Buchman, however, always regarded his spiritual discoveries as having universal application. After his experience in the little church in Keswick, when he realised his own sin and experienced Christ's forgiveness, he never again considered that any other human being, however corrupted, was beyond the reach of the grace which had healed his own hate and pride.

Another decisive experience had resulted from F. B. Meyer's question to him at Penn State - whether he gave enough time each day to asking God what he should do. This can be seen as the time when Buchman decided to give his will, as distinct from his life in general, to God. Now he must do God's work not in his way, but in God's. His immediate response had been to set aside the hour between five and six in the morning not just to talk to God, but to listen as well. It was his personal discovery of the age-old discipline of silence before God. In carrying out this experiment, he was much encouraged by contact with Professor Henry Wright of Yale and by studying his book, The Will of God and a Man's Lifework, which was published in that same year of 1909.1*

(* Wright immediately sent a copy to Buchman at Penn State, who replied, 'Your book has just come and I am delighted with it ... am teaching it myself to about a hundred' (Mark Guldseth, Streams, privately printed 1982, p. 87). Wright was at this time Assistant Professor of Latin History and Literature at Yale. In 1914 a special chair in Christian Methods was created for him at Yale Divinity School. Guldseth makes clear Buchman's debt - often acknowledged by Buchman himself- at this period to Wright, Moody and Drummond.)

The central theme of Wright's book was that an individual could, through 'two-way prayer' - listening for guidance as well as talking - find God's will for his life and for the ordinary events of the day. Wright himself set aside half an hour for such listening prayer first thing every morning. At such times - and indeed at any time in the day - he declared that what he called 'luminous thoughts' came from God, provided only that the human receiver was clean enough to pick them up. These thoughts Wright wrote down in a notebook and always tried to carry out.

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