For Sinners Only

by A. J. Russell

Let us assume the theme of this short story is a motor club in an English University, and that three young dare-devils are at its secret centre, bent on painting the town and countryside red, doing it so consistently that one of their number is sent down; that all three plunge heedlessly into all sorts of scrapes with all sorts of authorities; are modern disciples of Don Juan; organizers of illegal motor-races on the high roads, reckless riders in the Isle of Man Amateur Races; and are contemptuous of ordinary sinners because they have not the abandon to go hell-for-leather in a life of wild revelry.

And let us assume that someone alleged it possible, in these post-war years of unbelief, to penetrate that centre of profligate undergraduate life and change those three roystering prodigals into men who listen-in to God for His daily guidance and spend their lives changing others to their own pattern -- humbly modelled on the pattern of Christ, that these regenerated undergraduates had already become effective life-changers. Would anyone believe this possible in 1932, when the truths of Christianity are generally regarded as frozen assets?

Yet the truths is no less surprising than the assumption. These things have just happened in an English University, among the “up-and-outs,” not in a slum mission among “down-and-outs.” Because of their marvelous transformation, the heart was taken out of the wild life in the Carburettor Club (as we will name it for the purpose of this true story), the inner ring of a motoring club.

If there Is still any adventure in modern religion, there is adventure in this tale as told me by the three chief conspirators -- who shall be called Bob, Rip and Sandy -- which seems to be one of the news stories that Fleet Street has missed.

The story begins with Bob, who is a tallish, upstanding, broad-shouldered young fellow of twenty-two with fair, curly hair, remarkably fair teeth, a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, and a sphinx-like expression which leaves you wondering if he is on guard against you or hoping you will stay. He won a scholarship to Winchester and did amazing things when at that famous school. He annexed practically all the prizes for classical research, English literature, German translation, and a good many seconds as well. He was not a born athlete, but became one of the synthetic variety, by patient effort and determination. Good at rowing, at fives, at Winchester Football (“Our Game,” as Wykehamists call it), he had sufficient merit to command a majority of what honours and positions there were. Of the four hundred and fifty boys at Winchester there are seventy-six privileged to wear the Scholar’s gown. Five leaders of the school are appointed officers over the scholars, and over those five officers is the Perfect of Hall. And the one who becomes Perfect of Hall has to justify that pre-eminent position by weight of achievement, which Bob was able to do by dint of effort. Winchester expects that every scholar will do his duty at the ’Varsity by winning a first in “Mods” and “Greats.”

Bob secured his scholarship into his college, and then his penchant for this study and sports, except motor racing, flopped. Surfeited with past achievements, he now felt the time had come to enjoy himself with Sandy and Rip, two gay companions. They founded the Carburettor Club and began to make things hum. Headquarters were conveniently situated near to several “pubs,” all patronized in turn. That the Carburettor Love was not proctorially recognized, and was therefore an illegal institution, mattered little. In the first year Bob ran three motor-cycles for sport and a small car for pleasure.

The three went to the Isle of Man and two rode in the Amateur Road Races there. They had sport, some luck in their races, and still more merriment between, even to the extent in taking a public-house piano to pieces before breakfast. Back in College, Sandy continued to make things merry, once by throwing forty empty bottles into the main street, to the distress of the Dean.

Another exploit was for the three motor musketeers to hire a lorry and a temperance driver and tour all the public-houses of the city tasting all that was going, while the townsfolk, not unused to odd spectacles, looked on amused. Sandy became so offensive on the ride around that his friends threw him off. His language passed the Plimsoll line.

The Carburettor Club organized an illegal motor race at dawn on the high road, though the winner only achieved a leisurely 68 m.p.h. About this time Winchester’s ex-Perfect of Hall quietly distinguished himself by climbing out of College down the rain-pipe of an adjacent house, a difficult but not unprecedented feat, as other undergraduates know from practical experience. The difference between Bob’s getting away and that of other undergraduates taking the same route was that he took with him the rain-pipe as well as his freedom! Though not for long! For a city policeman invited the ex-head of Winchester to the police-station, where he was allowed to go, after information as to identity had been checked by removing his coat for the police to read his name on the inside tab.

And now the Group began to get busy with the Carburettor Club; and the Carburettor Club with the Group. The three motor musketeers had heard that the Group talked openly about their sins, so Sandy was deputed to go down and tell them wants and really is, since he was an expert in the subject, and to break the show. Perhaps the best way to picture Sandy is to say how he then looked to his pal Bob, who grinned as he said: “Sandy has a merry peal of laughter chiefly aroused by any form of iniquity. A moustache, slight and light, a hook nose, spectacles, somewhat receding forehead, sallowish, a quick brain that can throw off smart slogans at command, and good organizing ability.” Sandy returned from the Group meeting saying he had told them a few things they needed to know, as he was in the habit of telling Deans and other institutions before he finally left. Of course he still wore his old tweed cap, broken peak, plenty of oil on top, and his brown leather waistcoat. But the Group were good shock-absorbers.

And now Sandy ran into a Springbok (All-South African) Rugger-player, one of the Group, who began to take him in hand. He induced Sandy to go down to Chrowborough for a house-party which Frank had arranged there. “The people knew I was coming,” said Sandy, “and I was ushered in by Frank with some ceremony, which rather fluttered my pride. That perhaps prevented me from being affected by the meeting. I know I was very disagreeable and obstreperous as usual. I had tea, and then looked all around for a few girls, and was rather disappointed at being out of luck. But I took a strong liking for Frank, and was struck by the kindness in his eye. I boasted to Frank that my amusements were women and drink, but I refrained from disclosing that I was secretly lonely and bitterly unhappy. He didn’t seem very shocked, but said my head to cut them both out. We praying together, and I went back -- changed! The first person to know the difference was my landlady. I had come in at three in the morning sober, and went out next morning still sober.”

Sandy’s first attempt at witness was a letter to Bob and Rip, telling them simply what had happened.

The earth ceased revolving for a while when the Carburettor Club received Sandy’s letter saying he had tried running his own life and failed, and had tried letting Christ ran it for him, and was succeeding; that as he’d tried two lives and they’d only tried one, he felt It right to tell them which was better.

“That made us think a bit,” said Rip. “We put down our glasses and began to consider the amazing news. Our star turn had gone over to the despised enemy. Not having anything more or original to do, we jeered.”

Sandy seemed to take that all right, which was rather unlike him, for he loved to answer back, and had a tongue like a razor. He merely said, “All right, you come and meet these chaps and see for yourselves.” So Sandy arranged a tea-party at his house, and eight in the Club decided to go along. When the Group heard this they sent out a Flying Squad comprising three of the best shots, and -- most important -- backed by a battery of twenty-five men, solidly praying.

This Flying Squad stopped about one hundred yards from Sandy’s house and held one of their deadly Quiet Times. Before entering, Ken Twitchell coached his two colleagues not to mince words, to avoid pious phraseology, and to talk in a language that Pagans understand. The eight lambs inside were unaware what was being prepared for them without. When the three entered, tea was served, and everybody was on his best behaviour. At first the Group wanted to know of what the motoring game was like just now, how study was going, anything but the religious inclinations of the eight. But after tea all drew round in a circle, when the three broke into the main business of the evening, with Sandy, ex-ringleader of the revelers, the subdued link.

There was not much time to argue, for the Group jumped straight into their well-proven game of giving evidence. One began telling his yarn. A compelling story, that was. A parson’s son, he had lost all his jobs in England, and had been sent out to Canada, where his progress was equally undistinguished. One night he had come home so tight that he indulged In a massacre (chopping off the heads) of all the hens in the chicken-run. That story was hilariously received by some of the wild men of the road. The speaker now found the climate of Canada a little too warm; he went south to New York, between trains gambling all his money on poker, with the exception of seven dollars. He picked up a job in New York selling china behind a counter. An English lady came into the store (a natural contact), and casually asked him if he had any use for religion, and he replied, “No.” She invited him to Calvary Church, and he went. There at the famous Thursday night Group he met a young banker who had been in the depths of degradation and had been re-created by the power of Christ. But the speaker still thought he was beyond hope. So he was taken down to the Calvary Mission, where he heard some amazing stories of changed lives from men who had been right up to the edge of beyond. One man told of how he had been turned out of his house sick and ill and told to go somewhere and die. Looking for a suitable spot to die in, he was changed at Calvary Mission. This story at last convinced the parson’s son that he could get the victory over his evil impulses, and that Christ was the real answer for him.

The former leader of Winchester, listening-in, observed the sinews standing out strongly on the speaker’s brawny neck, while the story set him thinking hard. So did the way that is another in the team shut his jaw with a snap of decision, showing that he too knew what life with God was, and intended to go on with it. Then the four standards of the Group were brought out -- and Bob’s jaw dropped lower. Despite the testimony, he frankly did not believe it possible to be absolutely honest, loving, pure and unselfish. He shall that he sometimes did an unselfish action in repairing motor-bikes broken down on the road, but that was perhaps because he liked motor-bikes.

“How about one ending in?” Asked Ken Twitchell.

“I get quite a kick out of mending a motor-cycle,” said Bob.

“You’ll need a greater kick out of mending men,” prophesied Ken, hardly foreseeing that Bob would be used to mend a dozen directly and countless others indirectly before the next two years went by.

“Then we tried to argue,” continues Bob, but after an hour and a half Bob came back to the evidence. “You cannot get away from the fact that Sandy’s changed.”

Fallowed the Group Sunday evening meetings attended by the eight, which Rip would noisily interrupt with some blasphemy.

“At those meetings,” continues Bob, “I observed the radiance of Howard Rose’s when he said he was a free man. And that disturbed me a bit. So I used to draw my chair away from Ripped because he was interrupting so blasphemously. I began to be ashamed of being near him. Then I noticed that one of the Group, after rowing two courses on the river, would be willing to sit up until midnight listening to a man’s troubles. Here was a quality of unselfishness I hadn’t seen before. At a Group tea-party I heard one say that impurity just slid off when Christ came in. I didn’t believe it, I said I should always have to smoke and drink to hide my feelings when I became a diplomat. To which one of them replied, ’Suppose you haven’t any feelings to hide?’

“The Groups are also unceremoniously punctured my sentimental theory of free-love and eroticism by saying it might seem rosy to me, but it looks shabby to them. The next step came when a leader had guidance to read Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy. I took a copy away, and my girlfriend and I read it over five times during the next fortnight. The line: ’And shut out Christ in husks and swine’ caught me. Conviction of sin used to an even at the breakfast-table. It got me up earlier in the morning, because I found it uncomfortable to lie in bed and think about Groups. When I went into breakfast in the J.C.R. (Junior Common Room) I found myself grabbing food, instead of looking to see if my neighbor had any, and I felt how fundamentally selfish I was. It was a shock.

“Then there came a memorable Sunday night when I went out of the Group with the determination to try the standard of absolute purity they advocated. On Monday afternoon it occurred to me to go for a run around the parks with one of the Group leaders to get back into training. As I ran I determined to show no sign of distress, bad training, or bad condition. My theory was that one could get away with fast living with impurity. That run acted as a bracer, and I decided to get the impurity, the nicotine, and the drink out of my system. Then I decided to put God to the test that Monday night. On the ’bus I prayed and looked up into a grey sky clouded over and asked whatever Supreme Power there was up there to come to my aid.

“The power worked that night, and I prayed before I went to bed. Strange, but I felt conscious that Christ was standing there. Next morning I had the same sense of Christ being in my room. I always pictured Christ standing by the lake shore. Here in College He was standing by me encouraging, strengthening. I knew now I had emerged from a gilded cage. That morning the trees were greener, the sky was bluer, the birds were singing. The New Testament was alive for me at last. Afterwards I went for another run, and ran In the power of the Spirit, definitely faster and with less distress. During that run I said to my friend, whom I outran: ’I may be In with you before long’ -- the first hint I had given him, although I had been taking the side of the Groups at our shove-halfpenny matches. While others cursed, I said that Groups were the goods.”

Forty personal talks are tea-parties with others in the College was Bob’s programme for the next few amazing weeks. In consequence a young man training for missionary work learned how to achieve the kind of results the Groups achieved. Another training for Orders found release from moral defeat and a jaundiced outlook on life. Then Bob went home, and grew much stronger on his news spiritual diet. “I witnessed there,” he said, “and rather crudely, I fear. I also made some restitution to an insurance company from whom I had claimed too heavy damages for a motoring spill. For the first half of the interview I was uncertain whether I was to be prosecuted. I was asked why I owned up, and told the manager that I had invited Christ to run my life. He was a bit staggered and in the end quite friendly, asking me to get in touch with a nephew of his in the University. He said I must refund nine pounds instead of the twenty I thought would be demanded.

“That evening I had to do a little more restitution. I had been tutoring a son of a rich man for nine guineas a week on an out-of-date testimonial. I was guided to tell the man the truth about this, and stood to lose about thirty pounds from the act. Instead of losing, I found the man very pleasant and I was re-engaged for that vacation and given twenty-six pounds towards the Group’s South African venture as well.”

Within a week Bob and was being eagerly sought a number of men who wanted his help, and was seeing them up to two in the morning. Within a month he was on a team of twenty getting rich experience in action. One of his best friends came to see him almost immediately after his change and made a decision. Bob also went to South Africa, while his story went all round Britain and nearly all round the earth.

The third of the three musketeers of the wheel to surrender was Rip, who spoke so blithely at the first Group meeting I intended. Perhaps the best way to picture him, too, is how he looks to his pals. This is the description that Bob gives of him. “Rip looks like Harold Lloyd.-- horn-rimmed spectacles, sandy hair, a fine voice, speaks rather loud through self-consciousness and so the attracts a lot of attention. Could hold very little beer. His c.c. (cubic capacity) was about a pint. The rest of us rather looked down on him because he had to be carried out before we really began to soak. Of medium height, he can ride a motor-bike well, and is a good jazz pianist.”

And now for Rip’s rollicking story of his change. “I went to my first Group,” said Rip, “a bit cheerfully primed with ale, and with the few friends of my own school of religious thought, because I saw that Sandy was sober for long periods and that something had happened to him. I was an atheist, and had written a thesis recently upon ’ The Impossibility of the Existence of a Personal Deity.’ I heard that some people in the Group had found freedom from the same elementary moral problem that had beaten me for the previous six years, and which I had ceased to regard as defeat.

“I love arguing with the Group people, but the thing that struck me was their happiness, friendliness and non-piousity. I went several times on Sunday evenings, giving as an excuse to my friends that it was worth It for the thirst I acquired during two hours of total abstinence in a hot room. But I wanted to happiness and the purpose in life that these people had, yet I didn’t want to turn religious and give the way of spending my evenings I liked.

“I met Frank at Wallingford, and was frightfully tickled by his good humour. The whole of the Carburettor Club -- a tough little gang whose activities were not confined to motoring, though we made use of our cars in the evenings quite often -- went up to dine with Frank in London. During dinner Frank asked me to tell my best story, and I hadn’t got one I could tell at dinner with ladies there, though I was renowned in a small way for my repertoire. Someone they’re asked me why It was I didn’t throw in with the Group, and I remember I answered, ’ Because I’m too selfish.’ Though that was not half the story.

Shortly after that I got Frank’s invitation to Edinburgh. I decided that if then Group were going to play there being a God, I was going to add Interest to the game by playing at there being a devil. Hence the letter I wrote to Frank signed, ’ Yours, Sin, Ltd., per Rip.’ I rode up to Edinburgh on a motor-bike, but only got as far as Derby when a blizzard forced me to take to the train, and after an uncomfortable night trip and landing up at 7 a.m. very irritable, the first thing that happened was Frank telling me to buy ‘ Lawng woollies.’ Ugh!

“Then came the first of the big evening meetings. It never crossed my mind that Frank would ask me to speak. Is still less did it crossed the minds of those in the team, who fairly clutched their chairs in horror when he did. I know I sweated heavily, and I forgot what I said, but no one took any notice of it, anyway. Then I got fed up, bored with everybody else doing a job and myself not being able to. I wasn’t at all convicted of sin, but I knew that these people were happier than I -- and that was the thing I was out for. That aim had to be dropped before I was in the show for a week or two, when I found it wasn’t all gin and gaspers, so to speak.

Anyway, that was the thing for which I originally made my decision. I walked Into the hotel and found one of the team:

“ ’Are you doing anything for five minutes?’

“ ’No.’

“ ’Then come and convert me.’

“This was the actual conversation -- I remember that quite clearly. We went upstairs and knelt down by a bed, I’ve been pretty silly. I asked God to come and run my life and tell me what to do. The first thing that came was to tell this man that I had been telling a lie consistently; the second was to wire to my mother, who knew all about religion but not the best way to put it across; the third to let my friends know where I stood; and the fourth to send back two books to the head man of my school and tell him why I was sending them back, and I didn’t like that sort of thing very much.”

Was capitulation of Rip the three motoring musketeers were again reunited. They are still trying to paint up the town and countryside. But using white paint instead of red.

And that Is the true story of how the Carburettor Club blew up in A.D.1930.

May came, and with it came the legendary Frank, back from a fruitful tour in South America. Though Ken Twitchell had warned me the Groups sought no publicity at the time, for they had only the sufficient leaders to cope with the interest already aroused, he promised me an interview with Frank immediately on his arrival. One May mourning Ken’s voice on the telephone announced that Frank was in London and would be glad to see me.

I invited both to lunch. Frank’s “guidance” was that I call at Brown’s Hotel for afternoon tea. Unexpectingly I went, and met for the first time the well-dressed Doctor of Divinity, human founder of the Oxford Group, who received me with cordiality and even gaiety. Frank was stoutish, kindly, affable, and very active. He talked a good deal in that quick, crackling and not displeasing voice of his. He had experienced a great time in South America. He had been amazingly conscious of the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit during the whole trip. the he had seen a good deal of Bolshevism him in South America. He was still more confident that the world needed the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and not Bolshevism, to put it right. I had never heard a parson -- and Frank is a parson -- express himself so freely about the Holy Spirit before. Most Parsons seemed uncertain about Him. Frank paced the room, head and shoulders thrown back, hands behind him, using similar gestures and showing that awareness and intensity of purpose I had noticed about Lloyd George when I was introduced to him in our office. We discussed the religious articles that had appeared in our newspaper. I explained what was in my mind about an Oxford Group series, and Frank listened without interruption until I proposed to invite our readers to express themselves for or against the movement in a fresh newspaper discussion.

“Oh, dear no!”

Frank was flatly opposed to the proposition. The Group were not seeking publicity symbol; they were prepared to give Information if published correctly and thus subject treated with reverence. Newspaper controversies on religion were never satisfactory. The New Testament was against them. They are roused to interest for a time, but did little real good. People whose interest had been quickened were left stranded, while the newspaper went back to its daily task of purveying News. That sort of publicity was useless for the deeply spiritual movement to which he was committed. And would do more harm than good.

Further -- and here he threw a ball at me -- the Holy Spirit’s guidance was against encouraging me to write or organise the publication of anything about the Oxford Group until I myself was spiritually ready for the task.

This remarkable Life-Changer had courage. He had made the most extraordinary suggestion that I had received in twenty-five years of London journalism; although I remembered making a somewhat similar suggestion to a well-known celebrity some years before. Frank was turning the tables on myself, telling me that he felt the Holy Spirit was against my writing about the Group until I, too, was thoroughly right spiritually.

Did Frank know that journalists never ask outside permission as to what they shall write about? Evidently not. Nor did he know or seem to care that for many years I had been trying to live Christianity, read the Bible most days, prayed twice or thrice daily (like the Pharisee), was repentant of occasional sins, and tried to conform to New Testament teaching as I understood it while endeavouring to pilot myself and the paper through a daily maze of difficulties. I was an elder of a church, a treasurer of a church building fund, the organiser of phenomenally successful features (secular and religious), and not altogether a stranger to a little persecution, perhaps for righteousness’ sake. And drawing the top salary on a newspaper which could give the Frank’s young movement just to help upward that it seemed to need.

For a time I wondered if Frank’s uncomplimentary attitude was not merely clever charlatanism, an effort to hoodwink me by quoting the Holy Spirit, to ensure that we only published to what he wanted, irrespective of our honest convictions about his teaching. At least my doubts about him were as honest as his doubts about me. After all, a man knows himself and the kind of life he is trying to live; let others say what they may who are unafraid to make the same effort, be their motives natural aversion, self-justification, jealousy, or common projection.

What could there be in my life which entitled Frank on our first meeting to say the Holy Spirit was against my touching the movement? Of course it was a safe guess to make about anybody. The odds were on the side of the challenger -- always. He had got in the first below. But even if he were right in his assumption, was he still right in his objection? Ventilation of a new movement did no harm unless there was harm in it. Moreover, there were illuminating Scriptural texts concerning those who had nothing to hide being ready to bring everything to the light. Our novelists had confessed their religion and exposed themselves to the criticism of our readers. Arnold Bennett had endured a heavy barrage of loveless bigotry. If and unbeliever was ready to write openly at my invitation, why should Frank object when he knew I was on the side of the angels as well as he? If Frank really desired sin to be brought to the light for exposure as the vile cancer it was, how much more should his new movement be held up to the light for all to inspect its purity? And in any case we could do it whether he liked it or lumped it. The Editor was always the deciding factor.

Still Frank said “No.” He was positive he was guided to say “No.” And recalling that Interview In the lightt of subsequent events, I, too, am positive he was right.

Frank was “guided” to say several unexpected things to me during the afternoon and evening. One thing he said at dinner interested me considerably. He had just taken a second helping of asparagus when I asked him to explain where common sense ended and guidance began.

“I don’t pretend that every detail in my life is guided,” said Frank. “For instance, I did not have guidance to take that asparagus. I was hungry, and I like asparagus. But if I am alert for guidance it comes whenever I need it. And so it does to anybody.”

And other of Frank’s sayings that afternoon as he walked about the big Red room taking off for letters of the alphabet on his first four fingers was, “P-R-A-Y : Powerful-Radiograms-Always-Yours” -- one of the many forceful epigrams he is constantly uttering, just as a pedagogue teaching easily-remembered shortcuts to education.

And other epigram that came later was: “We must work with the chisel, the hammer and the rivet. Make an opening and then flatten in the rivet so there shall be no more weakness at that point.” That was Frank’s method with me that afternoon.

Christ was sensitive to the possibility of sin in the Woman at the Well and In the sins of many others.

But Frank did not ask me for a confession of my sins that day, though a live journalist might have been willing to relate few as the easy price of a good story.

Nevertheless, my own sins came up as we talked, came up voluntarily, and the way of future victory was shown clearly, almost before I realised what he was about. Probably my vanity did it. I was so anxious to tell this unusual evangelist a few of my own experiences with the supernatural, partly for enlightenment, perhaps more to let him know that I, too, had practical experience of the subject to, either to impress him or to disprove his offensive suggestion that I was spiritually unready to translate his movement into journalese.

“You can tell me what you like,” said Frank, standing in the middle of the room, his large head and shoulders thrown back, hands again clasped behind him, just like Mr. Pickwick. I told him first of an ecstatic experience which happened several years before. I had been studying the New Testament, a book I had dropped as an encumbrance during my early years in Fleet Street. Though I had returned to Christianity, I felt no great , compunction in committing one or two breaches of the teaching, seeing my circumstances were unusual and I was harming nobody. Closer study of the New Testament revealed that some of my indulgences were uncompromisingly forbidden. Then one day, when there came along a temptation which usually defeated me, I took a right turn instead of my usual left incline. It was that same right turn which resulted in the remarkable experience which I now described to Frank. I was in my room shortly afterwards, when I suddenly felt an amazing exaltation, and unspeakable rapture, accompanied by a delightful glowing sensation throughout my left side. The ecstasy of this experience is untellable. It outshone all human joys just as a searchlight outshines the light of a candle.

It was a delight; I was fully dressed and quite conscious of everything about me. But the transport of joy which accompanied this beautific experience was so wonderful, so celestial, so vibrantly effulgent, so transcending anything that happens as a consequence of the average good deed of the Boy Scout order, that I sank quite naturally to my knees in an ecstasy of inspired prayer. And then as this extraordinary trance-state continued I seemed to be raised out of myself into a sunlit region where I could observe humanity struggling blindly in shadow, and lovingly sympathise with all because of the shadow preventing them from seeing the glorious future which was their destiny and into which I have been so marvelously drawn.

At this time I realised that even joy can be intolerable and that joy, like pain, when it becomes unendurable ceases to be borne. No unfortified human being could endure more than half an hour of the rosy ecstasy. Exactly what happened to me that day I never quite knew, but I shall always believe the Creator allowed me to pass a full have-hour on the fringe of Paradise. And if Heaven is still more glorious, I can understand Paul saying that eye hath not seen nor ear heard aught of what the Lord had prepared for those who love Him. Such an experience turned the joke about the golden harps of Heaven into bathos. Later on, when reading a book on English mysticism by Dean Inge, I saw that this state of trance was not peculiar to myself, but had been experienced by others, and described in some of the autobiographies of the mystics.

I may have thought there was something specially worthy about my attempts at Christianity, as distinct from what others were doing, to justify this foretaste of Paradise. Possibly I expected Frank to think so, too, as I told the story to him that afternoon at Brown’s Hotel. He listened interestedly and waited; but made no comment.

Then I described another experience which had come to me just as surprisingly. But whilst the former gave me half an hour of such intoxicating joy that no earthly experience could compare with It, the other scared me out of my wits for the ensuing forty-eight hours. And is still gives me a shudder whenever I look back upon it. This second experience came as a glorified nightmare. It was midnight --one o’clock summer-time (delight-saving time). I had been sleeping, but was awakened by a human face at my window. Between that face and myself was something black and the evil. There was no one else in my room. The human face vanished, but in the darkness I had a strong sense of the uncanny and the sinister. My unseen visitor, that had separated me from the vanished face, if a living entity, and is not a black cloud of evil -- the incubus -- certainly had no rights in the world of man. He or it seemed to steal Into the room, pervading the atmosphere above me; then descending to seep itself into my body, an inky odiousness pervading my left side just as that effulgent visitation had previously done. This second experience, like the former, lasted approximately for half an hour of wakefulness, during which time I was helpless to dislodge it -- a dark shade saturating me with its blackness, producing all the sensations of horror, guilt, and severance from God’s which surely must be felt by the lost soul. Once again I had no recourse but to prayer, a series of repetitions of the lords Prayer with stress on deliverance from evil. At the end of half an hour I felt my body freed again, though how they incubus departed I cannot say. It had been; and then it was not. But the experience had been so poignantly real that it was sometime before I felt completely at ease when alone, fearing a similar visitation.

But what was it? Was I going mad? Or had I really had an experience of and evil spirit? I knew there were many incredible stories about them in the Bible which were explained away as meaning something else. Pondering over this odd experience, I received the idea that probably my visitor had been sent by someone dabbing in the black arts who had some unpleasant interest in me. Then later I came across a book by an English lady of title, The Riding Light, giving experiences of The Sinisters. Later still, I read a book by Lord Frederick Hamilton, The Days Before Yesterday, which also contained some kind of confirmation of my own experience.

When I had finished these two stories of spiritual light and shade, Frank suggested neither clairvoyant intervention nor the Black Art. But he quickly revealed to me what I should have realized from the first.

“Those two experiences,” he said, “relate to the same sin which God wants cleared out of your life, so that He can accomplish his plans and you. He may have something for you to do which a mortal sin of yours is frustrating.”

Light came. Even if the suggestion that God could have anything special for me to do was more flattering than reasonable, because one particular sin had produced the opposite poles of mystical experience I have described. Again, doctors might suggest active glands following protracted medication. Only -- the second experience happened to be accompanied by the features of a person whom I had never met, and whom I did encounter several years later. Which showed a pretty clearly that even if this were not a prophecy, my psyche had managed to project itself into its own future for several years and picture one character in a scene who was presently reproduced in life. Who had character was may be revealed in a subsequent volume as a kindly and fruitful worker in the Oxford Group movement.

Frank’s voice called me back to earth. He was talking earnestly, urging me to drive stakes around myself as protection against further lapses. Mentioning a person whom I had wronged, he urged me to go and tell that person the facts. “Never mind if there is another side to the story,” he counseled. “You do your part. The other person can confess or withhold. What is that do you?”

Frank’s drive to get me to forsake every form of sin and to put an unscalable fence between it and me caught me unawares, although I should have been ready for him after reading of his tactics. I thought his request was unreasonable, as I was as much sinned against as sinning, perhaps more.

“Supposing it causes further trouble?” I protested.

And I explained to the difficulty.

“I don’t urge you to do anything that will hurt anyone.” He paused for guidance. “If you are sure it will, don’t do it.”

I thought of him at this minute as a kind of a silver dynamo, sympathetic but irresistible.

And then, of course, Frank suggested the inevitable Quiet Time. Taking two sheets of notepaper, he handed me one. We sat down and listened in prayerful silence. I tried to pick up another of those luminous thoughts. Nothing except in all came: quite a lot of ordinary human thoughts, but no luminous ones. I had no wish to confess my sins to the person Frank had named, but I wished to see the thing through as an honest text. Yet to my thoughts in that Quiet Time agreed with what Frank urged, though my wishes stood not. I wrote down my thoughts; then read them allowed to Frank, who confidently and surprisingly pronounced them to be God-given thoughts.

“Oh, come,” I said to myself. “That’s much too strong an interjection.” How on earth could be a few wondering thoughts, unattended by mystical feeding or luminosity, scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, be catalogued as God’s thoughts by anyone in his right senses? Still, I was determined to do see the thing through, being a believer in the pragmatic method of learning by doing. I had always learned to as I earned. Furthermore, my vanity was touched at being asked to do the most difficult thing yet, although Frank seemed unaware of it or entirely unconcerned. Later I told him that it was the most difficult task to set a man, and he jocularly replied, “Oh, that’s nothing to what you might be asked to do on this basis of Christian living.”

Was I going to do this thing because I was afraid to refuse a dare? To mask real cowardice? Or because I believed it might be the right step forward in the Christian life? Or because I saw a news story behind it? To this day I cannot distinguish between the four motives. All were there.

During our conversation Ken Twitchell had slipped from the room at a glance from Frank. I thought his departure was pre-arranged. I learned afterwards that It was the custom in the Group to leave one of their members of on with any interested person when the opportunity offered. Ken Twitchell now reappeared, and Frank shared his guidance that all three might dine together, and that later Ken and I might go on to Harley Street for the Thursday night Group meeting: typical of this modern evangelist who is never so immersed in the present as to forget to the future. Frank’s reason for staying away himself was that he had an unfortunate to see whose need might keep them far into the night.

I said “good-night” to Frank, having voluntarily taken on the most unattractive assignment of my life.

Speak unto the Children of Israel, when a man or a woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that soul shall be guilty;

Then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall make restitution for his guilt in full, and add unto it the fifth part thereof, and give it unto him in respect of whom he hath been guilty. --Numbers v. 6-7.

The Harley Street Group meeting the following my first talk with Frank was one of the most impressive gatherings I have attended: one of those rare occasions when one feels powerfully conscious of the presence and pressure of the Holy Spirit.

I had said nothing to Ken Twitchell of what Frank wished me to do. But there was a look of understanding in his eyes that evening which showed that he understood; for which I was grateful. That look, I discovered later, arose from an experience at his is not completely dissimilar from my own.

Before arriving at my office next morning, I made a call on the person named by Frank and revealed the humiliating facts. It was not a pleasant interview, and the facts I disclosed cause no surprise. I was censured for the clumsy way I expressed myself and the early hour chosen for the task. I had no sense of spiritual exaltation at doing what I did. But it was done, and nothing could undo it. And I had driven in one of those protecting stakes that Frank is so keen upon to prevent his followers from repeating past errors. Furthermore, I saw that same person later register a spiritual change which probably would not have happened but for my frankness. I record this as a simple statement of truth.

Frank’s practice of sending a person to make reconciliation or restitution is occasionally criticized by those who recoil from the high spiritual challenge of the Group. The criticism may arise as much from self-contradiction or cowardice as from an honest objection to a hard saying. For unquestionably, Christ said that before we bring our gifts to the altar we must first be reconciled to our brother, a difficult saying, but one perfectly reasonable if Christianity is to realise its lofty ideals, though restitution should always be under guidance.

Sometimes harm may be occasioned by unwise and “unchecked” institution. Nevertheless, the Group did not compromise on the necessity for why is reconciliation and restitution. Zaccheus told Jesus that if he had taken anything by false accusation he would restore fourfold as ordered by the Mosaic Law. But, for Instance, how could a man with nothing restore fourfold what he had stolen? Why stir up trouble unless you were in a position to make amends? The answer to these questions was that each person must decide the thing to do on his own guidance, checked perhaps by the guidance of others.

Supposing a person to whom an apology or reparation is offered behaves badly? Usually he behaves very well, for the restitutional act has the psychological effect of raising the other person’s ego, putting him in good temper with himself and with everyone else, including his humbled enemy. But should he act otherwise (say the Group) his behavior must be accepted cheerfully as the natural consequence of wrongdoing. Nothing is born without pain; not even a soul born again.

Everything must be subordinate to this new quality of life, even if It means the disapproval of others, since the Group rests in the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the constant companionship of the Holy Spirit -- a benediction which means just what it says and is not a formalism.

Frank does not advise people to do what he Is unwilling to do himself or what he has not found to be of great spiritual value in practice. Hear one of his own experiences of restitution as he told it to me in my room at Selwyn College, Cambridge, when I was attending one of his many house-parties. The Bishops of Norwich and Leicester and the Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America were there. Another Bishop wood arrived the next day who was present at the Chinese house-party when Frank had his own sharp taste of restitution. Does Frank:

“It was the very first religious house-party I had organized, and was held at the house of a famous Chinese diplomat in one of the most beautiful spots in China, a summer resort wear the old Chinese philosophers had their retreats. Its cragged peaks and sunny valleys were dotted with ruined pagodas destroyed at the time of the Taiping Rebellion in the middle of the nineteenth century. Our mountain beauty-spot overlooked the Yang-tze River, writhing through the valley below -- a yellow Chinese dragon.

“I used to go out and sit on the rocks and enjoy the glorious scenery. For the first two days I had a wonderful sense of communion, fellowship, and joy, and peace. My third day was uncomfortable. One word kept running through my brain: ‘ Restore, restore, restore.’

“I tried to brush it aside, but it came again and again. It referred to an old matter with the railroad company. I had accepted from them some former privileges, but a rider was introduced and the reduced rates privilege was canceled. I argued, was true casuistry, that I had the right to these privileges, owing to my prior claims, now only partly operative. At the time of the house-party I had hated and forsaken the wrong-doing, but I had neither confessed it nor restored. Therein lies the great secret of victory. A great many hate of and forsake, but never go on to the larger victory.

“So my struggle continued. Should I restore, the vice-president of the railway, with whom I occasionally dined, might find out? What would he think? How would I know what money was involved? How could I own up when so many people had arrived at a house-party expecting me to lead them into larger areas of you experience when I must admit my own dishonesty? Finally, I compromised by saying I would write anonymously now that I had found out the amount.

“I remembered that a check had come in recently to help me in any way I chose, and this had been forgotten in a multitude of duties and was adequate for the restitution. But as I went on to write the letter there was a sense of dissatisfaction and completeness. And to so I knew I must do the costly thing, which meant signing the letter with my own name, revealing who I was and what I was doing. With it came a wonderful relief, but only momentary, for more disquieting guidance came, saying I must share with the house-party that afternoon.

I began to argue. How could I? What would they think? Could I ’lose face,’ as the Chinese would picturesquely say? ’Losing face’ was one of the things not done in China. But the insistent urge was there: ‘Confess, confess, confess.’ I did.

“With the pain of confession came a completer message that meant victory to many in my audience, composed of people of national influence: members of Parliament, a General, several Bishops, well-known folk from the Foreign and Chinese communities. As the meeting ended I first doubted whether I had down the right thing. Have I had not yet learned that a confessing Christian is a propagating Christian. A costly confession may be the price of power. Certain things which concern the public must be publicly confessed. So many people have a false fear of confessing things in public which perhaps they should not confess. God often tests our willingness without asking us to do it.

“At that meeting when I owned up to the sin of dishonesty there was present a man who had come to that beautiful mountain resort to recover his health. The doctors told him he needed rest and quiet away from business. As he left he said that if he were to do the same thing as Frank he might have to pay out all the money In his bank. Then what would become of his wife and family? Fortunately he talked to a friend who held him to his highest, and suggested that he look into all his affairs and put everything straight with everybody. A friend said to his health might never be improved until he had put everything right. The Bible parallel is, ’Which is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven, or to say, Arise and take up thy bed and walk?’ This man made full restoration to all, which they left him with practically an empty bank. Then the miracle happened. Coincident with his courageous step there arrived a note from his employers saying that the most important thing for him was to get well, and enclosing a check for a much bigger sum than he had paid away.

“Another person present had told a lie in Sweden. That lie followed her all the way to China, where she had gone to teach and help the Chinese to be good and not tell lies. Wherever she travelled she found that lie turning up. Whenever she tried to help someone it burst in with ’You’re a liar.’ My telling that simple story of restitution made her realise she must do more than write anonymous letters owning up, not to a big lie, but to one that robbed her of the power of being a life-changer.

“There was a third person at that meeting possessing what is technically known as a dispositional temper. Her husband to brought her to the house-party and suggested she enjoy the beneficial results while he went off to enjoy himself in his own way elsewhere. This contrary woman too heard this story, and it made such an impression on her that she went to her room and locked her door. Someone was concerned about her dinner, but I said there was no real need for worry, as the New Testament enjoyed fasting. She did not attend the next meeting, sending to say she was not well.

“She wanted no breakfast the next morning, as she now had a slight headache. But at eleven a.m. she left her room radiant and triumphant, and went off to tell some of her friends with similar contrary problems of her new-found victory. Another miracle had to come about leading to a procession of such miracles which were performed because I had now learned not only to hate and forsake, but also to confess and restore!”

When Frank had finished telling me that story, I asked him, “Would it not be better in the general interest for you to steal something every five years or so and then repeat the ceremony of taking, forsaking, confessing and restoring? You might start many more such processions of restitution.”

Frank beamed.

“I learned enough from that first experience to be careful not to repeat the offense.”

Frank has been setting his changed men and women tasks of restoration ever since he wrote his own difficult series of six apologetic letters to persons against whom he had borne grudges following his vital experiences in the Cumberland church. Because God floods in where there is no sinful obstruction to His coming, Frank sets his face and against compromise which may also be sinful obstruction. He insists that converts should not only turned from sin, but take long steps to prevent reoccurrences. Voluntary confession and restitution bring home the seriousness of wrong-doing more effectively than any other curative method.

If a man’s relations with the other sex are on a wrong basis, the Group say he should put them right immediately, and the obvious way to do so is to confess the change in his own life to the persons concerned. Even if he does not win them for Christianity, he puts himself on a comprehensible basis with his former women-friends. His changed demeanour is understood, and not considered a slight. Likewise, women who have been drawn to Christ are advised to tell why they can no longer live the old life of responsible pleasure. It is all to the good of the new convert, and possibly to the salvation of the companion in error.

Some graduates holding University degrees obtained by cribbing have been counseled by Frank to return to their College authorities and confess the devastating truth. Or have gone back voluntarily. One of these, a young giant, who, with his wife and two wonderful children, have been living on faith and prayer for some years, told me his own experiences over a luncheon which he insisted on giving. He said he was educated at a small, socially prominent college in New England, colloquially known as “snooty, snobbish, and high-hat.” Made Honours System for examinations was the rule here, and it was also “the done thing to respect the rule, to me honourable and never to crib, although there was none to supervise.”

The system was controlled by a Students’ Honours Committee, exercising the powers of a supreme court dealing with all cases of infraction of rules. If anyone was proved to have cheated at examinations, there was no option but to fire the student; the decision was automatic. Yet out of eight hundred students only one was sent down (expelled) every other year. From earliest boyhood the young giant had lived a life of expediency -- believing the end always justified the means. The reasons were laziness and fear of failure. With the Honours System of no other supervision during exams, he saw a splendid opportunity for indulging his laziness and getting clear away with it.

At prep school he habitually cheated, knowing he would not be caught. By substituting cheating for work he had more time for enjoyment outside the University. And illicit enjoyment at that. But it meant constantly inventing fresh excuses for absence from class for those extra outings. One day he fell on the stairs, and this gave him a new excuse for a free evening the study. He struck his forehead with a hammer hard enough to show a large bruise, which it passed off as the result of falling down stairs. He claimed to have been in a stupor when he should have been at lessons, and again was believed.

He was preparing for this degree when he ran into one of the Group house-parties, and became convicted of sin, as the old-fashioned evangelists used to say, and felt we must put things straight In his own life.

“Did anyone in the Group urge you to do this?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, “I knew my duty very well without being told.”

Tremblingly he asked to see the Dean, feeling so nervous that he wrote that his own accusation before going in and tried to read it standing. His knees knocked so much that he had to sit down.

“It seems a sorry sort of admission,” he said dismally, as he recounted to this experience. I felt he was showing considerable courage in telling so much, and that I was showing the case-hardened indifference of the typical journalist over his painful recital. I said so.

“And what did the Dean say?” I then asked unrelentingly.

The features of the young giant broken to his habitual smile.

“The Dean said he was awfully sorry about it,” he drawled. “Not so much for the honour of the University as for my own sake. He said he appreciated my honesty in volunteering the information, and omitted to reproach me for what I had done. At the end he said: ‘Since you voluntarily told me this, and no one else knows about It, we will not turn over a new page and forget it.’”

This young man is now a Presbyterian minister -- and a saint.

“Were you glad are sorry you had seen the Dean?” I next asked.

“You bet I was mighty glad to get it off my chest. I now think it must have been God’s special leading to do this. For not long afterwards several ministers of the intellectual type spoke critically of the Group at a Convention, when the Dean of my University stood up, and announced that he was a Unitarian with no strong leaning towards our teaching, but impelled to testify to its efficacy, since a number of young man in his University had come to him voluntarily with apologies for past misconduct.”

Sometimes contact with the Group results in converts going to their parents to straighten out difficulties that have divided the home. Sometimes parents go to children and do the same reuniting thing. Besides seeing the Dean, the young giant had also been led to write a straightforward letter to his parents, telling them of how he had been behaving while they paid high fees for his studies, believing him to be a conscientious student. As he had always played a role at home, his mother was convinced he was the angel boy.

His letter home cost more than seeing the Dean. His courage ebbed so low that he waited until a few seconds to midnight, when the letter-box was cleared; and then he had to run his hardest to catch the post.

“And your parents said?”

Again things have gone smoothly for the student-prodigal.

“The same day they received my letter,” he said, “I received a telegram thanking me for what I had written and sending me there love.”

“So you are out to turn schoolboys into Saints?”

“That about says it,” he replied.

Still I was unsatisfied.

“You say you were fearful and lazy by nature, when in fact there was plenty of courage and energy latent you, which the Group, with their experience of psychology, knew how to stir up.”

He would not have it. God’s strength was made manifest in his weakness, he asserted. Being in Christ, he was able to do what he was unable to do otherwise.

“Has anyone ever regretted making such a confession as yours?”

I was prepared for another uncompromising “No.”

“Only if they subsequently draw away from God. Those who keep near Him never regret obedience to His law of love to all. How low can anyone who professes to love God and his neighbor as himself, as Christians must do, how a wrong he has done to anyone to go unrighted? It would be a deliberate interference with God’s scheme of righteous world-government as revealed in the Bible.”

I probed further.

“Have you looked back into your life and carefully considered every wrong you have ever done anyone and endeavored to set it right? Or are there still some dents in your spiritual armour-plate?”

It was a searching question, one which very few persons, clerical or lay, Christian or Pagan, dared to ask themselves. But he was not to be caught.

“Wherever God has shown me that there was restitution to be made,” he said, with quiet assurance, “there I have made it.”

“That is to say, you have seen those in your neighborhood. What of those at a distance?”

He declined to admit exceptions. “I have either seen or written to all who are alive where guidance has come about them.”

Hearing this, spoken not boastingly but hesitatingly, in answer to some very impertinent probing, I felt a sense of hopelessness. Such a state of purity and perfection seemed to be altogether too wonderful for me. Later I heard a Rev. Cleve Hicks (a former Harvard Chaplain) carry this point of restitution still further, when telling of a man sixty-five confronted with the Group teaching on this subject, who said it would take him the rest of his life to straighten out all the crooked things he had done. And CLeve had cheerfully replied that, as guided, he could not embark on a more useful undertaking.

About this time I heard a fine young Englishman tell a story at a Group meeting which coincided with some of the things told me by the young giant. He had been to Oxford, but had deliberately kept away from the Group influence because he understood it would prevent him from enjoying himself to the full. Later drunkenness and foolish squandering of an allowance from his fathers depleted resources became his chief difficulties. Not long after that I was with him as he perused his father’s letter just arrived. “ ‘ Your last letter made very unpleasant reading,’ “ he read aloud.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I wrote and told Father the truth about my past life,” replied the changed youth. “And now I’m jolly glad I did.”

Sending prodigal sons back to their earthly as well as their Heavenly Father is a specialty of the Oxford Group.

One is constantly hearing stories of restitution from persons who have been attracted into the Group, including one from a very successful minister who preached a sermon which created a deeper spiritual atmosphere than I had sensed in a church for many years. He confessed to me that in his early life he had stolen Money, and found it necessary for his peace of mind to call on the person he had robbed and confessed his sin. That man to-day is one of the most fruitful Christians in the Group. A relative of mine was so struck by his sermon that she said to me, “The difference between that men and most preachers is -- he’s real.” When refusing a knighthood John Galsworthy said, “Literature is its own reward.” The testimony of the Oxford Group is that absolute honesty by anybody is its own reward. George Muller of Bristol, who stole as a young man, and many another saint found that a confession or restitution is the gate way to power.

I shall never forget the greeting received by a company of the Group when we called on the Principal of a High School in an important town.

“You are the fellows who took formality out of religion and turned some of my students into honest boys.” Or words to that effect. He said that about twenty-five school-books, purloined from the Library, had been returned as a consequence of our last visit to the city.

But what of the bad boy, the ugly duckling, with who nobody can deal? Garrett Stearly told me that in Africa the Group found such a boy; caned daily at school, moody and morose at home, his great claim to fame had been winning the junior swimming championship of his club.

He was bribed by his godfather to attend a Group house-party for the price of a cinema seat. At the party he was caught off his guard by the friendliness of the people he met, and soon found himself envying their state of abiding joy. He decided to try Christianity, though he saw it might be costly. First of all, there was that swimming championship -- he had been six months over age when he won it, but no one knew. He took his courage and his beloved trophy cup in his hands and made a clean breast of It to the committee.

The swimming coach was aghast. “You more nerve then I have, my lad,” he could only grunt as the lad walked out, shorn of glory, but triumphant. Later, with the minister’s permission, he witnessed in his family church after the service, and promised to restore seven pounds that he had once stolen from the collection plate. A man in the congregation was so convicted that he sent back five pounds to a department store in the capital -- value of goods quietly stolen some years before. The store sent the money on to the Oxford Group team, telling them to keep up the good work.

Another convert restored jewellery stolen from the house of a friend at which he was a guest.

“Was he really a friend?” I queried.

“There are friends and friends,” was laughing reply. He’s a real friend now.

In Asheville, North Carolina, I ran into some more lads who had been captured by the Group’s high challenge. One of them told the following remarkable story:

“I believe without a doubt that I was the worst pupil ever and the Asheville Senior High School. That is not only my opinion, but the teacher’s and the Principle’s too. I wasn’t mean, but I took a great delight in telling lies and seeing them through, which took bigger lies to make the little ones seem true.

“After a year of lying, I began to have enough confidence in myself to steal. I got money from my parents to buy books, then kept the money and stole the books. Every day I would go to school with a troubled mind and not quite satisfied.

“Then one day we had Chapel, and the Principal announced that the Oxford Group were going to speak to us.

Well, I thought, here goes another lecture, and I guess it will ruin our freedom with the girls for a few weeks.

So my buddy and I took a back seat and began to amuse ourselves. We carried on until Frank Bygott, the Englishman, got up and spoke. We thought to his top ‘rawtha funny,’ so we listened to him. When he finished, we also finished listening. Well, when the talks were over we all went to our classrooms and forgot about the Group for while.

“After supper, the same day that I had heard the speeches, my buddy and myself decided to go over to our Sunday-School league, to get a couple of girls after the meeting, and go for a ride. When we got their whom should we bump Into but Cleve Hicks! The next night up in Cleve’s room we surrendered our lives to Christ.

“Well, I ‘took off’ and made up with my friends on the student I had told them. I humbled myself to the Principal, and in doing so told him what I had found in life. He was in a hurry to be about his business, but when he found out that I had asked Christ to run my life he took time to give me a lecture on keeping it up. When he had finished I thanked him and walked out, saying to myself, ’Well, isn’t that funny, making a friend of somebody I never liked until to-day?’

“He wasn’t the only friend I made. I confessed to everyone I could recall telling a lie to, therefore making friends out of enemies. And I also took back the coach of the school some football equipment I had stolen, and straightened out affairs with girls. I have also been used to win fellows to Jesus Christ.”

The influence exercised over the typical lad by Cleve Hicks is one of the many astounding facets of Group activity. Cleve told me the story of a Boston boy whom he had known before he was sent to a Reformatory. The boy’s parents, anxious about their son, wanted Cleve to see him when he was released. Cleve agreed, making the proviso that the boy, voluntarily come as he knew the danger of compulsory religion.

The boy came, and a heart-to-heart talk followed. Not long afterwards the boy suddenly turned up again, face beaming, altogether proud of himself; bursting to tell something important.

“I earned thirteen-fifty this week.” (Spoken proudly.)

Cleve has his own methods.

“So?” (Spoken casually.)

“All gone!” (Defiantly.)

“Yeah!” (Humorously.)

Cleaves casualness merely stimulated the boy to burst out with the facts. When not stealing motor-cars, the boy and his pals went in for petty thieving. One particular store in their neighborhood often suffered from their depredations. As one of the young hooligans engaged the salesman’s attention, the others lifted what they could.

“I went back to the store and gave that man five bucks,” proudly announced the lad.

Another of this young Bostonian’s rackets was to break into an elderly woman’s house and damage to property. He told Cleve:

“I went back to that old woman and asked her if she lived there two years ago when the house was burgled. She looked at me scared like, and said ’Yes.’ Then I told her I was one of the fellows who did that, and she looked more scared. Then I gave her five bucks, and she almost died.”

The remaining three dollars and fifty cents of the boy’s earnings that week had gone to another store from which he had once wholly stolen a portable radio set, carrying It brazenly out while the music was still playing.

Of course the best story that Cleve tells he forgot to tell me. When he reads it here he will wonder how I got it, and where. The Oxford Group were visiting a school In South Africa, at which Cleve gave a clear presentation of the message to the whole assembly. Some teachers afterwards were very skeptical, and one master cynically asked if the Group could do anything to help them recover school muskets which had been stolen.

“Look here!” Exclaimed Cleve. “We are not the detectives.” But he added that one never could tell what would happen when the Spirit of God was working to make an honest.

The boys listened intently to his address, and one of them at least felt God was giving him another chance. Nothing happened for several days. Then a boy came and tapped on Cleve’s door.

“Come in,” said Cleavage cheerily. “What are you here for?”

The boy was nonplussed. “I expected you to do the talking, sir,” he said. “I came to hear what you got to say.”

“Bless your heart, you heard me in chapel. Now let’s hear you.”

For half an hour a boy toward out that heart Cleve had cheerily blessed. Still he seemed unsatisfied. Then Cleve had an intuition.

“Be well anything about the rifles around here?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy blurted out. “That’s really what I came for.”

And the theft of the muskets was admitted as well as of many other items belonging to the school and the students. From being the worst boy he developed into a spiritual force and influenced strongly for good the lives of seventeen other boys and that school.

Sometimes people become less-honest men. One of my best friends in the Group offered a former employee or approximately a thousand dollars as payment for a thousand hours stolen when he should have been working, an offer which was refused, though the honesty of purpose was recognised.

These stories of reconciliation and restitution all point to new principles at work in the lives of persons encountered by the Group, and are quoted to Illustrate “the take off” of the quality of life which this movement is striving to achieve. For a long time I felt the Group were erecting far too formidable barriers in the way of potential Christians; and were turning a simple leisurely flat race into a mighty Grand National Steeplechase, with appalling fences, wide brooks, and sudden turns to negotiate, which only the courageous few dare attempt, and a tiny minority of them achieve. Those on the verge of a change-over, I argued, might be driven away by this unsympathetic and uncompromising teaching.

The Group replied that persons attracted to Christ could not be driven away by an obvious Christian duty, since Christ supplied the strength as well as the incentive. Nevertheless, I had read no story of the disciples running around making restitution. I thought Christ had said they were clean through the word He had spoken unto them.

But the disciples may have had nothing to restore, or the act of restitution was omitted from this story; while the law of God unquestionably enjoined restitution, and Christ did say to Zaccheus, “This day is salvation come to thy house,” when he announced he would fulfill God‘s law and restore fourfold.

“Listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” said the Group, “and you will hear Him saying, ’Be ye reconciled one towards another.’” I began to listen again. At first not too attentively.

About this time I left the group of newspapers I had served for eight years and devoted myself to a smaller rival prior to making a long-overdue visit to America. Once more I attempted to get Frank’s co-operation in a newspaper series about the Oxford Group.

Frank knew I had taken his advice and seen the third person he had urged me to see. I wondered if he now thought my own spiritual life sufficiently cleaned up to entrust me with all the facts of the Oxford Group. Evidently he did, for when I called him on the trunk wire (long distance) he seemed quite eager for me to come down to the Oxford house-party which had just then started and begin work, although the newspaper I then directed was not so powerful as the one I had just left.

I went down twice to the 1931 house-party at Oxford, wants to describe the event, the second time to introduce some of my friends.

My second visit to that twelve-day house-party gave me further insight into the intensive methods of this consecrated human engineer. I told Frank I wished my friends to meet some of the men I already knew in the Group. Frank gave me to understand he would see to things, although I knew he was carrying the weight of the whole house-party. Instead of introducing us to those I knew already, he collected several other prominent figures In the Group to entertain us: one of the surprising things that happen when you work with guided people.

Furthermore, he had deserved a seat for me for lunch at High Table, Lady Margaret Hall, between himself and a young man he suspected of having the same problem to conquer as the one I had revealed to him. And so, instead of spending a leisurely luncheon-hour making interesting conversation to the accepted way of host to guest, Frank whispered in my ear a point about my neighbour on my left, and bade me get busy telling the old, old story in the autobiographical way common to the Group and the early Apostles: so zealous is Frank in setting his friends working for others by the simple means of narrating one’s own experiences with problems common to both. Mentally I handed Frank the blue ribbon as an organiser of amateur evangelists.

Having recovered my breath, I turned to my neighbour, son of a man I knew, whose book publisher had also been my book publisher, and endeavored to be helpful. I was not sanguine of the results. I felt no sense of the Holy Spirit telling me to talk, no freedom from natural inhibitions. Moreover, my neighbour was not at all interested in expurgating his possible besetting sin, but far more interested in proving that it was not a sin at all -- my original view. I’d tried to quote a text or two from the New Testament which had changed my opinion, but at that awkward moment could not remember one correctly.

Then the door swung open, and a member of my own staff, deputed to work the three colleges with the newspaper containing my first article on the Group, noisily injured and began hawking the papers around the lunch-table, to my added confusion. And this while at Frank’s bidding I was trying to cure the soul on my left of sinning the sin he said was sinless. Another of many incongruous situations in which one occasionally finds oneself as an enterprising journalist.

The incongruity developed. I began talking to Loudon Hamilton, a former Master at Eton, an elegant beau ideal of the Guards officer type, who gave me this story of Frank’s advent in Oxford which appears in an earlier chapter. Lunch ended, and the party dissolved, while we do still talked. The friends I had brought disappeared; I hoped they were happy under Frank’s genial guidance. Loudon Hamilton was absorbingly interesting; more so to me because I have never met a lay-evangelist who so thoroughly and convincingly in every respect does not look the part.

I scrutinised his aristocratic features, listened to his aristocratic voice, watched his aristocratic figure, and said to myself, “Everything about you makes me discredit you in this unsuitable role.” And yet Loudon Hamilton is one of the most completely-surrendered, fully-consecrated needed in the Group. He is a tremendous character. (Read his talk on sin in a later chapter.) He has undergone the most severe self-discipline, has given up “absolutely no end of things”; he is “completely in the saddle,” and allows nothing to stand In the way of his helping other men. He has learned to believe absolutely in God, and trusts himself all the time to guidance by the Holy Spirit.

It was a long time before I understood Frank’s attitude towards newspaper publicity. To Press in variably judged by numbers, and persistently missed the spiritual genius of the work and his great achievements with individual lives. At first the newspapers ridiculed, criticised or made a futile attempt at exposure. Never with anything to expose. The same attacks from every type of assailant are directed against every deeply spiritual movement, stimulated by the undoubted fact that known charlatans are leading quack religious movements both in England and America. The extraordinary thing about the attitude of some newspapers is their complete Inability to distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit.

In rare cases Press criticisms, like individual criticisms, may be occasioned by the high challenge of the teaching; but usually that is not so. The Press know there are more scoffers at, then believers in, a new religious movement, and are generally on the side of the majority, until passage of time, public recognition, and the patronage of the elect two have convinced them of the movement’s success. For the Street of Ink is also the Street of Snobs. Rarely does a newspaper courageously investigate and accept the risks involved in a daring espousal of a new religious stirring. Records show that the work of Moody in the British Isles had powerful and lasting results among countless thousands. Yet to Moody had his baptism of Press opposition at the start. His success was all the more amazing because he arrived in England to find that three persons who had invited him over had all died during the six months elapsing between his acceptance and arrival. So Moody started his great Crusade in the open air with no money and no backing.

It was not until after King Edward VII had sent for the aged William Booth and congratulated him on his work for the submerged tenth that one dignified English newspaper would print the word General without quotation marks.

I heard some of the pioneering experiences of the first General Booth from his own lips when a guest in his house at Hadley Wood. The blind and aged warrior emphasised his points by thumping my knee with his bony hand.

King Edward asked the old General how he got on with his bishops.

“Sir, and they imitate us!” wittily retorted that General, thinking of the Church Army. A remark which tickled King Edward. But before that interview had taken place in Buckingham Palace William Booth had undergone great ridicule and persecution without much support from Fleet Street.

Frank’s desire to work through journalists who understood his ideals thoroughly and could be trusted not to misrepresent them was quite understandable in the light of past experience. Sanity suggested that the best way to help the journalists and the movement was to change the journalists, if they needed changing. As we are mostly a hard-boiled fraternity, nobody is likely to dispute the general need. The percentage of changed journalists is probably lower than the percentage of changed publicans.

Though this circulation of the London newspapers in which I ran the articles on the Oxford Group was small compared with the vast sale we had built up for the newspaper I had just left, we did quite well from our advocacy of the new movement. My staff was tiny, and there was no appropriation for advertising. Yet the circulation jumped immediately, convincing me that had I run the series in a big way with the great resources to which I had been accustomed it would have been another outstanding journalistic success, even though my booming methods might have developed more public interest than the Group leadership could have coped with at that time.

We opened a new series with a batter line on page one announcing:

REMARKABLE RELIGIOUS HOUSE-PARTY THAT OXFORD

Then under the sub-titles:

“OXFORD’S NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT”

“B.A.s WHO LIVE on FAITH and PRAYER

“FIREBRAND COMMUNIST’S CONVERSION”

I stated that: During the past fortnight there has been taking place in three of the colleges of Oxford University a gigantic international house-party that may eventuate in a world-startling religious revival.

Oxford may be the home of lost political causes; it is indisputably the home of several religious awakenings that have stirred the five continents. Already the new religious movement centred in this remarkable house-party is awakening the most somnolent of all sleepers -- the intellectuals. B.A.‘s, M.A.‘s, LLB.‘s, M.B.‘s, honours men and women in great number, and many Oxford Dons are to be seen at the meeting-rooms in the three colleges or strolling together arm-in-arm on the rose-bordered lawns discussing nothing more intellectual or scientific than “Christ the Wisdom and Power of God,” and the need of a daily self-surrendered to Him as the solution of life’s riddle.

Yet the house-party is not forbiddingly highbrow. The mid-brow visitor notices immediately the absence of any sign of intellectual snobbery; indeed, of every human affectation or mannerism likely to drive the curious and pagan inquirer hurriedly back into his protecting shell. For whatever he first thinks of the teaching, he has no alternative but to like the product of the Oxford Groups forming the house-party.

A. healthier, livelier, gayer, more courteous and unselfish band of cultured men and women does not exist. Here at St. Hugh’s, St. Hilda’s, Lady Margaret Hall are groups of young and middle-aged men and women who are taking Christianity to its logical limits and practising the faith, courage and recklessess of the early Apostles.

These five hundred or so, drawn from all churches and no churches, do not stand for a point of view as the price of a safe seat in Paradise, but for a quality of life. They accept the New Testament as marching orders for daily activities, interpreted and guided by the constant directing presence of the Holy Spirit. And all unitedly claim that Christianity, when put into unrestricted practice, becomes not the impossible ideal of popular belief, but the only working basis for a joyous life.

A new automobile may stop, a race-horse may die, the wireless may fade out, and a watch run down. But the Acts of the Apostles continue; they appear to continue impressively in many acts of the groups now gathered at Oxford University, who find in the New Testament the secret of perpetual motion galvanizing any man, any woman, any type, any class, in any age, into unexpected vitality and startling power.

Oxford’s new religious movement is neither Methodist nor Tracktarian; it includes both wings of the Christian religion. Through a unity in common action, many of divers religious beliefs, and more of none, have reached an altitude of Christian experience which may hold the one possible solution for modern world problems.

The man through whom the movement came into being is a buoyant, alert, broad-shouldered, vital man of middle age -- one who gives the impression of holding a reservoir of secret power, which he would explain as “being filled with the Spirit.” He is a single man. I asked him why he had not married. Frank beamed through and around his spectacles.

“Just because I have never been guided to marry.”

Oxford’s new religious movement started because Frank found he was not making converts as the early Christians made converts. What was the matter with Christianity or with Frank? He found out, and evolved a technique to put his discoveries into practice, with such astonishing results that he seems to be capturing the cream of the world’s universities for vital Christianity.

The Group has the blessing of Anglican and Nonconformist Churches. The Bishop of Leicester and Chancellor R. J. Campbell and Dr. Herbert Gray (Presbyterian) are but three of many well-known clerics and ministers visiting the house-party.

Most of the “cloth” present are in disguise. They conform to the in formal nature of the Oxford Group by wearing mufti, although there are no rules as to dress or conduct . Visitors may smoke, drink, do what they like. Yet nobody takes intoxicants, and a visiting lady novelist had the utmost difficulty in borrowing a match from what seemed literally a matchless group.

There are probably a thousand groups scattered around the world to-day, each meeting informally as a little house-party where we soon can be talked naturally without formality. New groups are constantly springing up under the Holy Spirit’s guidance. There is one in Harley Street, and other in Fleet Street, and one for prisoners in a British gaol.

Some of the changed lives are so outstandingly interesting that books containing stories of a few have already become good sellers. Men and women who have seen little in church membership suddenly challenged to surrender everything -- time, money, ambitions -- to God and order their lives by Holy Spirit guidance are constantly capitulating, including those in the higher walks of life.

But there are picturesque captures mingling with the scholars, including James Watt, until recently the firebrand Communist organiser for Fifeshire, a miner, who once lived on the dole and used it to propagate the principles of Bolshevism; who admits that when least satisfied with his own moral code he stifled his conscience stirring up disaffection at open-air meetings, invariably resulting in clashes with the police. This ex-Communist namesake of the inventor of the steam-engine, proud of his sandy hair and his new life, has four months past been living on faith and prayer without the dole, while propagating first-century Christianity.

Being a Scot, he decided to move with caution in his new faith. He carefully tried out all the teachings of the Oxford Group to see if they worked. Discovering that some lived by faith, he and two others, feeling guided to do the same, spent the little money they had in furnishing two rooms in Glasgow. They read the New Testament, prayed, had Quiet Times each day listening to God, moved among the working-class preaching vital Christianity, asked for no money, and waited to see If supplies arrived. Food came, clothes came, money sometimes came. James Watt reached Oxford with a few schillings, and spoke in Mansfield College chapel last Sunday to a congregation of astonished highbrows.

Although It is not the practice of all In the groups to live by faith -- nor does teaching enjoin it -- there are many at the house-partly who are actually doing so. At leas thirty-five of them have been living without two an assured income for several years; some for ten years. All have piquant stories to tell of their faith being tested to the last penny and the last minute; though none has ever gone hungry save through voluntary fasting. Nor do they ask for money or take collections. And this Is an age of insurances and tumbling dividends.

A woman novelist pretty but skeptical, challenged to one of those who lived on faith with the accusation:

“You look mean you live on others?”

He quietly replied: “We all live on other people. What counts is our own contribution to the world. You may work eight hours a day. Some of us work eighteen with no salary.”

Frank has lived on faith for ten years or more. A working day in his life would appal the average businessman. It usually begins about 5;30 every morning. From then until 630 he spends, to quote his own words, “one hour of quiet alone and with the living God” to obtain direction for the day. During house-parties at 7:30 a.m. he attends the first meeting of the Inner Group, some of whom live on faith, and all act on the principle of the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Plans are received and discussed, speakers for the day are appointed, and work is allotted. And so on for a full-length day of speaking, guiding, counseling, until nearly midnight -- meetings to discuss the principles of Christian living, others for Bible study; more for witness, for converts to announce changed lives and to share experiences.

Though it is not claimed that every thought received and expressed is inspired by the Holy Spirit, there are innumerable proofs (when the work is reviewed over a period) of supernatural guidance, the divine leading that might be expected when a body of men and women meet often together courageously obedient to any indication of the will of God. All are receptive to the Inner Voice, which they say is one voice unfolding through them, though not through them alone -- not a five-year plan, but a majestic eternal plan for the redemption of humanity.

The first article so pleased Frank that he posted it to nearly ten thousand people. His enthusiasm amused me, seeing that not many weeks before he thought I was not spiritually capable of writing about the movement. The article was reprinted in part or in full in several American and English journals. It was quoted in several pulpits. I constantly heard echoes of it as I moved about the Western World.

Though Frank knew everybody and everybody knew Frank at the house-party he was never in the forefront of things, and pleasantly evaded my attempts to draw him out for journalistic purposes. So I began to collect stories about him from his friends -- in case he permanently escaped my attempts to put him “on the spot.” Presently I was in possession of such a sheaf of remarkable stories about him that in self-defense he had to verify them and modify them with me. But they still remain remarkable.

At first I liked Frank very much, then not so much, until I began to understand him thoroughly. Afterwards I discovered my experience was similar to that of many of his firmest friends.

Ken Twitchell’s brother Han told me that when he first saw Frank at a Group meeting bustling about, talking gaily to everybody, he disliked him; yet he Is now one of Frank’s best friends and greatest admirers.

And the irritation shown against Frank by some was explained to me by Sam Shoemaker of Calvary Church, New York, who said, “It is like this. You go to a doctor and he gives you medicine. You don’t like the medicine, but it is none the less good for you.”

Moreover, Frank does not attempt to dominate meetings or house-parties are people. He uses meetings as a means for training his young man to become leaders and to carry on the work when he is gone.

“I don’t know how you manage to make your parties go so well without leading them!” exclaimed the Bishop of Norwich to Frank, when looking admiringly on at the Cambridge house-party in Selwyn College in April 1932. Frank smiled acknowledgments, but still kept in the background.

While traveling in a railway train in Canada, just before one of his early visits to China, there came home vividly to Frank the recognition that Christianity has a moral backbone. That moral Bolshevism precedes political Bolshevism. And that to make Christianity vitally productive he could not afford to miss making the moral test with persons who consulted him. To speak with a person about his thought-life is considered indelicate by the old-fashioned and the mock-modest; yet, apparently, the results completely vindicate the practice.

Frank’s object is merely to strengthen the man in his weak spot. He finds it the most effective way of putting religion over to people who have no faith, only problems.

Frank has had many experiences of the wisdom of taking nobody for granted. He may be a clergymen, an elder or a vestryman in a church, a Sunday-school superintendent, and yet need ruthless moral surgery. Frank declines to accept the division of the world into two classes -- saved and unsaved. Christ was emphatic as to which of these two classes -- the professionally religious, and the publicans and sinners -- most needed changing, for with scathing irony He said, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Frank believes the Pharisee Is still as much in need of spiritual attention as the publican. One of the best stories of Frank, told in this connection, is by H. A. Walter, in Soul-Surgery:

In New York City a University student leader came to talk with Frank about entering the Christian ministry. He had just been attending a conference on the ministry at which brilliant addresses had interested but not convinced him. . . . Frank answered his questions to the best of disability, still the man seemed to him unsatisfied. They had finished dinner with very little accomplished, and Frank then invited him to his room for further conversation. In time the student opened a little more and said, “I’ll tell you why I couldn’t enter the ministry. I want my own way too much.”

“Isn’t there anything else?” Frank asked, and the student said, “No.”

And Frank was told what he should say as suspicion became conviction; and, leaning forward, he said quite naturally

“Isn’t your trouble . . . ?”

The barrier of pride crumbled away . . .and a new beginning was made on a sure foundation which transformed the young man. . .. As they were walking together to the Subway, the student said (and it is worth remembering):

One of many examples of wisdom Frank shows in taking nobody for granted.

Frank was attending a conference for students when he heard the story of a piece of life-changing work in which was the inspiration for his future. A young fellow of limited means told how he had worked hard to help a well-to-do freshmen known as Dick (in with a fast set), who was so busy getting into mischief that he was unable to prepare his lessons.

The speaker rose early and worked through his own lessons, and then at 7 a.m. knocked on the door of his prodigal protégé. Naturally Dick was much too tired to wake up; he sleepily murdered his intention to cut lessons for that morning. Nevertheless, the student entered, got him dressed, and so helped him through his preparation that his recitation was the best he had done for a considerable time. After about six months of this assistance Dick observed that he would give the world to be as good a student as his friend. To which he replied:

“Well, so you can.”

“But you don’t know my problems. I’m a different type from you.”

His friend insisted there were no types who could not live the life through the power of his Friend Jesus Christ -- as Dick, too, found from that time onwards.

Frank heard this story told, and said to himself that if a poor student could take so much trouble to help another man, he could surely do the same. Hitherto nobody had told him how. But he decided that his life’s objective must be to win men no matter who they were. Immediately he drove stake in, vowing to win a man before he got home. He thought this would be easy, although it had been a long job for the student.

On the way home, Frank was to visit New York, where he assumed he would have plenty of opportunity. In New York things began to crowd in on him -- those things which are the great enemy keeping us from men -- so that he forgot about his vow until he was on the point of leaving the city. As he was buying his ticket, he suddenly remembered he had not won his man. He grew hot and cold and bothered. How could he go home? He must find one needing changing on the spot. Frank caught sight of a colored porter, in a red cap, looking as fat and shiny as butter. “Here’s my man,” said Frank, and started in, feeling very scared about his first adventure in life-changing.

“George, are you a Christian?”

“No, bawss,” said the darky, startled.

“Then you ought to be a Christian.”

“I know, bawss. Other people have told me that. But I don’t know how, bawss. What’s more, I’m scared.”

Two people scared of the same subject, comments Frank. Everybody seems scared to talk sanely about religion, which is why we fail.

“Why are you scared?” asked Frank, hiding his own fright.

“My brother’s coming down the river from Sing-Sing. He’s got religion up there, and I don’t know how to handle him.” Frank’s own attitude towards George.

“Now, George, you’ve got to be a Christian,” commanded Frank, not knowing what more to say, or how better to express himself at that time.

“Yes, bawss, I will.”

“Thus ended “ says he, “my first crude attempt to bring the unsearchable riches of Christ to another man. Whether he became a Christian or not in time to meet his brother coming out of prison, or afterwards, I cannot tell. But that day the Ice was broken on a new life-work. Another crisis had passed which released me for one of the most glorious adventures is open to man. It showed the me what ordinary men like myself may be privileged to do in life-changing on a big scale.

What is the secret of Frank’s amazing power over himself, over his colleagues, over everyone who knows him

well? Just the power of a positive personality, is the first assumption. Then one discovers that is not so. He is a long way from the domineering character who carries everyone with him by sheer force. Pleasant, suave, obliging, eternally merry, active, strong-willed, if you like. But not an overwhelming force breaking down all obstacles by the ruthless drive of the leader born. Whence, then, the secret of his astonishing power over others? He revealed it to me on the afternoon of Easter Day, during one of his gay chats over tea at Oxford.

I was very busy (Frank began) working eighteen to twenty-eight hours every day. So busy that I had two telephones in my bedroom. Still I was dissatisfied with the results. There was a constant coming and going, but the changes in the lives of my visitors were inadequate, and not revolutionary enough to become permanent. So I decided on a radical procedure -- to give that hour of the day from five to six in the morning when the ’phones were unlikely to ring to listen for the Still Small Voice to inspire and direct.

The only thing that came to me during the first morning hour of listening to the Living God was three words, really the same word repeated three times: The nickname of a happy-go-lucky fellow in the University --

“Tutz , Tutz, Tutz.”

This young man’s grandmother used to call on my mother and say if Frank couldn’t do something to improve her grandson. I had prayed that Tutz would be changed, though until that time I had not the inclination to cross his track. But that same morning the first person I met on the green was Tutz, coming leisurely along, smoking a cigarette and just late for lectures as usual. My first thought was against speaking to him just -- that I was not sure about my message, as the word Tutz might just have come to me out of my subconscious self or from the evil one. But there came again the same insistent message of the morning, “Tutz, Tutz, Tutz.”

Knowing I must not evade, I said to Tutz, “Would you like to have a chat with a football friend of mine who knows how to put the great truths of life and make them ineffective for ordinary people just like ourselves?”

“Yes,” he said, “I’d like to,” showing that fine sense of abandon of the interesting sinner -- always ready for a new adventure.

Now Tutz had come from a normal Christian family, had been confirmed, but the strain of prep school life, and later the University, had veered him from the straight and narrow. He had talent, and did well in Dramatics, in which he always played the girl’s part, and made a great hit with the audience, for he knew just how to swish his train to create the maximum comic effect. When the Dramatic Club went on tour, the show would always conclude with a dance, into which Tutz would put a lot of kick and go. And when he returned later to their private car, he would never forget to say his prayers before going to sleep.

I accompanied him to the football player, and so readily did my friend understand him, his problems, his open faults and secrets sins, and the divided life that goes with them, his sense of defeat and unhappiness, that Tutz made a decision to surrender his life to Christ, the great Friend of sinners. He gave himself to God to have and to hold from that time forward for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death. Later he came to me radiant with his new experience, whereupon I challenged him: “How about telling your friends the story?”

“Tell my friends! They’d all laugh.”

“But you like the laughter of your friends at the play. The more laughter you get to the more you are please.”

The thing I like about interesting sinners like Tutz is -- they have imagination. Give them a chance to look, and they leap. He went back to his club, and found all his friends sitting about the hall waiting for the luncheon-bell to ring. The game or young Tutz breezed in and announced, “Well, I suppose you will all laugh when I tell you what I did this morning.”

Everyone was most interested. Tutz usually had something to say that was spicy and amusing. He may have been pulling the leg of some Don are picking up some good new story. He simply said:

“Well, I decided to change my life this morning.”

Here was news! They waited eagerly. He must tell them all about it. They sat on the edge of their chairs listening breathlessly to the happenings of the morning, and the gong for lunch clanged unnoticed.

One of the auditors -- named Bill -- who had a racing car with room for someone next to him and something in the rumble seat behind, said, “I’d like to see that football fellow.” Tutz said, “Right. I’ll telephone and make an appointment.” He came on to the constantly ringing telephone, “Can Bill, this afternoon?”

“Certainly.”

“When?”

“Any time.”

Frank continued:

That’s the marvelous thing that about the busy college men. They can always make time Immediately for something they really want to do. Bill came to see my friend, and he, too, found the new power that day and became a changed man, with Christ as his King and Guide. Later the same day I was standing with the Chaplain, whom everybody cold Bob. His popularity rested on the short sermons he preached and his interest in sport, but rarely met men’s deepest needs.

Tutz came up with Bill and said to me, “You know Bill’s with me on this.” I said, “Bully for you, Bill.” Bob the Chaplain added that It was about time he made a change. Then Bill rounded on Bob something like this: “We’ve known each other a long time, Bob. I used to admire you for your ’Varsity letter. Then you came up here as our Chaplain and coach and played around with us, but you’d have let me go straight to hell for all you cared about my real need.”

This indictment of the Chaplain by Bill made me shudder (says Frank), as it might very well have been said to me -- that I was looking after men’s bodies instead of their deepest needs -- had I not been listening to God for an hour early that morning, although only three words came, from which to souls were reborn in one day. But that day I found the secret of true education. The Holy Spirit is the Light, the Guide, but the Teacher, the Power. What I am able to do I do through the power that comes in the early hour of morning quiet, waiting and watching for the voice of the Living God to break through the shadows of the night.

There was a sequel to the story of Tutz. Seven years afterwards I was asked to preach for a Rector, who advised, “Make it short, so they will come back for the second service to-night.” As I was about to close I felt the Holy Spirit saying to me, “Tell them the story of Tutz. Tell the story of Tutz.” Seven years’ experience of the Still Small Voice taught me the necessity of prompt obedience. So I told this story. The church was large. There was much stained glass, and the congregation were difficult to see. As I got into the story I noticed a movement on the left to half-way down the church. At the end of the service who should come up to see me but Tutz, Mrs. Tutz, Baby Tutz, and Father-in-law Tutz, all of whom had been in the church without my knowing they were present.

Tutz had held faithfully on for seven active, fruitful years. His wife was on his side too. And his father-in-Law. And Baby Tutz would probably be coming along later.

“That went big this morning,” announced Tutz, as he came up to me, adding, “I wouldn’t have been teaching a Sunday-school class in this church but for your accosting me that morning on the College green.”

And somehow, because I had enlarged my theme with the Tutz story in the morning, the congregation enlarged itself automatically for Evensong (adds Frank).

Frank learned long ago that he must never scold. To scold is not to understand. To scold is the negation of the story of the Prodigal Son. It is the whole question of nagging, he says, that makes the average home uncomfortable. The home atmosphere must be lifted to above that undesirable, all-pervading human sin. One way to do that Is to remember with Kipling never to look too good or talk too wise. Frank has developed the art of looking Into the face of a man and reading like a book the life he is a leading. He has developed the sense of never being shocked.

“I am quite unshockable,” he told me.

“Has a man ever confessed murder to you?”

He laughed.

“I knew you were going to ask that. I have been in condemned cells, but I think I had better not say whether I have heard murder confessions. We mustn’t be sensational.”

I mentioned that a clergymen told me he had listened to confessions of murder by four persons, and I had published these under his name in a signed article in a British publication. Head Frank received such a confession? But he still avoided the question.

If a murderer confessed he might say, “Tell me all about it. How did you do it?”

Frank’s reluctance to disclose another’s secrets is understandable. All ministers of the Gospel hear extraordinary confessions from sinners and treat what they hear as confidential, a practice adhered to in the Group unless the person who confesses himself takes it public.

Fear of a censorious attitude by the listener often prevents honest sharing which might end the chaos in many homes where the ideal life could quite easily be led

Frank believes it possible for sons and daughters to return home and frankly disclose the story of their daily life, instead of contributing to the general conspiracy of secrecy as to the real doings of the day so common in many homes, secrecy inspired by an artificial restraint first introduced by the parents. He knew a mother whose chief hobby was temperance, but all of her children became drunkards. If she had known better how to get into the lives of her children by confessing her own weaknesses, instead of warning them so often against theirs, she might not have driven them all to drink.

According to Frank, the same judicious practice of sharing would prevent many sons and daughters from being driven away from their home by misunderstanding parents. There was as much need for prodigal parents to return to their forgiving sons and daughters who had been driven away by nagging and the unwillingness to share as for prodigal children to return to their earthly parents. Furthermore, there was too much assumed horror by parents at their children’s repetition of their own early sins. Sex problems would cease to exist in homes where parents were honest about their own problems in an effort to help without affectation or censoriousness.

Frank learned the necessity of avoiding scolding when helping George through one of his early problems. George was sixteen with blue eyes and blond hair, a slight figure, a blue suit with a long trousers. He was a double orphan. On the day of his mother’s funeral his two sisters were sent to do an orphanage and, there being no where for George to go, Frank invited him to his own home.

“I tried to make him feel comfortable with me,” said Frank. “I sat next to him, told him my best stories and tried to make him interested. That was Tuesday. On the Friday night after dinner George said he would like to go down-pound. I said, ’Yes,’ but I knew I had not yet got his competence. You can sit at the same table with a person and is a lot of things, and yet not know him.

“The It was a long summer evening. About nine-thirty I looked out the window, and saw young sixteen-year-old George zig-zagging up the street with the pavement not quite wide enough for him. I have watched him as he tried to get into the house. He missed the bell, and so no one came, which made him furious. Then he began to shake the door violently.

“Most people shake the door when they ought to shake themselves. I felt very unhappy about George as I went to the door and let him in. . . .”

When Frank has reached this point In his story, he usually asks, What would you do with George? Some suggest a shower, aspirin, black coffee, soda-water, a school evening. Frank let George severely alone for a while, after making sure that he had gone safely to bed, without George knowing he was looking after him. Nor did Frank go down to breakfast next morning with George, knowing that if he saw the bloodshot eye he might to say something he would regret later. During his Quiet Time guidance definitely came that he should go down to the wholesale millinery store where George worked and meet him there. He asked the Jewish manager if he could see George.

“Certainly, sir.”

George came up a hall-like corridor, and immediately he saw Frank his head fell and he blushed, although Frank had said nothing. Most people, Frank observed, who want to help others seem to think they must publish abroad their sins. He asked George what about lunch together.

George said, “Excellent.”

They went along to a restaurant with the manager’s permission to take a full hour. They started the mail with oysters, George as silent as a clam. They came to the fish, and while picking the bones George said, hesitatingly:

“I was drunk last night.”

Frank heard the admission in silence. Presently George mustered up courage to go a bit further:

“You know It didn’t cost me very much.”

Frank again said nothing, but his comment to me on this excuse was, “There are people who think it mitigates the offense if the sin is not too expensive.”

Presently George said, “You teach a Sunday-school class?”

“Yes,” said Frank, and left it at that.

Frank observes hear that most people would think the occasion was now ripe for a pious talk, which would probably have satisfied their conscience, but not cured George, for his full confidence had not yet been won.

Finally George said, I made up my mind last night as I came up Twentieth Street that If you scolded me I would go out and do it again.”

Most people, according to Frank, are sober enough for some clear thinking even when drunk. As it was, George dropped his drink, turned up at Sunday-school next Sunday, and became a worker with remarkable talents who could do for boys more than Frank was ever able to do, as he was nearer their age and had a ready point of contact. And time George came to be the Secretary of a national chain of Bible-classes organized by a well-known amateur pugilist who belonged to one of the old families.

“I saw Frank from another angle when discussing him with Cleve Hicks, a former Chaplain at Harvard.

“Frank is nobody’s fool,” said Cleve. “And he can deal trenchantly with anyone if needful.”

“Has it dealt trenchantly with you?” I queried.

Cleve has a merry smile and a jolly, well-upholstered figure.

“We were having a Quiet Time, and I was feeling very undisciplined,” Cleve admitted. “I had a lot of fear of the future and had been slack about morning devotions. Frank asked me if I had anything to share among a big Group, and I said, ’ No.’ Frank looked straight at me and said, ’ Cleve, you are sleek and unconvincing.’ “

“And what did you tell him he looked like?”

Cleve regarded me sleekly and replied convincingly, “I said nothing; but I had no fear of him. I knew he was right.”

“On another occasion,” continued Cleve, “we were having a Quiet Time when Frank announced, ‘Cleve needs dynamic change. Hold him lovingly to maximum experience of Christ. Opposition but great fruitage in years ahead.’ “

Cleve was intrigued by this prophecy, and made a note of it. The prophecy is already being fulfilled.

Frank is a stickler for courtesy and good manners. A young man attending a house-party in Holland omitted to thank his host as Frank and team were leaving. On the way to the station, Frank discovered the omission, and insisted on the car being driven back and the host properly thanked. Immediate restitution !

If any of his young men are leading England for another country, he warns them to learn the customs and fit in with the social code of the land they visit. For these international house-parties he always endeavours to see that the people from one country are agreeable to those from other countries, and that everyone Is comfortable.

While he Is sensitive to unfair criticism of his work, and has the settled conviction that the Holy Spirit to is with him, he dislikes arguing about the rightness of his methods of teaching. He prefers to change his critics, thereby giving them a personal demonstration of the practicality of his work. As, for instance, when a gathering of American psychiatrists ask him to come and explain his methods, he used all the time of the interview endeavoring to turn them into Christian psychologists like himself.

If he could have been harnessed to any organisation he would have made a Napoleon of organisers. His Oxford friends told me that when he arrived at a house-party he would ask a few questions and immediately gathered together all points in his well-ordered brain, quickly Infusing more life and hilarity into the proceedings. And withal so simply and so naturally that you were always In danger of overlooking his bigness.

Only after you had left him, and one of his apt sayings -- “We are an organism, not to an organisation” -- or kindly just-right actions recurred to you would you observe, “Ah, Frank said that!” Or, “Fancy Frank doing that just at the right moment!”

Frank insists there is no difference in sin wherever it is committed. He crystallises the point by saying, “Crows are black the wide world over” -- a favourite slogan of the Group. Immorality in Paris or theft in China is just as sinful as immorality or theft in England. But when a team was addressing an audience of Negroes in South Africa, the slogan was changed to, “Grass is green a wide world over.”

I asked one of Frank’s friends if he had ever seen him angry. ”Only once,” he replied. “Frank was addressing a public meeting, and waxed very angry with those selfish, lazy persons who want in their relatives changed to Christians but were unwilling to do the tackling themselves.”

“That’s your job,” is Frank’s uncompromising rejoinder to most of these petitions. A rejoinder which makes him temporary enemies because of its truth. A young than who confessed that his trouble was sex was given the slogan, “Watch your eyes.” Frank believes that Christ meant what He said that “every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” First the look, then the thought, then the fascination, then the fall. It was better to look away, to think of other things, and better still to be actively engaged in changing others, which produced the highest joy in life.

The number of religious books Frank has given away would fill a public library. His traveling-cases are packed with Group publications suitable for different spiritual diseases. He uses so many that he buys wholesale.

He is a religious colporteur freely distributing samples of the commodity most needed by everybody. Those who accept the books usually I allow him to pay for them. Occasionally one more thoughtful will leave him the price.

“Were you guided to leave that?” he crackles.

As you were merely refusing to accept goods for nothing from one who lives on faith and prayer you reply:

“Yes.”

Though you are not quite sure about it.

A point that his friends stress about Frank is the utter selflessness of the man, the absolute identification of his own personality with the intangible development of the Body of Christ on earth. He is perfectly willing to be out of the picture, to be humiliated, scandalised, or, if necessary, to assume and exert all authority. No Group meeting ever goes with quite a swing and vitality as one run by him. Frank is fearful of putting too great dependence on personalities, and is out to modify rather than a result himself or his friends, since the humility is the true Christian characteristic. He believes in perfect freedom of action even without the money to buy it. He has been known to take his last penny out of the bank to help some person whose urgent needs seemed to entitle him to it. When Frank has no money he prays for it.

When first I met Frank he had been praying for money to help a man with whom he was sharing his linen.

The money came.

He prayed with a person who brought It. Frank thanked God, first for telling him the money would come, and then for sending the money.

He is scrupulously careful not to waste money on anything. Frank asks guidance for expenditure on postage. Yet without a qualm he will spend a thousand pounds if he feels he should do so and if he has the money. He emptied his pockets to help a team to visit South Africa to found the Groups there.

Sometimes persons who have little or no money, but are touched I his zeal, express a wish to help him.

For instance, a devoted maidservant in a house in Scotland, where Frank was staying, told him the only way she could help him was to wash his linen, which she would be glad to do.

And so every week when Frank is In England his laundry goes to Scotland and is washed free by “a braw Scott lassie.”

It is impossible to understand Frank at all unless he is thought of as always in God’s presence, listening for direction and accepting power, which he says is the normal way for a sane human being to live. Frank is an example of the psychologically mature men, thoroughly integrated round the highest relationship possible to man. An interesting part of this is the amazingly practical way his guidance works out.

If a man’s life is thoroughly integrated in God, he finds a dominant purpose In which everything fits. It does not mean rigidity, but being so flexible as to be responsive to unexpected opportunities giving further opportunities to serve God, whose ways are not men’s ways, as Paul found when he was going his roundabout way to Rome.

Frank is perfectly undisciplined. He does not wonder voluntarily in his spiritual life: he goes direct to the Source all the time, and expects the Source to come direct to him. Whatever he does he feels must be right, since he is doing what he is the guided thing for him to do.

Through his constant practice of losing his life daily he has come to find himself. He awakes in the morning with the idea that to-day is not his day, but God’s day. Losing his life, he finds it all the time. The result of his discipline is abounding energy -- which he is confident comes from the Holy Spirit. This discipline at the heart of the movement means complete freedom. The paradox of Christianity.

As I thought of Frank living this listening-in life, I felt that it was excellent In theory, but impossible in general practice. And then the former Master of Selwyn (Dr. Murray) lent me the notes of one of his lectures on Prayer, in which I found this paragraph, which gave me a better understanding of Frank:

“For our life here is not meant to be a monotonous and lonely tramp on a treadmill. If It is meant to be a brisk, an intelligent and adventurous march onward towards a goal which, however distant and however dimly discerned, is certain because God has appointed it. But it can only become this in proportion as we hear and respond to the call of God, to co-operate with Him in the bringing in of His Kingdom. And when you come to look under the surface of our Lord’s teaching on Prayer, you see that it is all directed to secure just this harmonious and effective co-operation.

“It was, of course, as we learned especially from St. John’s Gospel, just this kind of life that Jesus Himself lived in the flesh. His meat was to do the will of Him that sent Him, to finish His work. His old being was supported by conscious communion with His Father. His life was brightened by the consciousness of His Father’s approval. He was always watching for a signal from His Father’s hand, so all that He did was not His own doing, but His Father’s. The Spirit of His Father taught Him what to say.”

Frank, following his Master, is always waiting for his Master’s signals.

Everybody associated with Frank, like Frank himself, gets a new quality out of this basis of life, as well as some pain -- the pain of the Cross. Frank gets the disappointments which come when someone for whom he has an enlarged vision fails to obtain to Olympus. But he is supremely human, and is not harden himself through and other’s failure. He is never too busy to think humanly. He lives more of an objective life than anyone I know. That is one answer to any who suggest that he encourages introspection.

He is always thinking of other people. He loves festival’s; his birthday list Is long and growing; he is a great man at any celebration. He is a dominating character, but does not believe in domination, for that kills initiative. Meet him and you may not like him, because he does not appreciate you too much at your present worth, the reason being that he wants to get you to a higher altitude: more spiritual exercise and more spiritual air. For, says he, the spirit, like the body, needs food, air and exercise.

Frank has a way with him for every occasion. A young Presbyterian minister told me that when traveling with Frank he repeatedly noticed his amazing solicitude for the welfare of others. He had seen Frank stopped suddenly in the midst of a discussion to inquire if a fire had been placed in somebody’s room, or adequate preparations made for another’s arrival or departure. When the last Oxford house-party was breaking up, I observed Frank stealing round the dinner-table to some of his friends with fine singing voices arranging a farewell chorus for the housekeeper at Lady Margaret Hall. Under Frank’s vigorous direction they sang heartily:

For she’s a jolly good fellow,

And so say all of us.

Typical of Frank’s spontaneous good-will and rightness of action.

Once Frank wittily amplified to me his teaching about Sharing by saying, “Love’s blind, but the neighbours ain’t.” We may think our sins are securely hidden, but directly we begin to disclose a few, we usually find our neighbour is already aware of them. If anyone doubts this, try it and see.

Frank has a counterpart of his saying about the neighbors in the aphorism, “Read men more than books.” If you really want to help men, you must get oftener Into their lives than into the bookshelves. He wants asked the late Dr. F. B. Meyer (of Christ Church, London), a famous saint and a powerful preacher, how a man could have power in the pulpit.

“By answering on Sundays the questions your congregation ask you on week-days,” was the answer.

That meant they must be getting into the lives for his flock all week to know their real needs when Sunday came.

Sam Shoemaker (Rector of Calvary) told me that when someone accused Frank of having no Interest in the Second Coming he flashed back:

“Why talk of the Second when so many know nothing of the First?”

Not that he is less interested in the Second Coming than other ministers; he urges men and women to cut out sin and keep it out; then they know what it means to hope for an are always ready for the Second Advent.

“I have never seen a man so completely surrendered to God as Frank,” said Sam Shoemaker. “He is the most disciplined personality I know. Everything he has is absolutely given up to God. I have seen him at night seated his chair thoroughly done in with his day’s untiring labours forward God, pale and utterly exhausted. Then the door opens an and walks another opportunity for service. Tired though he is, Frank is on his feet instantly, his face glowing, his merry smile back again, hand outstretched, his whole being a-quiver for further effort for his Master, ready to go on right through the night if he can only help another from shadow into light. He allows himself to be just carried along without effort on a wave of the Holy Spirit.

“He never seems to tire. His life is entirely without conflict or worry, except when deeply concerned over someone else’s problem. Occasionally he gets pained with sin, and can deal drastically with insincerity and compromise. He has amazing patience in the face of the Incredible, persistent and blind stupidity of persons who consult him while unwilling to take his advice and surrender the sin which prevents them from fulfilling their destiny.

“Frank is no quitter. He is never through with a man. They may talk and part. The man may go away interested but unconvinced, and may forget, but Frank doesn’t. The day may come when that man returns, perhaps prepared to go a step further. Frank remembers him and patiently endeavors to help him another step forward.”

I asked Sam Shoemaker is Frank never grew tired of the strain of continuous personal evangelism. Did he never want to break out and paint the town red?

Sam laughed the impossibility. “You bet he doesn’t. Why should he when he is so thoroughly happy? I have never met a man quite so merry as Frank. He once signed a cable to me -- in a time of the greatest stress --‘Yours merrily -- Frank.’ “

Some of the New York toughs have a too-familiar custom of walking by your side in the street, thrusting a revolver at you, and demanding that you “shall out” all your money, in the good old Dick Turpin way. I asked several leaders of the Group what they would do in such a disturbing event. One or two thought it would be better to pay out than to be shot, for in New York those fellows stood no nonsense. The prospect of forty or sixty years in Sing-Sing was not encouraging. Only the fool fought when taken unawares, said my friend the Spider, who knew all about prisons and gangsters because he was changed.

I asked Frank what he would do if accosted by a man with a gun. We were in a London cab making for Bond Street. It was rather a tickler, I felt, even for Frank, who pondered a while. Then he said:

“I should invite him to say the Lord’s Prayer with me. If he were and Battalion I should ask him to say the Paternoster.”

“And suppose he fired?”

Frank gave an enigmatical smile.

“I don’t think he would.”

Frank likes think in the plural when organising a life-changing campaign. He would much sooner take a hundred life-changers into a city than one or two. Musical-comedy touring companies, he argues, take fifty or sixty into a town the other. Why should not the Groups do the same?

He foresees the day when an army of five hundred or more consecrated life-changers may descend on a town or city and set to work winning it to Christ. “Maximum effort -- no loan-wolfing” is his motto.

Though Frank has no money, he also has no worries, and so when he does go to bed, which may be at any time, he is asleep as soon as he has turned out the light.

In the morning he is astir with the birds. He came into my room at Cambridge before seven in pyjamas to wish me good-morning. His face was hidden behind a foam of shaving-soap; yet merriment broke through. That morning Frank told me he not only believed in getting up when the clock crew, but he believed in crowing as well. He was crowing with joy that wet April morning. The Lord was so good to him, he said.

I watched him as he prayed during the seven-thirty Communion service which followed, his eternally happy face lit with smiles.

Frank is one of those rare human beings who really love God.

There were divided opinions in my office as to the new movement. “I hate it!” affirmed to the best writer on our staff. People on the hate what matters most to them. Hatred of religion is often the beginning of faith. Christ came with nothing but love in His heart, and succeeded in stirring up more towering hate and any other men in history.

The time seemed propitious for my long-deferred pilgrimage to the New World, and for fuller investigation of the work of the Group outside my own country. I sent a cable to Ray Purdy, told him of my projected trip, and asked what were the chances of covering the expenses of an American tour by writing. Back came the answer: “Come on a basis of faith and prayer. Check your decision with Frank.” I wired Frank in Germany. He advised: “Go in faith and prayer, and rely on the Holy Spirit’s guidance.” It all seemed very unreal, possessing a mixed flavour of sand and sawdust, tasting more dry than prohibition. Nevertheless, although more interesting as journalism in the working out.

Europe was in semi-chaos when I left. My liner might have been Noah’s Ark floating on the Deluge to ground with me on a new Mount Ararat, the Empire State Building. A panorama of pyramids glided by the porthole admitting me to a titanic city of confusing right-angles and glittering towers. All incredibly thrilling.

New thrills produced queer effects. This is what the thrill of entering New York dated to me:

Out of the storm
And to the quaking East,
Down the Atlantic bend
To a terraced city,
Lofty, geometric,
Fantastic as the dream
Of a drink-maddened tedious.
City of New York:
Dream-city,
Devil city,
City of Satan and God;
Gliding by my porthole,
Skyscraper after skyscraper,
Cluster following cluster;
Tall giants at the Battery.
Elder brothers in their prime,
Then the part-grown children,
Plump infants passing now;
Here come Father and Mother --
Empire and Chrysler,
Monarch of Fifth Avenue
And slim Mistress of Lexington:
Jupiter and Juno
Gazing proudly Down-town,
Excusably admiring
Their grown children,
Sons of an improved race
Of Anaks,
By whose courtesy
I enter
Gratefully
The Promised Land.

For some reason inexplicable, Frank was delighted at this; he learnt it off by heart and quoted it often.

One of the Three Troubadours who had come to see me in my office, Charles Haines, met me at the doctor and introduced me to New York. We spent a delightful week-end -- on the Woolworth Power (Prince George had just been up, said the attendant), the Empire State (too giddy at first to look over, though on the next ascent I dropped off to sleep on the eighty-sixth floor in the warm February sun), Coney Island (America’s great Yarmouth), Bear Mountain (no bears), and the beautiful West Point (America’s Sandhurst). And a jolly day and night at Summit, New Jersey, where John and Alec Beck and their sister “Marge” gave me a true Western welcome as I first entered an American home. So did Grace and Howland Pell, and Peter; and Mr. and Mrs. Biscoe, the ideal married couple.

Later I was hospitably entertained at Bill Wilkes’ home in Summit. While Bill’s pretty wife provided welcome hospitality, Bill sorrowfully offered me much-needed advice on the sin of selling short. Crowded days followed. Charles Haines took me to his fine gold University, once controlled by the War President of the United States, and proudly showed me Princeton from every one of Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points. John Beck drove me up Broadway -- the hundred-mile street -- to Albany, the State capital. I soon observed that America uses knives rarely at table, presumably keeping them for more effective use in the street; I’ve discovered that Babe Ruth was a great turn national character than Al Capone, that millionaires walk about with armed body-guards to save themselves from kidnapping and torture, that Fifth Avenue is undoubtedly the finest street in the world, and that New York made nearly every city I knew seemed painfully provincial. I have seen no more thrilling site than New York City and Harbour from Brooklyn Bridge. In Washington I met an Irishman who affably pointed out the scenes of British defeats!

Before my first week ended I was invited to take part in a tour with an Oxford Group team -- one of those faith-and-prayer trips, this time to the Southern States. There would be some hospitality, I was told. My expenses would approximate a pound a day. And there would be twenty dollars divided between the five speakers at a meeting in the Orange Presbytery in North Carolina. Four dollars apiece for a three weeks’ crusade.

The tour attracted; the work scared; the pay amused. They mentioned romantic names like Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina. Haunts of Raleigh, Lincoln, Lee, Deerfoot, and Daniel Boone! But a religious tour. Traveling with four men who said they had planned the journey under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Four men who lived on faith and prayer. I expected Quiet Times in the morning, life-changing in the afternoon and evening, confessing a coloured past and praying with people about their future and mine, perhaps morning, noon and night. Too much realism for real romance.

We started, four evangelists with and a pseudo-evangelist; three of them -- Sciff Wishard (leader), the ubiquitous Cleve Hicks and Levering Evens -- were fully-fledged parsons; the fourth, John Beck of Summit, an ex-engineer. No apparent difference in the mentality of the four. All kindly, cultured, lovable. None wore clerical clothes and dog-collar as most clergy and ministers do in England.

One of the most entertaining travel companions, and one of the most liked and inspiring, was Cleve Hicks. His round, merry face, all smiles and generosity, is a proof that one can live on faith and prayer and still be free from all worry, even with no money in the bank. To Cleve looks so youthful that one assumes he has only just graduated, instead of taking years ago.

Amazingly successful as a personal evangelist, he was most aptly described to me as “A mischief-maker for God” -- by the Rector of Calvary. Cleve’s good nature is undiscourageable, his industry indefatigable, his humour unquenchable, and his ingenuity for God incredible. And always the merry schoolboy still rejoicing in tuck (sweets) and in English tea at all hours of the day and night.

At the end of a long day’s drive I had gone to bed in a country home in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and was just settling into sleep went Cleve’s merry face stole round the door and in a loud, almost guilty whisper, he called:

“A. J., would you like some tea?”

The American way to an Englishman’s heart! He had been rummaging in the kitchen and found a saucepan and crockery and teapot. He boiled hot water in the saucepan and brewed midnight tea in my bedroom. Whatever good thing comes his way he enjoys with the rollicking zest of his religion; enjoys it most as a means of sharing. Cleve would never have sat lonely in a corner hugging a tuck-basket to himself.

I was descending in the elevator at Calvary Home one afternoon when I again heard that loud, half-guilty whisper: “A. J., I’ve found some tea!” The Vestry were in session. They had just had tea. But there were spare cups and plenty of surplus cake in the adjoining room. Cleve had discovered this, and he wanted company to share his good fortune. I shared while he went upstairs to find another friend, Sciff Wlshard, who came creeping down to participate in the spoils. I suggested that we three should have confessed our theft at the Group meeting that evening, and was informed that Cleve had secured permission before he distributed his invitations.

Although Cleve is a successful evangelist, I can never completely dissociate him from Friar Tuck. The first day I met him he came bounding down to breakfast, saw a tempting morsel near his plate, and asked his hostess (“Marge” Beck) if he could start on it. She smilingly announced that he must wait until grace had been said. “But can’t I say a special grace now?” queried the former Harvard Chaplain, unabashed.

We were nearly two hundred miles away by lunch-time, and hungry with the journey. There were seven of us to lunch, and a smallish pie came in. Cleve okay regarded it with apprehension. “Is that all you’ve got to?” he demanded, while everybody roared. Sciff’s attractive wife produced another pie, and Cleve was content.

At one Thursday night Group meeting in Calvary I heard Cleve Hicks tell the story of how Sam had first intrigued to him with his wonderful narratives of men and women who had been won for God. To capture men alive for Christ! That had become his motto. And he is capturing them out by almost every week. He told of his experiences in South Africa, and how he had attended a Quiet Time held in the Cabinet Room of the Government and of the unceasing fun and adventure and zest of letting God run your life as He wished to run it. Trusting to God for everything was not a worrying, but a stimulating thing to do, he proclaimed, adding that if God let you down you were finished.

“But God never lets you down.” Cleve’s round, beaming face and well-nourished body confirmed his words as he smiled around.

Inseparable from Cleve Hicks is Sciff Wishard, who leared our team round the Southern States.

“To watch that fellow firm up and move forward in discipline since he came into the Group,” says Sam Shoemaker, “is an inspiration! He has developed a knife-cutting edge like steel. What a change, he says, from when he used to stroll negligently about the campus at Princeton as though he were doing the place a favor to be there.”

Sciff is tall and handsome and greatly generous. I heard him tell the story of his contact with and Anglo-Catholic clergymen in America which had some remarkable results. At one house-party he overheard this clergyman saying to another clergyman: “These fellows are getting after the clergy.”

Sciff leaned forward and asked if some of them didn’t need getting after.

“What you mean?”

“I’m a clergyman and I need getting after.”

The clergyman suggested a talk. They spent most of two days discussing the principles of Group. Then one morning the clergyman was trying to steal away quietly when Sciff Wishard encountered him and urged him to stay longer. The clergyman stayed against his inclination. He became a good deal rattled as several others spoke to him. Cleve Hicks asked him to come and read the Bible with him.

“No, I won’t,” he snapped.

“Well, you mind if I pray with you?”

“Yes, I do!” (Another snap.)

But the upshot was he returned home changed, where, through persecution and misunderstanding and loneliness, has been started a work which has changed many lives in town. For several months the Anglo-Catholic, the Methodist, and the Presbyterian ministers there have been holding weekly meetings to share their experiences and needs and sins. And the outcome of this new fellowship was a Group dinner for two hundred and fifty persons of the three churches, with the same number unable to secure seats. The clergyman said he was none less than Anglo-Catholic, but his encounter with Group had made a Presbyterian tolerable!

Both John Beck and Levering Evans had good stories to tell of their experiences, were convincing speakers, and lived the life. Never have I met a quartet of happy travel-companions.

I soon found that the best way to discover North America was to travel south! Our first halt was at the Birmingham School for Girls, a lovely blue-and-white institution nestling In an aerie of the Alleghenies, where a Group had been established. The staff entertained us, and we talked quite freely, shared our experiences, and continued on our way next morning In brilliant autumn sunshine, I still feeling a sort of tame wolf in sheep’s clothing.

There was then such a gulf between my colleagues’ stand-point and to my own. They claimed to have surrendered their wills to God, and always to seek His guidance. I believed in Christ, and thought perhaps I had been led to America. But I wasn’t so sure about it -- as they seemed to be about our trip, for instance.

The first favourable thing about them was there unanimous day of mind; they never squabbled. Once I surprised one taking another aside to discuss something dividing them, and the tiff was over immediately. They had to act thus because the Group say, “Sin is that which keeps a man from God or from his fellow-men.”

At Wooster, Ohio, we explored the Presbyterian College, and then, a terrific heat, to the flat, curveless road to Indianapolis. Here we are welcomed by the First Presbyterian Church of the city, and entertained most hospitably by Sciff Wishard’s parents and brother William, who figure prominently in the medical life of America.

I had heard some amazing stories of the early settlers from Skiff Wishard’s then venerable Father. Though over eighty, he had just performed an operation with the sure touch of a surgeon half his age. A movie was taken of this notable performance.

One of his grandfathers, said Mr. Wishard senior, had been chased in a canoe by Red Indians and shot. His body fell in the Ohio River at Pittsburgh (then called “Fort Pitt”), and the Indians swam out to get his scalp. A beautiful collie dog lunged in to protect his master’s body, and was also killed before the Indians secured the scalp. Those were the days when men were men.

But the story he told of another grandfather and his sister was still more thrilling. As boy and girl, both under ten years old, with their mother and a baby, they had left Scotland to join their father in New York. They were a board any sailing-ship which took the usual three months to cross the Atlantic. The hardships of that journey were so great that mother and infant died on the voyage. At last land was cited, and brother and sister were put ashore, but they could see no signs of their father. The girl began to weep, and the Inevitable elderly stranger inquired the reason. They explained.

“Did you say you were to me your father in New York?” asked the elderly inquirer.

They were sure of it.

“But this Is Philadelphia,” announced the stranger.

Their skipper, mistakenly or purposely, had deposited them at the first port he touched and made off.

There were no telegraphs and those pioneering days, and all efforts to trace the father were unsuccessful. So were the efforts of the father to trace the children. The elderly stranger adopted pair and they grew up. The Revolutionary War broke out and the young man enlisted, went through unscathed, and was being demobilized at Pittsburgh when one of the officers called him into his room and asked if his name was McGohan.

The young soldier regarded the officer intently. Then, “Father!” he impulsively exclaimed.

His great-grandson was my host at Indianapolis.

It was while we were staying In Indianapolis that things began to happen which made me personally a little uncomfortable. The Presbyterian minister invited us to take his pulpit in the evening and talk frankly to his congregation on a frank subject. Not about our journey, nor the principles of the Oxford Group (on which I could have put up a possible talk), but our personal experience of Jesus Christ. Though I had sat judiciously by and heard this being done by Oxford undergraduates, I had no great desire to do likewise. All write perhaps for our traveling and practiced foursome. Probably they liked it. But something unusual for the pen in the pentagon. Twenty-five years before I had spoken in a church pulpit. During the years that followed I had been everywhere but in a pulpit.

Nevertheless, during that time I had undergone a remarkable religious experience which the Group would describe as an experience of Jesus Christ. And as others were standing up telling about their experiences, I could see no honest reason for dodging a possibly Christian duty. So I told the story of how before I went to Fleet Street I had been interested in Christianity, but, in the mistaken belief that I could do better as a journalist without It, I had let what I held slip overboard. Later I found myself beaten at three salient points -- my private life, my pocket, my ambition. At one period those points converged into a crisis. In adversity, I sought consolation and also something to still an intolerable and frequently recurring ache of the spirit. That spiritual ache had been more are less constant throughout life, asserting itself at the most unexpected moments -- when confronted with panoramic beauty, watching an emotional scene in a play, reading great literature, or when breaking the had the higher laws of the Universe. Afterwards I came to know it was the natural longing of the finite for the Infinite, since man’s true environment is God.

At this time I was a “confirmed unbeliever,” arguing that my brain had come to me before the Bible, and as my brain could not honestly accept the Bible, I felt I was behaving quite sensibly in disparaging religion. Then one day I thought I would read the Bible again. Just as literature. But with a mind quite open to be convinced if I read anything convincing. Critically I read through the Gospel of St. John, not knowing then that some theologians have their doubts about this non-Synoptic writer. What a superb journalism was that simple and solemn opening! “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God. . . . All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. . . . He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not.” Who in modern Fleet Street could open a story of such magnitude better than the simple Hebrew fishermen? Yet when I had finished reading the whole Gospel, I concluded that St. John was an unconvincing witness, a poor recorder -- the gaps in his narrative would make a cub reporter blush -- and an undeveloped poet. His testimony confirmed my unbelief. But I read St. John again -- as a fisherman-poet. How far I progressed in my second reading I do not remember, but I do know that at one stage, in some surprising manner, his words suddenly sprang to life!

A bright incandescent light seemed to have been turned on in my brain. It lit up every doubt-darkened corner, completely driving away all the grim shadows of unbelief that had haunted me for years. A bright white light -- soothing, cleansing, convincing. Possibly, I thought, a ray of the same light that shown about Saul on the road to Damascus. Besides dispelling, illogically perhaps, the cynicism and skepticism of years, it had a positively physical effect. There was a certain explosiveness about its manifestation which produced the same soothing result as when menthol is rubbed into an aching forehead. Once before I had felt a similar light bursting in my brain, giving unexpected relief from a long-continued worry, accompanied by the feeling that all was well, that some unseen power was watching understandingly, and although I had been breaking God’s laws, the benevolent Unseen perfectly understood, sympathized, but completely disapproved.

Having those two experiences In mind, I was naturally interested to read the following In a New York evening newspaper when I returned from the tour with the Oxford Group team.

“Readers who follow John Masefield will find a little essay bound up in the covers called Poetry. It was originally an address, and can be read in a quarter of an hour. In it Mr. Masefield defines poetry as an inner illumination, a certain ecstasy of understanding, a flash which comes when the poet communes with the source of all life outside of himself, the supreme being of the Universe. After describing Shakespeare, Dante, AEschylus, and Homer, Mr. Masefield writes:

“ ‘ Brave, proud, gentle and blind alike had access to an illumination which came within their beings, as sunlight comes within the sea.

“ ‘ I believe that this illumination exists externally and that all may know it in some measure, by effort or through grace. . . . Those who deny it can never have felt it. It is so Intense that, compared with it, no other sensation seems to exist or to be real. It is so bright that all else seems to be shadow.

It is so penetrating that in it the littlest things, a grain of sand, the flower of a weed, or the plume upon a moth’s wing, are evidences of the depth and beauty and unity of life.’ “

The writer in the New Your World Telegram who quoted this made the skeptical comment: “Such definitions interest me chiefly for the manner in which they are spoken. They do not convince me. If Mr. Masefield adheres to this type of mysticism, well and good, but he does not alarm anyone by declaring that ’those who deny it can never have felt it.’ That is the usual excuse of a devoted priesthood when its arcana are challenged. Mr. Masefield’s definition Is the essence of a beautiful dream and nothing more.”

But I know better. What England’s Poet Laureate said of the illumination that flashes within our beings as sunlight comes within the sea, so bright that all else seems shadow, so intense that compared with it no other sensation seems to exist, or to be real, had flashed in me on two memorable occasions.

The life of that world, said John Masefield, was all ecstasy of understanding; all that instant perception and lasting rapture which we knew as poetry. Not as poetry did I touch the life of that world, but as consolation and conviction in a religious quest when reading the Gospel according to St. John. That flash from the world of Divine order and beauty -- the Kingdom of Heaven -- told me convincingly, what I cannot prove to anybody else who does not picked up the same flash, that the Beloved Disciple had really walked and talked with the Son of God.

That was the true story of my experience I told when addressing the congregation of that Group Meeting in Indianapolis. The others told their stories, all different, all convincing, and sat down, each of us following the simple practice of the early disciples, who publicly witnessed to their own experiences and left the work of conviction to the Holy Spirit. After the service we were surrounded by members of the congregation, who expressed deep interest in what we had said to them, re-emphasizing the Group contention that an audience is always awaiting those who will tell the simple truth about themselves for the spreading of Christ’s Kingdom.

Yet I somehow felt more pleased that persons had been ready to listen to me than to hear about Christ’s Kingdom. When the devil enters the pulpit his name his name is Vanity.

Social visits in Indianapolis further showed how deep was the interest of the individual in personal, rather than formal, religion, when men and women preachers and elders, instead of standing on a self-erected pedestal of virtue, are prepared to tell the truth about themselves as Paul did, so that others, hungry for peace and serenity in a jaded world of pagans, seeing themselves in another’s mirror, may also be inspired to develop along the lines of their true destiny.

True, a delightful Society leader petulantly expressed regret when one of our party took off his mask and admitted having once cribbed at a college exam, although he head since made restitution. Yet she was swift to add that we possessed a quality of tranquility, unlike many of her guests, that we need not fidget, and that we were enviably united.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

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