 the effect of the initial publicity was not washed away. The world-wide impression had been given that Moral Re- Armament had been condemned by the whole Church of England.

This impression, not perhaps unnaturally, was self-defeating for those in the Council who genuinely hoped to improve Moral Re-Armament's work. People who had sustained such universal public attack tended to feel beleaguered and not only to ignore the occasional praise within the report, but also to become disinclined to pay attention to any helpful advice. For example, Bishop Alien's chapter on the 'Psychology of Group Revival' (which he specifically stated was 'not intended as a description of MRA in its present form') was a helpful discussion of the dangers of any association of people becoming dependent on each other. He rightly emphasised that in the relations of parents and children, of priest or teacher and disciple, psychologist and patient, the junior partner must not remain dependent on the senior or he will not 'grow into the maturity and power of his own free personality'. The present book will have shown how keenly Buchman felt this danger and what drastic steps he took to try and avoid it. He did not always succeed: but the strictures on Moral Re-Armament as 'psychologically dangerous' - added to Bishop Alien's theme, it would seem, by another hand - would surely never have appeared if the Working Party had contained anyone with up-to-date knowledge of the inner life of the Moral Re-Armament fellowship, or even, perhaps, if the Council had accepted the Oxford Group's repeated invitation to meet its responsible representatives.

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