Although probably it could and should have all ended sooner, it is hard to find any adequate explanation except Howard's final one. He was fairly new to Moral Re-Armament and there was no possibility of his supplanting Buchman, and the tremendous scope he was given in the next eleven years, when he became Buchman's most trusted companion, argues against any desire to keep the younger man down.

Howard's daughter, Anne Wolrige Gordon, concludes: 'The apparent harshness with which Buchman dealt with Howard at this period was, in reality, a measure of his trust in him . . . He saw in Howard the possibility of great leadership, coupled with weaknesses of pride, conceit and a dependence upon man's approval. Buchman was out to produce a man whose blade was sharpened and whose life was freed from every human attachment.'4*

(* A bishop who read Howard's daughter's book told me he could not understand Buchman's treatment of Howard in this period. I reminded him of Ignatius Loyola's harsh treatment of his successor, Diego Laynez, as described by Pedro Ribadeneira, the friend and first biographer of both men. Ribadeneira was astonished by it, particularly as Ignatius had assured him 'that there was no man in the Society to whom it owed more and he had told the Father that he designed him to be his successor'. 'Yet during the year before he died he showed so much severity towards this Father that at times it made him completely miserable...', he continues. 'The reason was that the Blessed Father desired to make Father Laynez into a saint, and to inure him to hardship with a view to his being General, so that, from what he himself had gone through, he might learn to govern others.' (Quoted in James Broderick: The Origin of the Jesuits (Longmans Green, 1940), pp. 259-60.)

Howard was not the only person to be held at arm's length for a shorter or longer time. Austin, on the other hand, once said he never remembered Buchman saying a harsh word to him. Buchman, in fact, tried to give each person what would help them most to greater maturity at each particular moment. Thus he waited twenty years before pointing out to one artist that he had transferred his affection for his father, who had rejected him, to himself. This man's wife, who sometimes experienced sterner treatment, says that her dominant impression of Buchman in the 1940s was of his tenderness: 'We knew that it was not out of spleen or spite that he sometimes said something very sharp. He never held it against one. There was not one of us who could not go to him and discuss anything, including plans, problems or thoughts we had had, and have his full interest and attention.'

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