It is hard to reconcile Bishop Roots' estimate with the impression which Harlan Beach, once Professor of Mathematics at Penn State and later the first Professor of Missions at Yale, had of Buchman in China. Notes taken of one of his lectures give a very different picture: 'No flourish of trumpets, no rhetoric, a great human, strong personality ... A friendly man who cheers, is conversational, talks like a brother, no parson lording it over us. Tells funny stories, jolly, yet most earnest and serious ... He has a new conception, talking to one instead of masses …. People criticised that he emphasised sin, that he was too severe. He talked about real things which are fundamental... He had generalship and he could work with a team ... Whole total summary - the best thing that ever happened in China.'13

Reviewing at Port Arthur his last weeks in China, Buchman realised that he had treated Tewksbury and Miss Paxson badly and sent letters of apology to both;14 but on the central issues which he felt were at stake, and particularly his attempt to deal with sins which he believed made the work of many of the missionaries ineffective, he remained totally unrepentant.

'The people at headquarters have never been won,' he wrote to Howard Walter in India, 'and the opposition was evident in most subtle forms. They have been trying for some time to use every conceivable means to get us out of China, as the shoe pinched harder and harder and we got deeper into the personal lives of men.'15 In a second letter to Walter, Buchman said he was convinced that there were far deeper reasons for what had happened than they had yet fathomed.16

His letters to Bishop Roots were also far from apologetic. He conceded that the burden he was carrying at Kuling might have caused a certain 'harshness' in him, but only the harshness of one who was concerned about the failure of the churches and had applied that same harsh judgement to his own life first.

As for Kuling, he went on, he was more than ever convinced that he was merely 'scratching the surface'. Terms like that and 'spiritual bankruptcy' had been objected to, but nothing less expressed the real need. What made his heart heavy, he declared pointedly, was that as God had given him an increasingly clear diagnosis of conditions and his message had more nearly met the actual needs, 'there were some Christian leaders who turned back'.

He would, he concluded, respond warmly to the friendly tone of the Bishop's letters if he did not feel there was a danger of clouding the fundamental issue, and he warned Roots against thinking that their disagreement in Kuling had been purely a personal one. 'It is far deeper,' declared Buchman, 'a matter of principle which vitally affects the progress of the Kingdom.'17

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