On 21 October another ecumenical ensemble came to Lambeth Palace. Its purpose was to discuss drafts, two of them by Temple and his fellow ecumenist J. H. Oldham, for a new united statement on the international crisis. J.H. Oldham was still fulsome in his praise of Chamberlain who, ‘in his shrinking from the inhumanity of war was the mouthpiece of the common man’. But now there was proof of growing ambivalence. Oldham had written, ‘The fact which stares us in the face is that … our deliverance has been purchased by the overwhelming sacrifice of a small nation.’ He still thought of Chamberlain’s declaration to the House of Commons that ‘the infinite calamity of war’ could be justified only by ‘a cause that transcends all the ordinary human values’. What cause, Oldham asked, could answer to that description?1 Temple looked equivocal, talked of the sovereignty of God and the fellowship of Christians, and requested cautiously that a further statement be ‘as little national as possible – and as little political’.2