For Sinners Only

by A. J. Russell

During my American travels with Group I was constantly hearing the comic name Bill Pickle in relation to some marvelous work that Frank had done at Pennsylvania State College, following his vital experience in a Cumberland church.

I intended to run over to the College to meet to the famous Bill Pickle, but was prevented by circumstances. So I induced Frank to tell me the whole story in his own inimitable way with the fullest details, for it is something of a spiritual classic. A rollicking story, it captivates all sorts -- Pagans as well as Christians. Frank started and established the Group in Oxford by telling a series of stories such as this and inspiring others to do the same. Frank is a born raconteur. His aim is to inculcate principle while keeping his narrative as bright and as human as possible. Principle with interest.

One of the forces in the religious world, John R. Mott, invited Frank to take charge of the religious education in Penn State at the time when there was a difference between the staff and the students, who did not seem to understand each other. The atmosphere was antagonistic, suggestive of those student strikes which have since developed in many parts of the world -- Bucharest, Santiago, Germany, China, America. The life of the students reflected the godlessness of the place. There was a great deal of drinking. There were nineteen drinking-parties in progress on the night of Frank’s arrival; so much drink was consumed that the proverbial battleship might have been floated on it.

The man who supplied the drink is the hero of the story, boasting the priceless name of Bill Pickle, a bootlegger, employed by a local doctor by day and by the students by night. Frank used to see Bills stealthy figure sneaking about the spiral staircases leading to the students’ rooms at all hours of dark night’s -- a Deadwood Dick in University life. These times, of course, all the faculty were in bed; only Bill and the students were awake and merry.

Bill is the son of a Colonel. He has a strong, stocky figure, a terrible walrus mustache, and looks a roaring pirate. Bill soon knew of Frank’s arrival, and expressed immediate dislike of him. He published abroad his desire to knife Frank, that usually darted into a side-alley when there was a chance of an encounter.

Frank surveyed his difficult new job. To turn this College Godwards -- there was the problem. The solution, if he could find it, would be a miracle.

His sought direction, and the names of three men came to him. Later these three proved to be the strategic points in changing that. They were:

(1) Bill Pickle the bootlegger.

(2) A cultured and popular graduate student possessing every physical grace and charm.

(3) The College Dean, a frank agnostic, whose wife was an earnest Christian.

The graduate student brought a letter of introduction to Frank which disclosed that he was the son of a Supreme Court judge and grandson of a State Governor. He seemed to be clever, but dissatisfied. Frank felt that this handsome and influential youth should be approached with intelligent restraint and nonchalant reserve.

They became friendly. The student frequently visited Frank’s house, and showed his fondness for the Southern cooking, including the inevitable fried chicken and “beaten” biscuits for breakfast.

Often they would ride together, but for a long time Frank said nothing about the things that meant most to him. Meanwhile the student was getting more interested and pleased with the atmosphere that Frank radiated. One sleety day, when the streets were slippery with ice, and the rain was frozen on the telegraph wires, the student came into his room and said, “Let’s ride.”

Frank said, “All Right,” although concerned for the horses’ legs, feeling they could not possibly venture out.

For fifteen miles they walked their horses in the cold, biting wind, and then settle down into a hostelry for a good dinner, followed by much hot coffee over the fire. The driving wind had made them drowsy; they retired and would soon have been asleep, had the coffee not begun to act. Frank heard the clock strike eleven,

Twelve, one, too, when his friend said:

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Would you like to talk?”

“Yes. What about?”

“Will you tell me what Christ means to you?”

At last Frank’s chance had come. He had played his cards right. They talked on and on for several hours, and finally the students said: “I’m not going to me a Christian.”

“Who asked you?” rejoined Frank.

“You didn’t. I know you are much too prudent to push religion down anyone’s throat.”

Then Frank asked him what he believed.

“Confucius,” came the unusual answer.

“Wonderful!” Said Frank, deciding to humour him. “Tell me about Confucius?”

Frank says his friend did not seem to know much on that subject. But Frank had been in China, India that Confucius said he could tell people how to be righteous, but he hadn’t the power to make them righteous. Moreover, he had been to Confucius’ grave, and been entertained at tea by the seventy-sixth descendant of the Chinese sage and seen seventy-seventh descendant on the day when he had to wear four coats because of the cold. But Frank’s principle is “Argument is not profitable, but possession is.”

“So I said to him: ‘Try your Confucianism on a chicken-thief, who is a friend of mine, his wife and five children, and see how it works.’ ”

The student agreed. He gave money to the chicken-thief’s wife, who washed one herself thin over the wash-tub; more money to keep the eldest daughter off the streets; paid for picnics for Elizabeth, Robert and Danny the dwarf, a town delivery boy. (Recently Frank was that Danny’s grave. “He died a beautiful Christian.”)

The student spoke to the chicken-thief himself, but to no purpose. This worthy soon found himself in jail for catching chickens by the neat method of pressing a sponge soaked in chloroform under their beaks and whisking them noiselessly away when stupefied. He was accompanied by one of his sons, who worked with him. And for two months the student worked with the family, read to them, gave them money and treats, and tried to behave as their true Confucian friend.

At the end of that time he came to Frank and utter despair and said, “I give up. The more I give them the more they want.”

“The reason being,” says Frank, “that he was trying to solve the whole problem of social service without Christ, and treating the immediate surface conditions without touching the root cause.”

And how the Confucian said he was willing to try Frank’s plan

“What is my plan?”

“I suppose you pray about it?”

So Frank suggested that, since he had been unsuccessful with the chicken-thief, now in prison, they try praying for Bill Pickle the bootlegger, who was free and very much alive.

The student readily agreed.

“Very well, you pray,” said Frank, still believing in getting other people to do the praying whenever possible.

The student prayed: “Oh God, if there be a God, helpless to change Bill Pickle, Mrs. Pickle, and all the little Pickles.” And unorthodox prayer. But this unorthodox prayer soon brought an answer.

The next day was a holiday, and Bill went away to play baseball with a team which he managed. That evening the Confucian and Frank were on their way to dine with the Chinese Minister when, passing through town, they saw Bill celebrating the victory of his team by challenging everybody to fight. He had consumed much liquor.

“There’s Bill!” whispered the Confucian.

“I see him,” said Frank, as though having no time to waste.

The student protested: “We’ve and praying for him. Now let’s do something.”

“All right. You do it.”

“No chance! You do it.”

One Frank reaches this point in the story he and injects a little principle by asking, What would you do in this situation? Here was the problem of the wife and the drunken husband. He once asked this question of a Chinese friend, who said, “Approach him from the blind side.”

Fearing that the muscular Bill would regard him as the Heaven-sent answer to his challenge to fight, and that, possessing a good-sized noes, he might lose the round, Frank approached Bill from his blind side, putting a firm hand on his biceps as a measure of protection. What should he do the next? The thoughts flashed: “Give him the deepest massage you’ve got.”

“I looked him straight in the eye,” says Frank, “and whispered, ’Bill, we’ve been praying for you.’ “

To his surprise, Bill melted. The fight when clean out of him. Tears came. He pointed to a church. “See that church over there?”

“Yes, Bill.”

“I was there when the corner-stone was laid. And there’s a penny of mine under it.” There seemed to come before Bill at that instant a memory of his home and his early associations through the perspective of his ill-spent years. “Do you know, I had a good mother and used to be happy once?”

Frank was glad to hear it, followed up his advantage and introduced the Confucian.

“Here’s my friend. He’s praying for you too.”

“That’s decent of him. He’s a gentleman.” Whereupon Bill and invited them both to call on him at any time at his house on the hill, which a student wag, adapting the name of a famous preserve, had appropriately christened “Heinz Heights.”

“Any time’s no time, Bill,” said Frank, pressing his advantage further. “Make it some time.”

“Then come next Thursday night at seven.”

As no real duties in life conflict, according to Frank, the two went on to their dinner with the Chinese Minister.

Thursday night came, and the two went up to see Bill in his unpainted house on top of “Heinz Heights.” Anticipating them, Bill had also anticipated his customary Saturday shave by a few days. When they arrived, all the neighbours (indivisible themselves) work out gazing at the visitors through their fences, assured they had come to change the redoubtable Bill, who is now ill at ease, as most people are when they think another has come to convert them. But as they talked of little besides the weather, and said nothing about religion, Bill lost his self-consciousness, and they departed good friends. The bootlegger was able to go straight out and boast to his neighbours that they hadn’t changed him. Nevertheless, Bills spiritual appetite was whetted. He developed a deep hunger for fellowship with the two friends who are praying for him.

Build knew a good deal about many things beside liquor, and all there was to be known about horses. One day the Confucian took him to see a horse-show on the college grounds. Be spent all afternoon talking horses, and Bill voted it to be his best afternoon ever. To think that a young gentleman should spend all the afternoon with him talking about horses!

Meanwhile a remarkable change was being effected In the young Confucian. Bill’s new attitude suggested to him that God was really answering prayer, and so when he prayed he left out the proviso ”if there be a God” from his invocation. The following Sunday a Bishop arrived at Penn State and nine hundredth students turned up to hear him. During the meeting he inquired of Frank if he should ask the students to make a decision. Had the Bishop asked him outside, he would have said, “Decidedly not, as a State School, it is not a Christian institution.” In those days Frank’s idea of the Holy Spirit was limited to a kind of five-by-eight picture, and he did not expect Him to be very active at a meeting address so formally. Nevertheless, the Bishop went ahead, and the unexpected happened. After the usual tense silence, the first person on his feet to announce the surrender of his life to Christ was a young Confucian. As he was the most popular man in went College, this created a stir, and one could feel the whispered surprise circulating round the building as his example was followed by eighty others.

Frank’s comment on this situation is that a great many people would feel this was the end of a successful meeting. That was where the old evangelism sometimes collapsed. The changed student came to Frank after the meeting and said he didn’t know anything about the Bible, prayer or winning people. What suggestion had he to make?

“We will spend the summer together,” replied Frank.

So they went writing through the great national parks of America, a peripatetic school of Christian development. On the way home they stopped at New York, where Frank bought a fine new beaver hat, usually expensive for him. He was wearing this magnificent that on night of his return when he met Bill Pickle, who immediately showed him in a password that he liked the hat as much as its owner did. Instead of greeting Frank and inquiring as to how he had spent the summer holiday, Bill walked silently and admiringly round him.

“Where did you get that hat?” he demanded.

Smiling, Frank told him.

“How much did you pay for it?”

Ashamed, Frank told him.

Bill observed that he could keep his family for a week on the price of that hat, adding that he would do anything for one like it.

Frank was on the spot for the opportunity. “The hats yours, Bill, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

Bill waited, breathless,

“That you go with me and a few others to a made student convention at Toronto.”

Of course Bill was delighted to do that. He would go at once and get leave of absence.

“There you are, Bill,” said Frank, handing him the prize.

Bills sprinted away with it coveted hat on his head.

Next morning Frank so Bill in his doorway.

“Can’t go,” said Bill is dismally.

“Too bad! Why’s that?”

“Nothing to put my clothes in,” said Bill sheepishly. Evidently this was one of the noes that meant yes.

Frank offered Bill a bag, which he refused, saying the people on the hill would see to that.

Presently the Dean arrived and said, “I hear you are going to take Bill to Toronto?”

“Yes,” said Frank, not knowing what frame of mind the Dean was in, and thinking he would be regarded as not a fool for Christ’s sake, but merely foolish. But the Dean was in favour. Bill’s daughter was a maid in his house, where, said the Dean, his wife did the praying for the family. This excursion of Bill’s he believed to be in answer to his wife’s prayers. He thought a miracle was impending. As he left, the Dean asked, “Who’s going to pay for the journey?”

“I shall,” said Frank.

But then Dean insisted on paying. “Do you think the other fellows will object to Bill in the team?”

Frank thought not, and the next morning the party of nineteen (including Bill) left for Toronto. Bill’s wife and most of his twelve children were at the station in full war-paint to see him off. The occasion was impressive. So was Bill’s entire. He wore the beaver hat, leggings, and a stock-tie which made Frank think of a poodle’s legs crossed. He carried a little cheap bag made of alligator skin containing a few articles he needed for the journey.

What were Bill’s motives In going to Toronto? asked Frank. Of course, one motive was hat. Then he had heard that the liquor was good in Toronto. The trip was another attraction. And the good-fellowship. All natural reasons. There was a fifth reason which Frank discovered later. Bill was longing for a fur overcoat to match the BU perhaps, and somehow expecting that the calm on his way in Toronto.

Frank tried to make Bill feel at home on the first stage of the red railway journey, and suggested that he must have something to eat. For some odd reason, Bill seemed against food, and told Frank not to be extravagant when he saw him taking a cup of coffee and a bun. Bill was planning how to get a drink when they arrived at the first junction. He is eager I looked over the party of seventeen, add to last alighting on one to whom Bill used to sell liquor.

“There’s Bonehead,” thought Bill. “I know he’s thirsty.”

When Bill saw Frank was busy with the tickets, he decided to follow Bonehead. The latter, true to Bill’s surmise, made straight for the swinging doors. He saw there was a bar only and no dining-room, the place he really sought.

“This is no place for us,” said Bonehead.

Bill thought exactly the opposite, and said so. But too Bonehead resisted and through that resistance, said Bill later, he laid the foundation-stone of Bill’s Christian life. For if Bill had taken one drink, he would have required many others to quiet that particular train thirst he had developed. He consumed a heavy lunch, and the party started safely on their way again, the bootlegger now firmly convinced that it was no use planning for himself, because everybody had their eyes on him. Here Frank comments that “Bill’s awakened conscience was at work.”

The evening meal was served in the dining car, and one of the party, a former agnostic, suggested to Frank that he thank God for the food.

“All right. Goal and head,” said Frank.

Here Bill suddenly intervened.

“What’s the matter this time, Bill?”

“That fellow” -- pointing to the former agnostic -- “has spoiled my dinner.”

At the first Frank thought he meant the coloured waiter, but Bill insisted that it was the man who had said grace. He didn’t bargain for that sort of thing in a College party. It recalled his early home and it took away his appetite.

Bill jibbed again later when they reached Niagara Falls and he found them were going to spend the night in a temperance hotel! Of all places! The bootlegger was told that It would be less expensive, but he shrewdly doubted. How could a hotel-keeper make his place pay without a bar? He must get his expenses somehow.

Besides, what would his fellow-bootleggers say if they heard he had slept in a temperance hotel?

Frank good-humoured him, took him up to his room and showed him how to operate a folding-bed, of which he was also chary at first.

“Now, do want to a bath?” With

The bootlegger’s walrus mustache supported the glare in his eyes.

“What! What In the winter-time for?”

“Why not?”

“Do you want me to catch my death-cold?”

“No, Bill.”

“Don’t you know we sew up down our way in November and don’t unsew again until March?”

Still a little suspicious of the folding-bed, Bill tucked himself In for the night, when Frank, coming in again, told him he had forgotten something. Bills searched under his pillow for his watch and money and then demanded, “What?”

“Prayers.”

“I can’t do them things.”

“You come out and I’ll help you.”

Weak in this form of exercise through long disuse, and suffering from temporary ague, the bootlegger came

out of his folding-bed and knelt down in his night-sure.

“You begin,” said Bill.

“Our Father,” began Frank.

“Our Father,” followed Bill.

“Who are in Heaven,” continued Frank.

“Who are in Heaven,” continued Bill, and then stopped his mentor with, “I used to know that.”

“All write. Go ahead.”

“No, you go ahead. I’ll follow after.”

And so they went through the Lord’s Prayer, after which Bill re-entered his folding-bed sighing hugely as though to say, “It’s hard work living with these Christians.”

Next morning they started again for Toronto. The Porter was carrying the luggage them Frank saw the bags of the ex-Confucian plastered with labels of the Niagara Falls Temperance Hotel. There were at least five of them on the handle, and crowds everywhere. The student had been one of Bills best customers; he turned to Frank and asked if he had done that. Frank said, “No,” and smiled. Bill was playing ‘possum grandly. Presently Bill owned up. They had reached a point of contact when Bill felt so much at ease that he could play with them. The first wall which separated Bill from the classes was breaking down.

They had settled themselves in a Toronto hotel when the time came for the first meeting of the convention, but Bill didn’t think he would go.

“What are you going to do?”

Bill thought he’d like to go and look at the fur shops. Perhaps he could find something to match the hat. The additional motive that had brought Bill to Toronto was now clearly revealed. Frank said Bill must go to the meeting, cajoling him with the news that the Governor-General and six thousand people would be present. Bill replied that the Governor came sometimes to Pennsylvania State College, and he wasn’t any more interested in him than he and Bill. Presently he agreed, on condition they sat in the rear seat. Arrived in the hall, Bill showed no signs of interest in the meeting save to count the number of people present. Not unlike a great many churchgoers, who prefer to figure out the profits of the week while waiting for this service to end, says Frank.

But Bill’s attention was quickly arrested when the second speaker came along, a coloured man, who, according to Bill, was so black that charcoal would make a white mark on him! All the time he was speaking, Bill was nodding in agreement or registering violent disagreement, to the amusement of everyone around him. But Bill was blissfully unmindful of anyone saved the coloured man, who was hitting him between the eyes with every shot. Afterwards he accused Frank of taking him there specially to hear the colored man, and of telling the speaker about him. Nevertheless, he rather liked that sort of speaker. A Group meeting held later in their hotel added to Bill’s reviving interest in religion, especially the story told by a football player of how a foster-child had disowned his foster-parents, which somehow greatly moved the bootlegger. When this man had finished, Bill jumped up like a shot from a gun, as Frank puts it, and announced that he wanted to say something.

“Go ahead, Bill. It’s a free country, “observed Frank, not knowing what on earth Bill would do next. Speaking with great solemnity, Bill announced:

“Mind an old man of sixty-two, and I’ve decided to change my life. I have grandchildren, and I can’t bear to think of them turning on their grandfather like that foster-child I’ve just been hearing about, because all my life I’ve been disobedient to my Heavenly Father.”

After that outburst Bill went out of the room, beckoning Frank to follow him. “For what?” asked Frank.Bill desire to his help in writing a letter to his wife and son, as he wanted them to know at once of his determination to change his life.

From that time, onwards Build developed amazingly. He became one of the great figures of the Convention: one of those miracles which make conventions occasionally interesting and memorable.

After a strenuous week they returned to the College, but when we reached the junction were met by a liquor missionary supported by a pair of Bill’s old-time friends, two quart bottles of liquor. Bill’s old associates, finding It impossible to believe that he had changed his way of life (for the news had flared through the town), had brought two bottles of the choicest for his benefit. As Frank saw the tempter surreptitiously handing Bill a bottle, his heart wobbled. As Bill let It slip through his fingers, he gave great sigh of relief. Its smashed on the pavement. The next attempt was more subtle. The liquor missionary unstopped the second bottle and held it under Bill’s nose so that he could savour the old familiar bouquet. This time Bill gave a swift tap on the missionary’s wrist, and again the bottle of the best was smashed to smithereens.

Bill’s change and Bill’s resistance to the tempter were the talk of the town for a long time to come. Would this astonishing miracle last? Even the clergy weren’t enthusiastic in believing that it would. One told Frank that he did not want Bill in his church.

“Don’t worry,” said Frank. “He likes a church where he can take part and talk back if necessary and say an occasional Amen or Hallelujah.”

On the next Monday, which Bill was to stand with Frank, he came In looking very aggrieved.

“Heard what’s happened?” he growled.

Frank tried to waive the question aside, for gossip had already brought a whisper of trouble.

“They won’t have me In church,” stormed Bill.

Frank felt he had been stabbed. Now surely Bill would not be able to hold out.

“Don’t worry, Bill,” he soothed, thinking hard.

“I’m not,” said Bill, and then suddenly announced: “We’ve got a church of our own all planned. We want you to take charge of It.”

Hear Bill produced a list of nineteen men, mostly his old bootlegger friends, whom he had already collected under his new Christian banner. They were to be the nucleus of a new church to meet in the old porter’s lodge. Frank is still in possession of that treasured list. Before consenting to be the minister, Frank said that Bill must find out from the others what they wanted him to speak about.

“Don’t worry,” said Bill. “We’ve thought of that!”

“Well, what is it?”

“Thee Apostles’ Creed.”

Of all subjects for a bootlegger to choose!

And so, Saturday night after Saturday night, Frank met with Bill the bootlegger and his old associates, one of whom was once so accomplished a swearer that one could almost smell the sulfur. Saturday night was chosen to avoid conflict with church services. Everything went well with the Apostles’ Creed talks until Frank came to the part about Christ going down into Hell, at which Bill jumped up and suddenly interposed:

“I believe everything so far, but that’s too much.”

Apparently the preacher had overstepped himself. For a time Frank and Bill cogitated on way out, until at last Frank said:

“Welcome, how do you explain it?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill, “I guess He went down there to clean things up.”

That answer satisfied everybody. Peace again. They proceeded. But the upshot of those Saturday nights was that all attending eventually became forces in the Church life of the district, including Bill, who grew into a good Wesleyan Methodist, and occasionally turns up at one of Frank’s house-parties to confirm all the details as Frank narrates the true story of the change in Bill Pickle the Bootlegger.

The miracle of Bill’s changed life, and the changed lives of his family and friends which followed, become a standing witness to the Professors and the graduates who were in the habit of returning yearly to celebrate the liquor they once received in college from the hands of Bill. But Bill now refused to grace their parties if they had liquor. As they preferred an interesting character, even to the exclusion of the liquor, they fell in with Bill’s new ideas, and so Bill appeared and told his old-time stories with a new zest and a new restraint, on a new plane.

Bill still treasures the hat which he earned at Toronto, and though he has retired from work -- he is over eighty -- he still remembers the mighty movement of the Spirit of God which spread throughout the college and other colleges that season when he was changed.the

Not only were Bill Pickle and the Confucian and the Dean, the three strategic points of that College, transformed through personal evangelism, but before Frank left there were over twelve hundred men in voluntary Bible-study. Thus, after three years’ work, it was no longer good form to have drinking-parties. Athletics improved and there were winning teams. The scholarship, too, improved, and a new relation between Faculty and students changed the old-time factional spirit of the campus.

The change in Bill’s family life was equally marvelous.

“What a dinner Bill’s wife used to cook for the reformed bootlegger and their children!” exclaimed Frank.

Most significant factor of all was the improvement in the college discipline. So radical was the change that the salary of an extra disciplinary Dean was saved, and Bill, the ex-bootlegger who knew everybody, was given a seat on certain disciplinary committees --for maintaining order!

I had heard from Garrett Stearly and read so much about Calvary Church and its dynamic Rector (the Rev. Samuel M. Shoemaker, Jr.) that I was eager to see what both were like. I knew that Sam Shoemaker was one of Frank’s early captures in China, and that after he had come to Calvary he had begun to make things hum in the middle of Manhattan. I knew that he had started a running spiritual fire in the lives of and ever-increasing number of people drawn from all parts of New York and environs, who had discovered that a workable religion was being preached in practical sincerity in Calvary; that God did not always stand aside and watch, but really entered churches and human beings, and guided and helped all those who had the wisdom and courage to fulfill His conditions: that in the first two years of Sam’s ministry the congregation had increased by about two hundred percent, although the Rector protests that he is not out to fill churches, but to fill people.

My attention was first directed to the old brownstone church of Calvary at the inter-section of Fourth Avenue and 21^st Street by a smallish cross hanging old low over the pavement, illuminated by white bulbs. The church is large and darkening with age, perfectly merging in the faded grandeur of Gramercy Park, once the fashionable quarter, but now flanked by smart apartment-houses.

As in all Gothic churches, there are high pillars. The pews are a deep brown, and comfortably crowded on Sunday mornings when the Rector is preaching. I have seen over three hundred at Holy Communion after Matins.

In the stained-glass windows there are a few figures, and more are coming from Cardinal Newmen’s old church at Littlemore near Oxford. The chancel is smallish and friendly, flanked on the north by a tiny chapel and on the south by a baptismal font of white marble. The man who designed the organ had a fine eye for symmetry, as the array of gilded pipes over the chapel and the font is exceptionally pleasing. The altar is small and plain; there is a life-size statue of Christ in white shepherd’s robe, hands outstretched, as though beckoning all to come onto Him.

A ruby-red cross in the stained window above the white figure of Christ give the chancel a picturesque dignity. As the fine old organ peals, the mixed choir emerges from the vestry, led by the women choristers, wearing becoming skullcaps of black velvet and white surplices. Black cassocks are worn under their surplices by the men. The choir moves processionally towards the entrance and then up the central aisle to the choir-stalls, with the clergy following investments and Princeton hoods of black and orange. Although the church is mellow and darkening with age, save at the altar, the congregation is invariably bright and friendly, always ready to be helpful.

Some great sermons, preached in the pulpit of Calvary Church, have circulated throughout the world. Sam is one of those powerful and convincing preachers who doesn’t know it. He is still mystified as to what constitutes a successful preacher in New York. He names some who have come to the city was great reputations, but the congregations have faded away. Others have sprung up and preached the usual discourses with nothing remarkable about them, and their churches have been crowded.

The Rector of Calvary prepares his sermon carefully, and then spends a couple of hours on Sunday morning finally familiarising himself with it. He knows that the pulpit is not the only place of inspiration. I have heard him preach many good sermons on striking themes. The one on “Ye serve the Lord Christ” was particularly notable, and so was the one on “The Modern Profit”; and a third on “The Surrender of Saul.” The sermon that made the deepest impression when I was around Calvary was entitled “The Romance of Real Religion.” That sermon is still discussed, especially by the young Oxonian who was inspired to a changed life while listening.

It was some weeks before I met Sam Shoemaker, for he was on holiday when I arrived. It was longer before I saw Sam full face. Whenever I looked at him squarely my gaze was a irresistibly drawn straight to those magnetic eyes of his, those eyes that are always bright and twinkling merrily, one or other closing over and anon in fact and impish wink one comes to love and respect.

Sam very definitely gives the lie to the saying about distance lending enchantment. From a distance he is just and other curly-haired Southerner: medium-height, fair-haired, getting on towards middle age and pleasingly plump. In other words, not particularly uncommon. In the pulpit, omitting for the moment his sermons, there is nothing remarkably magnetic about him to whet one’s curiosity. His delivery, though convincing, is undramatic, and he rattled out his words clearly, like silver bullets from a machine-gun. Get near to Sam and you at once feel his magnetic personality. His happy faith and contentedness so permeate the atmosphere that you feel it unnecessary for Hoover to declare the depression of visually at an end.

So cheery is he that you might be tempted to take liberties with his time and convictions were you unaware that he works about fourteen hours a day, most days, although he occasionally takes a gallop in the country or plays a game of deck tennis on the roof of Calvary House for town exercise.

Sam calls all those round him by their Christian names -- the Calvary custom -- and everybody calls him Sam, with one exception, another Frank, who is butler and general factotum of Calvary House. Frank supervises the workers who wait on the rest of the staff. He is a happy product of Calvary Mission, an Irishman who has lost much of his hair and none of his humour. For five days and nights he was unconscious in a speak-easy after a bout of drinking, and came to the end of the things. The speak-easy attendant when he ultimately woke up suggested Calvary Mission. Calvary Mission reclaimed Frank, who is now a leader there. Frank keeps his Quiet Times regularly in the mornings, reclaims down-and-outs at night, and attends to multitudinous duties at Calvary House both day and night.

Frank is one of the happiest man I know and is a Calvary miracle. He dotes on Sam Shoemaker, his employer, but somehow cannot bring himself to practise the Group customs of calling everybody by their Christian names. He addresses his chief as “Mr. Shoemaker.”

Sam pulls him up. “Don’t call me Mr. Shoemaker, Frank. Call me Sam.”

“Yes, Mr. Shoemaker,” says Frank politely, and incurably disobedient.

Good-natured and kindly though Sam is, he has a strong presence and a force of personality which is suggested by a powerful jaw. It was that jaw which figuratively slipped out of joint on the occasion of Sam’s first meeting with the real Frank. Sam was born in the Chesapeake country, and once, sitting In his great family pew, listened to the stories of great heroism, of violent men changed and restored, told by an evangelist working among the iron mountaineers of the far South, and vowed one day himself to become a pioneer of Christ.

Later, after studying at a well-known University, he came to Europe during the War, but was confident he had been unable to touch one man vital it all that summer.

On to China to the important centre there maintained by his University, where he was impressed by the wonderful machinery, but depressed by the feeble output of changed men. All the workers assured him that he was doing wonderful things, but he did not believe them, although the school, the library, the classes, and the gymnasium were crowded with young Chinese.

About this time Frank arrived, accompanied by his tonic band committed to changing lives. Frank was indicated to Sam as the man who was doing what Christian workers were talking about. Sam looked at Frank and disliked his associations. But stories of Frank’s startling achievements with men were continually recounted to Sam, who began to speak to Frank, finding him a person worth knowing. One day he drew Frank aside and made the dangerous suggestion that he tackle a young Chinese in whom Sam was interested, giving Frank the opening for his habitual reply:

“Why don’t you do that?”

He added, “And if you haven’t got anything to give him what’s the matter?”

Sam was not merely offhanded, he was infuriated. He went away in a towering rage. When he cooled down he realised that Frank had merely spoken the truth.

Sam brooded over the talk. What use was he? Must he go on in this life as a powerless worker with nothing to give for ever? So he went back to the man who had challenged him and had the matter out. He told Frank both his temptations and his sins. Once these came startlingly into the open, the position was quite clear to him. He had no overflow of power, because there was no and flow, as sin was damning him off from God. Sam’s attempt to introduce intellectual of the difficulties had no more influence with Frank than similar attempts by a long line of changed predecessors. Sam says that might have seemed a source of weakness to some but the fact remains that Frank was right.

Frank asked Sam a bold question. What good was he? He was selfishly allowing sin to exclude him from vital consciousness of God and to make him spiritually. The challenge was irresistible. Sam knew that if he took the plunge of absolute surrender it would mean a very different life for him than he intended. Instead of continuing to take a decorative and patronising interest in religion, the association of a cultured young man with a University scheme for social welfare, it meant the real mission-field everywhere for life.

“That night,” said Sam afterwards, “my sins rose straight before me like tombstones. They must have all be cleared away. I saw that was a matter for my will rather than my intellect. I asked myself if I was willing, and then I thought how ridiculous it was ever to think of opposing my pygmy will to the will of God.”

Frank had won Sam. He surrendered, experiencing no loss of nervous energy, but sensible only of a great calm, that he had jumped a fence which for a long time he had refused to take. That night as he lay in bed there came to him a distinct voice that said, There is no work of Mine for him who is not wholly Mine.

“Those luminous words,” says Sam, “were different from all other words I had ever heard. And they revealed to me what I believe to be the central truth of religion.”

Which really meant that in some supernatural way there had been repeated in Sam the discovery made by Frank years before, that the demand of both God and Satan is identical -- the whole heart. From then onwards Sam became one of the men who swung around Frank, and whom he describes as “The gayest I know -- fellows who have found something worth finding. We never meet but we have a good time. This is far from the professional mirth of some religious people: it is the laughter of men who really know there is a way out for the world and are doing their best to show It to others.”

I heard that laughter ripple forth as Sam and I recently encountered three of those young man outside Calvary House. Sam made a jolly, provocative remark. They made a jolly, mutinous reply. I told him his remark would have demoralised any regiment of soldiers. But it merely increased the good feeling among them.

Sam’s favourite Biblical quotation is “If any man will to do His will he shall know of the doctrine.” Those in the Group who have experienced this mighty change claim to speak not of what they think or hope, but of what they know. They have a unified personality transcending all difficulties, giving miraculous assurance.

That Calvary Church is deeply interested in helping and changing the individual is witnessed by the amazingly friendly gatherings after service at the church door, where Sam and his staff greet everybody, and where there is an interchange of friendly greetings among the congregation rarely seen in these modern days of formal worship.

Sam’s congregation and staff are taught that aloofness may sometimes be sinfulness, especially when other people are in need, as they mostly are, of spiritual help. Sam and his staff teach that everyone should have a real experience, a maximum experience of God, which means we are to have the same transformation as sent the Apostles out after Pentecost to turn the world upside down.

With the arrival of Sam, Calvary soon became the most cheerful and perhaps the most spiritual church in New York -- a congregation of earnest, happy people who had found the meaning to life.

It was from Frank, who taught him so much about real religion, that Sam learned never to mistake sympathy with the teaching for a genuine experience of Christ -- a common error with many; and that he should be all the time emphasising the need for change or conversion, for full surrender issuing in guidance, and for every grown child of God to found an ever-widening family of his own spiritual children. From the same source he learned how to uncover the real facts in people’s lives, so helping them to peace and serenity and to becoming workers of moral miracles in others. Sam teaches his staff and congregation this essential art, in his sermons, in the Group meetings, and in the special conference held annually, known as the School of Life.

At the start he found the going not so easy. One wealthy old lady, having listened disapprovingly to a sermon by Sam on personal evangelism, stumped down the aisle saying she did not want to hear any more about changed men; she wanted the Gospel. She expressed her indignation at this “new” doctrine, and declared that nobody should drive her from her family church. For a time she stayed away, and then she came back beaming, ready to carry out the “new” teaching. She had been talking the matter over with a ministerial relative who was on Sam’s side and had persuaded her to change her view. Which goes to show how disturbing can be the doctrine to those who love to sit at ease in Zion.

The charming wife of the choir-master, Mrs. Bland, was one of the earliest to adopt the new basis of Christian living as taught by the new Rector. She had held out for some time, and her husband had held out longer. He remonstrated strongly, objecting to “this Church Army business.” It was over-doing religion and losing them all their Pagan friends. But he, too, capitulated.

One Sunday evening, soon after my arrival in New York, I heard the choir-master (Mr. John Bland) make an announcement from the chancel to the congregation, which the Rector described as the best sermon ever preached in Calvary. He was speaking on his twenty-fifth anniversary as choir-master, and speaking from his heart. He recalled the days when he first came to the church, when one of the near-by hotels was known as the “Church Inn” because the choir were so frequently to be seen inside drinking. Then came changes, in pulpit, congregation and choir.

“My greatest ambition,” said the choir-master, “was to be at the top of my profession, and in my effort I developed a lot of the envy and intolerance for many musicians. I envied them because they had much more money for their choirs and were better paid than I. Intolerant, I felt they worth teaching singing without the necessary groundwork and study. When my friend the present Rector came to Calvary I was restless and uneasy. Always being devoted to the Church in a conservative way, I felt that I was a good Christian. However, I soon came to see, from his life and the way he was helping men and women to a vital experience of Christ, that my Christian life was more or less dead. I was not helping a soul except by my music. When I fully realised my weakness, I went to my Rector and told him my many shortcomings and sins. I made up my mind, by the help of God, to overcome my envy, intolerance, drinking, and gambling; and ever since that time I have had freedom, radiance, and am learning the joy of living.”

I have never heard such a remarkable statement as that from the choir-master of a parish church. But many another Rector will agree that his own choir-master would be all the better for such a performance.

One evening at Calvary I saw an astonishing site for an Episcopalian church. Calvary has a rescue mission run by a remarkable Superintendent named Harry Hadley. That evening Harry had brought up with him a hundred or two men rescued by the mission from the streets of New York. Instead of a sermon these men were invited to stand in their pews and tell what contact with Christ had meant to them. If ever one was conscious of the Holy Spirit in a church service it was at that extraordinary Evensong.

There was no waiting. Men popped up one after the other from all points of the front rows of pews and rattled out their life-stories. The pathetic tales they told of broken homes mended, of drunkenness cured, of victory over vice, of the new reign of love in lives and homes previously disordered, divided, discordant, would have melted the heart of the most complacent modern Pharisee.

And at the end the invitation was given to others to come forward to the altar and dedicate their lives to the service of Christ, the Mender of men. Most unique of all -- there were responses. In an Episcopalian church! They walked boldly to the altar, and kneeling there dedicated their lives to God as though they were at Holy Communion. All done In simple reverence.

One of the men changed at the nation was known as “The Spider.” He had served a number of terms In prison, but is now an ardent life-changer and 80 radio at saint.

I spent an interesting evening exploring Chinatown and the Bowery under his genial guidance. He showed me many reminders of the old saloon days, including a hostelry that was once known as “The Bucket of Blood,” because its patrons, before starting their quarrels, would knock off the edge of their glasses to make them sharper for the fray.

As we passed, “The Spider” pointed out to me the undertaker who specialised in free funerals for gangsters.

The story of every live church is the story of a continuous war for spirituality. There has been no compromise in Calvary.

No one pretends that the devil never enters Calvary, though the combined effort to exclude him seems to be maintained at the highest intensity humanly possible. Some of Sam’s captures hold well for a few years and then drift away. Christ had the same experience. So did Paul -- “Demas hath forsaken me.” They are good sprinters, but unwilling to stay the course. Why do they go?

Meanwhile, the commendations continue to be large and fresh faces are constantly seen at Calvary Church, which is becoming a power-house were spirituality spreading through other churches in America and Europe. The number of Englishmen seen in Calvary Church is a perpetual surprise.

Sam traces the fruitage of his ministry back to that night fourteen years ago when, following a heart-to-heart talk with the man he once avoided, but who read him off like a page of print, he decided to “let go” of self and allow God to run his life.

“How long from that conversation until you began to get results?” I asked Sam.

He slapped his knee enthusiastically. “Bless my soul, I started immediately. I saw Frank on Saturday, and my first convert, the one I had spoken to Frank about, came along on the Sunday afternoon. After that I was busy with one or two fellows almost every day, and frequently there were changes.”

Sam smiled reminiscently as he recalled how much the work of Frank and his Group had meant to foreign and Chinese leadership during that fruitful period.

“But those were great days in China,” he said. “Real converts were being made because we were out to obey God rather than men who had made the commandment of no effect through their tradition. About this time I read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and saw what he was arguing being actually fulfilled in the lives of Chinese turning to Christianity.”

“What is the greatest mistake made by evangelists?” I asked Sam.

The Director of Calvary Church was very emphatic: “The neglect to intrigue the man’s imagination before moving in on his will.” Sam said the same thing again with more American snap: “Lure is more effective than logic. I am never worried about a man who seems interested, who cannot leave us alone although he does not announce his decision. That is where some of the old-timers fell down. They started to cudgel their wits and prove their theology before they had caught the interest of their own type of life or by stories of those who were living the life.”

“ You ever get the modern Nicodemus calling on you by night?”

“ That we do.”

It occurred to me that sometimes people were driven away in anger by the bold challenge put up by the Group. I asked Sam about it. He saw I was expecting a story of muscular Christianity in action, and he roared.

No, I don’t remember any untoward incident of that kind,” he said. “We are never offends you. Besides, people understand that when we talk about men’s sins we are being impersonal, just as a doctor is impersonal who puts his finger on the spot that produces the pain.

“But wait a minute! I did see one man go off in a temper -- in a worse temper than I was in when I had my first talk with Frank. He was an elderly crewman. He went white and then red as I suggested his trouble, and refused to stay longer. But came back ten days later, said he was in a terrible mess, admitted that my diagnosis had been right, and asked me to help him.”

“Have you ever known anyone let down who was trying to live on faith and prayer?”

I was thinking of the stories Sir Philip Gibbs had told me of children he saw dying from hunger in Russia, and a missionary tales of men dropping dead in China from the same cause.

“Never!” exclaimed Sam. “What I have noticed is that God comes in just in the nick of time. I have seen Him try a man’s faith right up to the last minute, and then I have wanted to laugh when I saw the situation clear instantly just when most desperate. Strange indeed the effect on our room risible faculties of seeing God silently at work, always providing while guiding.”

“And now for the best piece of advice that Frank ever gave you?”

The Rector of Calvary seemed to have his answer ready.

“Once I asked Frank what book I should read to prepare for special work. He told me to prepare myself, as I was the great problem. He simply meant that I must learn to disciplined myself: to make sure that everything was right between myself, my neighbours and God.”

Which is the same story that everyone has to tell who encounters Frank, a man who takes nobody for granted, me he parson or prodigal. And the measure of Frank’s success with either can be tested by the shine on the countenance.

Sam’s face shone.

Were the Oxford Group right?

Is their teaching the teaching the world really needs? It was taking me much longer to make up my mind than it took me to discover that the movement contained a fine news story.

Unquestionably the Oxford Group arouse more initial interest and any other religious movement at work to-day in the world. Mention religion in the average drawing-room, and people freeze or else begin to talk airily on their own religious theories, which is usually miles away from the belief and practice of their fathers. But the discussion soon peters out, as it leads nowhere.

Yet introduce the subject of the Oxford Group, begin to tell some of the changes that have occurred in your own life through doing as they do, and you will assuredly in a hearing. Even if you have no story of your own to tell, you will find a ready-made audience listening eagerly to the principles of the Group if they are clearly propounded.

One night in New York by had was taken to dine in a speak-easy. The last spare table was in centre of the gay room. Waiters were stumbling about our table most of the evening in their efforts to meet the demands of the crowded restaurant. Seated as we were behind doors locked and barred against police raids, drink flowing freely, smartly dressed women and their escorts chattering gaily, there was an artificial freedom and even friendliness about the atmosphere not often sensed in public restaurants.

Our table settled down to enjoy itself when someone suddenly introduced the subject of the Oxford Group, told of how they had recaptured some of the lost radiance of the Christian religion, had learnt the art of fellowship, of the living and working together, sharing their experiences and their troubles, losing their own aches through absolute and continued honesty, first with themselves and then with their associates. He spoke of a new spirit in their daily life, and their absolute surrender of everything, including their money, their fears, their sins, their time, to God. They even realised there was a difference between doing God’s work and God’s will, so asked God what was His will, and received an answer. He told stories which re-created in men’s minds the fact of their own spiritual needs.

Our waiters continued their bustling, slowed down, then disappeared. A party at the table opposite rose and left. Others followed. But the talk at our centre table went merrily on, still entirely devoted to the Oxford Group and its Insistence on Christianity proving itself to anyone who would try it whole-heartedly instead of half-heartedly.

Presently on the tables not ours were vacated; the room swiftly emptied. And still the one last table in the centre of the speakeasy was debating the Oxford group and a return to first-century Christianity. And when the party rose, the last to leave the place, it was to be greeted with an extra charge per head, not for over-staying the time-limit in a speakeasy, but because we had forgotten to order drinks!

That is the kind of interest the Oxford Group invariably awakens at the start. When those who are first interested begin to realise what the teaching means in their own lives if they consent to its demand, then some opposition arises. Some hold back because of its teaching about confessing faults one to another, not realising that, as Loudon Hamilton says, “There are few aches like the ache of working in a group of people who do not know each other, after working in a group of people and I thank you who do. I believe that real fellowship in a group of people is the most challenging lack to-day in the whole realm of Christian living.

“We need to recapture the genius of fellowship. It is not enough to manage to get on together. We must learn the secret of living and working together. The price of that is absolute and continued honesty, first with ourselves and then with other people. We must be willing to share not only our time, our homes, our money, but to take down the mask and reveal our moral and spiritual struggles. There can be no enduring team-work unless the members of the team do know each other as far as possible. We must learn to weld the team at the centre so that there are no barriers between each other, nor any reservations about each other which have not been thoroughly aired.”

That was the greatest stumbling-block to my understanding of the Oxford Group for nearly a year. And one time I had been in the habit of freely disclosing my thoughts on all subjects to anybody in social conversation. After a time I found that respected adversely on me. Then I went to the other extreme, and became intensely secretive, with occasional outbursts of garrulity over something that could not possibly injure me. And then I passed through a long, long period of worry and strain. Not perceiving that I was in the world for a purpose which may not have for my immediate benefit. I resented the strain imposed, a strain which might have been lessened and I realised that the goal of life is not comfort and character, not pleasure but perfection; that we are here being perfected for a place In God’s perfect state.

During this period I had a conversation with one of the Group leaders, who inquired if I had ever made a complete confession to another man. I resented the inquiry on the spot. I felt that if he were God-guided, as he claimed to be, and that was the last question he would ask of me. Had he not read the story of Job, who, passing through difficulties not of his own creation, had then to battle with blind, well-meaning friends who were doing their worst to prove to him how blameworthy he was? Furthermore, confession was dead against the practice of my own Church, except concession to God, and I had done that a number of times. I did not then fully realise that he was not interested in my past for his own curiosity, but for my benefit, because he knew there was seldom real release apart from confession. He argued that many persons had walled themselves off from God through an unwillingness to share their difficulties with their fellows. I told him that I had once been argued into believing that adult baptism was absolutely essential. Having once undergone that experience, I felt I was none the better after baptism than before. Concentration on one aspect of Christian teaching, whether it was baptism or Holy Communion or confession, threw the Christian life out of balance.

Already I had told Frank one or two regrettable things about my past, which were over, apologised for and forgiven. That was good enough. I felt no better for the performance, and I felt no encouragement to delve deeper into my past in the hope of getting this and elusive radiance and peace they were so keen for. Besides, I had experienced some of that joy they claimed to possess; on more than one occasion. Perhaps I had been vouchsafed a greater measure of God’s Spirit than some in this Group.

“But are you winning people?”

Confound Cleve Hicks for his insistence! I wasn’t. And I knew that it was by their fruits true Christians were known. One thought he had let his light shine a bit sometimes. Surely that was enough. Again that relentless query about winning people. Cleve said it was only when he had gone to a man he had offended -- made a deliberate sacrifice of time to do it -- that he made his first capture. Well, I had done that. But I still saw no necessity for full Sharing. I preferred to wait, to qualify. I had other reservations.

One by one these reservations disappeared, though the objection to Sharing persist did. Instead of waning, I grew as my travels with the team and extended. But the Sharing went on all round me. It was a change from mixing with people who were always boasting of their achievement in business or in journalism or in advertising, of beating the other fellow with a good story, by an extra advertisement, or at the fifteenth hole; or hearing the bad qualities of a mutual friend thoroughly exposed, as so many good sportsmen are eager to do.

Furthermore, there was always the discomfort that I had a few more things up my own sleeve I could confess at a pinch. And always the consciousness that of the late I had felt no certainty in my religion; none of the inner rapture which flows from the Holy Spirit. At one time, long before I met the Group, that was an oft-recurring experience, especially when things were most difficult.

These spiritual experiences were not always identical. Sometimes one felt as though a golden fountain were playing within. Before the white light flashed as I read the Gospel of St. John, I had been conscious of an intolerable ache which I thought no human joy could extinguish. Afterwards this sense of a golden fountain playing extinguished the ache and gave marvelous assurance of the doctrine. Still it was a long time before I came to see a link between this physico-spiritual experience -- this apparent witness of the Spirit -- and the mystic words of Jesus to the woman the well: “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up unto everlasting life.”

At other times the sense of a sweet fountain playing gave place to a mystic burning and glowing equally ecstatic, marking a step forward In the Christian path and making explicable those intimate words of the disciples at after seeing the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus: “Did not our hearts burn within us as He talked with us on the way?”

Another spiritual experience which came to me I have not seen described in Scripture. Occasionally one seemed to feel a golden wire, of gossamer fineness, strung across one’s body, which picked up a celestial melody. I had that experience when describing the principles of the Group in the Toronto drawing-room of a well-known Canadian minister, Dr. Powell, gifted with the grand manner. And once before I felt it when, throwing aside my many objections, I frankly shared some of the unhappiest defeats in my life with a friend in the Group. So, although I had the experienced no noticeable quickening from baptism or Holy Communion, I did get almost immediately a renewed sense of the Holy Spirit’s burning and glowing indwelling after I had frankly shared, even though there was still more to discuss and I was still pursuing a cautious Scottish polish of not putting all my sins into one basket. Not that anyone’s experience can be exactly like another’s, since we may have a different spiritual pitch, and those of my type evidently require a far more encouragement to seek first and last the Kingdom of God.

Many receive the Spirit’s witness at Confirmation, Conversion, Holy Communion, Baptism, and some, as I now know by experience, when Sharing.

“He who consistently refuses to share will never understand. But let such a mending into share, and he will discover for himself a comradeship which manifests the power of Christ with compelling reality. . . . There is a hunger for fellowship with God and man, and there are many who have found that hunger satisfied in themselves and In others along this double road of confession and witness.”

I had almost as much bother with the principle of Guidance. Once or twice I found the principle work out satisfactorily in practice; but for a time I could make a little or no headway with it. Being in a Group of persons who were ready to sit down at any odd moment and write the thoughts which came as they prayed to God was disturbing and frequently embarrassing. One day a member of the Group asked me to lunch, and later announced that he had been guided to write me a check of ten pounds. Whereupon he produced his checkbook and was about to hand me the money. Here was a man living on faith and prayer, and maintaining a wife and two children from the same source, offering me some of the balance.

My friend returns the check to his pocket. Was his guidance right or wrong? The answer is that his overture gave me a chance of revealing something I was more in need of than money, which I could never have revealed but for what he did. It set up a chain of astonishing consequences which may be endless.

Before I met the Group I was walking down Whitehall when I was suddenly told by something inside to send money to two children in New Zealand. I obeyed, and the needed money arrived six weeks later, just before the death of their widowed mother, whose sudden illness I could not foreseen.

And other experience of luminous Guidance came soon after I met Frank, when his insistence on setting his friends to work to build a spiritual family was still challenging me. Did he not know that religion was much too sacred a subject for talking about to everybody? One might be casting pearls before swine. Frank knew that, said we should be guided in our life-changing efforts, but we must remember that nothing was too sacred that helps men.

The name of a once-successful professional man had been on my mind there often of late. It occurred to me that here was an excellent chance to help a difficult case. I determined to try Frank’s advice and seen this man, though uncertain where he was to be found. Our last meeting was in Lincoln’s Inn, not far from High Holborn. Some months before, I had met him in another part of the town. I prayed about him, listened for guidance, half-expecting to get another such luminous thought as came to me at Oxford. The word that was pressed into my mind at that moment was “Temple,” but there was not much luminosity about it.

Strolling up Fleet Street, I waited at the top of Middle Temple Lane, wondering if I should encounter the man I had in mind, convinced that I had no earthly chance of seeing him there at that haphazard moment. It was about one o’clock In the afternoon. For half an hour I watched Londoners pass and repass me while I was aposprophising myself as: “You great big stiff to stand here in the middle of London expecting to meet someone with whom you have no appointment, who does not work here, and whom you have only seen at this spot once in your life.”

But reassuring to his came. “If there Is anything in this guidance business of Frank’s and his human engineering, as there seemed to be once before, it is surely up to Providence to make this test work, since I am honestly endeavouring to find out the truth while assisting someone probably in great need.”

I waited another ten minutes. And normal circumstances I should then have strolled into Lincoln’s Inn Fields for exercise or gone somewhere to lunch, as there was no need for my return to the office for some time. Just as I was about to move away, there came to me a sudden flash, distinctly luminous, identical in shape and feeling with the Oxford flash, and entirely different from my ordinary human thoughts. The message of this sudden luminous thought was commanding and urgent.

But why? I had no wish or need to go back just then. Yet I turned and went down the street, and as I swung into the side road leading to my office the man I had been seeking simultaneously turned in with me. Side by side we walked up the outing together.

I was surprised, and yet not really surprised. I felt that just had to happen. To say the least, it was an amazing coincidence. Feeling rather excited, I asked my friend if he was looking for me are thinking about me. Perhaps telepathy had something to do with our meeting. He said, “No.” He had been trying to keep an appointment with a man outside the Temple -- the word I had got in guidance -- at the opposite entrance to where I stood waiting for him. I had met with him before in Fleet Street, and so my encounter may have been coincidence. Nevertheless, it was most remarkable that I met him at a time and place revealed to me by a luminous thought while trying out the new theory.

But for that sudden flash I should have been somewhere else and should not have met him that day. Again I felt that Frank’s “guidance” was not altogether eye-wash.

I saw a good deal of my friend during the next week, but I’m afraid my further efforts with him must have been singularly unguided, for I detected no evidence of a great transformation in his life. Nor, probably, did he in mind.

Was that guidance or coincidence? Apart from the conviction it gave me, I can trace beneficial results. I described this incident to one of the men in the Group, who reminded me that the art of changing men’s lives was not necessarily an art to be practiced at the same speed as getting a good news story. With the former there was need of infinite tact and patience, a willingness to lay yourself alongside another man, regarding him not as a duty, but lovingly as an opportunity; to be ready to devote an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime, to his redemption, if so guided. The rush methods of journalism might be applied to the Kingdom God, sometimes with satisfactory results, but not always; and it was probable I was more in a hurry for results than God. I must regard every failure as an opportunity for success; every punch I received must be negotiated as spiritual jujitsu. Every blow, every failure, every misadventure must be a lesson for a further advance. As Christ accepted the wrath of the world in Gethsemane, we must be prepared to receive everything that came our way and re-direct the impact for the good of the Kingdom and our self-development.

After that, guidance became a desultory sort of affair with me. Occasionally I would try to keep a regular morning. For direction, and sometimes I would receive clear ideas as to what ought to be done. But the main idea in that I needed, the next big thing to take in hand, persistently evaded me in organised guidance. I watched the Group listening to God. At first I felt the women seemed more susceptible to clear leading than the men; some of the experienced ladies in the Group seemed to take almost every action on the guided principle. One night in Calvary I asked a newcomer to make herself known to another lady, Mrs. Lee Vrooman

(wife of the Dean of International College, Smyrna), on the other side of the room, while I carried on a conversation. She arrived just as Mrs. Lee Vrooman was quietly listening for special guidance on what to do. That contact brought remarkable results. But still no special guidance for me. I seemed to have slipped into a lonely rut.

At one Calvary meeting I encountered Dr. Philip Marshall Brown, Professor of International Law at Princeton University. I reminded him of how I had stormed his cab when he was leaving Oxford and shared his compartment on the journey to London.

Inspired by the Group teaching about reconciliation, he had called on his neighbour and settled a difference which had kept them apart for a year. But what was the Professor’s experience of guidance? I wanted to know. The Professor is a commanding figure physically and intellectually. He has a fine head and a clear, powerful brain. No, he was not accustomed to receiving specially luminous thoughts distinguished from other thoughts, but he was quite confident he received guided thoughts. In fact, he had settled into the Quiet Time habit at any time as well as every morning. Only the other day someone had called on him for help over a problem, and together they had listened to God for guidance. Afterwards he read over those thoughts received and that consecrated half-hour and he was quite confident his thoughts had been guided.

I was waiting for special guidance in my next big step. Still none came. I grew restive and a little skeptical of the guidance theory, which I criticised to Cleve Hicks. Cleve said he understood mind view. When first he saw people and Quiet Time he thought they were “crazy.”

“Let’s try a Quiet Time now,” said the imperturbable Cleve. We tried. I was the same results. He read out to me his own guidance, and he gave me his paper. He will be surprised to discover it in a book ”For Sinners Only.” Here is what he wrote:

They went every one of them with their faces straight forward, as the spirit was to go with them, they turned not as they went. (Ezek. i. 12.)

Trust and the living God and He will give thee thy Hearts desire.

God does guideone even to the picking of texts. Trust Him in all things.

Tell Mother you are starting for your remarks about . . . (Cleve’s mother died shortly after).

Commit thy ways unto the Lord and He will direct to thy path.

Talk to Ray Purdy about this feeling of the defeatism and things being snarled up. God will direct it. Beware of cheap optimism.

Take a college by storm.

Be more generous towards those who differ from you.

A. J.’s future is in God’s hands -- the good is soon lost when the best is not aimed at.

Get to the bottom of the sin and the way God delivers from all the lures of the evil one. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. Pray that you be not disturbed.

Constant prayer. A much deeper prayer life. A new trip south is right. Pray for money for It.

Face and name your sins and commit them to God.

There is no urging and love. It is a free response to a measureless love, that meets every need.

A J.‘s time in America will be richly used. Learn to take burdens off one another. Let God do it. Where we deeply care there is no strain.

Whatever one may think of this piece of sample guidance, there can be known two opinions of the quality of life lived by the man who wrote it.

Nevertheless, I still had some doubts about the guidance question and the possibility of being able to turn on guidance at any time. Perhaps because I had not yet conquered all the sins that were defeating me. As I waited I began to grow careless, and before I realised what was happening I had slipped a long way from the Source of guidance. Feeding remorseful, highly self-critical and definitely repentant, I asked for leading again, not feeling very confident as to getting more guidance, since its coming had been so desultory and unsatisfactory, and the quality of my spiritual life was so low.

Then, suddenly a flash came to show me how this book was to be written, followed by another giving me the title. The real purpose of my visit to America now came out with great clearness. “That checks. It rings a bell,” was the opinion expressed, Immediately I began to tell others what was in my mind. The urge had come not as a strong luminous thought or a soundless whisper in the atmosphere, but as sudden pressure on the spirit.

And now I had one day left to decide which of three beckoning finger-posts to obey. My investigations of the Oxford Group were practically complete, my story written. I was three to resume materialism once more. Should I follow one finger-post down to Florida, the second to new enterprise in the British Isles, are the third (the most enticing) into a promising field just miraculously opened in the middle of Manhattan? At last I gave up the attempt to solve the problem and through it back on the Group principle of guidance for one final day.

There was nothing uncertain about the way those three warning words buzzed in my ear, like a field of grasshoppers. Loudly the whirred and definitely they warned -- warned me not to touch an enterprise which would have taken me back to England during the next few days. Following the guidance, I made investigations and found snags in the offer I was about to accept. That meant good-bye to England for awhile. The choice now lay between a skyscraper in Manhattan and a sojourn in the Millionaires’ Paradise around Palm Beach. Guidance again, but no shrill warnings. Yet guidance to leave both Florida and Manhattan severely alone.

But come, this was absurd! One couldn’t throw away everything. Besides, this was now the last day of decision. Unless positive guidance came I was going to act without It. Slowly and meditatively that to the hotel. Hear a surprise: a urgent cable from London. Would I catch the next fast boat to Oxnard? Signed “Frank.”

So guidance had come again! Perhaps just the guidance I needed. It gave me the opportunity to make a few more inquiries which I had vaguely felt were necessary to complete my investigations of the Oxford Group.

A murky crossing in mid-March. Welcomed back in Brown’s Hotel by Frank, whom I found entertaining newcomers to the Group brought in by the articles I had written in the summer.

With them was “Sherry” Day, whom I had come to regard as Frank’s shadow and complement, sometimes following just behind or off-times going before and preparing the way for the house-party in some corner of the world where the Group was starting.

The Rev. Sherwood Day is now a Presbyterian minister. He was a divinity student when he first came to know Frank at Hartford Seminary Foundation, Connecticut, many years ago. Since then he has accompanied Frank on most of his world tours. Once I asked Sam Shoemaker to name the finest Christian in the Group.

Sam directed a merry eye at me.

“If you mean the saintliest, the answer must be Sherry Day. He’s an amazingly saintly fellow. I’ll give you an example. We were traveling in India and proposing to go out for the evening, but unable to find a servant. All our shoes were dirty. Presently we noticed that Sherry Day had silently disappeared. Later he returned -- just as silently. When we went to our rooms we all found our shoes clean -- seven pairs of them. I said to Frank: ‘Who clean these shoes?’

“Frank grinned cryptically. ’Don’t you know?’

“That,” said Sam, “is type of man Frank has around him.”

Sherry Day was imitating Christ, Who washed the feet of His disciples. Practical Christianity this.

On three of the five occasions I have seen Sherry Day, he was just in the act of catching a liner for England, for America, for somewhere; on the fourth and fifth occasions he was busy helping someone in need. He was always ready to do something for somebody, and something useful rather than spectacular, although willing to go to the ends of the world on faith and prayer.

“What a fellowship it is!” as Sherry is always saying.

Sherry knows instinctively what to do with a team in any emergency, for he is completely selfless and surrendered.

“The most trustworthy man I know,” says Frank.

When Sherry first met Frank he was finding the control of evil thoughts a hard daily fight. The harder he fought the more he was conquered. Frank showed him that when the imagination and will are in conflict the imagination wins; that the imagination must be centered on God, goodness, and on helping other people, so that all the evil steam can be condensed into a happy, useful and satisfied life.

“Instead of getting tense in temptation nowadays,” said Share it to me, “I find myself able to make a long nose at the devil. It was not a trick I learned, but the simple truth that Christ, working through the absolutely surrendered soul, enables him to overcome his own weaknesses by helping others who are also struggling with temptations.”

Sherry finds that Frank always jumps ahead of him in development, but he is the natural leader. But Sherry has a wonderful facility for enunciating the principles which Frank formulates. He explained to me how the principle of Sharing came to receive such a prominent place in the Group teaching.

“We were a traveling team in China, where we found that two of us would sometimes get together and secretly vent something we disliked about another. (It is notorious that some Christians cannot work together.) To end that kind of thing we decided that we should share with the person concerned rather than with another the dislike we felt. Then not only did we share our own is faults whenever they stuck their heads up, but we sought guidance to end our quarrels and cement the team into the ideal fellowship. Although Frank had worked out all the principles of the Group before he left the Church of the Good Shepard, it required crises such as the these to put them into joint action. And they have worked splendidly.”

Sherry says that ten years with Frank has made it possible to exchange his old divided will for a new and undivided way of life that has brought him far more pleasure than he believed possible. One of his typical prayers is, “Make me tired from intercession and service, and not from defensive fighting.”

He has been present or near to Frank in all parts of the world when men have been in the act of making the great change from self to God. “There must be thousands of such captures,” he says. “Of course some of these may later get spiritual colic, as Frank describes it, and slip away for awhile, perhaps to return when they feel better -- just as a child might do. It is such difficult and patient work, changing men and keeping them changed. I have seen Frank shaking with the pain of it. Few people realise how serious and difficult is the task of creating apostles, which was the life-work of Christ. You are born without effort and much pain. There must always be a Peter who denies at first, and a James and John who want to sit on the right hand and the left-hand in the best seats in the Kingdom; and a Judas or two to come along only to betray.”

When Sherry Day was a divinity student at Hartford, he was walking down the main street with Frank when they encountered two drunken men.

“You take one and I’ll take the other,” said Frank to Sherry, starting to callar his man and to take him home.

Sherry was unready and unwilling for the task. He thought the cure for a drunk was aspirin or coffee, a cold shower and bed.

“I watched Frank do what I felt I couldn’t do,” he told me. “He took his man’s home, and next day, when he was in the midst of a meeting, Frank had one of his irresistible impulses to go out into the street, where he found his drunken man again, now perfectly sober. Frank has one guided habit of turning up unexpectedly just when he is wanted. He put his man on the right road that day while showing me how inefficient I was in my own job. I felt like a young man who had gone into medicine but was unable to do the simplest medical work in an emergency. Frank explained to me that it was because my religion was not in action that I felt so helpless in an emergency. That if I had real love for men I should be willing to share with them my temptations, my secret thoughts, to put myself alongside them , and work with them and for them. He said that every man could test the reality of his religion by finding out if he was ready to make sacrifices for others. He gave me an early chance to make the test, and I found I did not want to go to China when he Invited me to go there with him. The truth is, or shrank from Frank’s too effective methods, wanting to live a selfish life. I’m definitely do not want to get into the lives of others, for I knew it meant being out in the cold winds, among the strays; hard work and considerable pain.”

“But you went?”

“Yes.”

“And results followed?”

“Yes. The first vital talk my had was with a man tied up by the same problems I’m now knew how to avoid. High shared my own experience him. As a consequence there were now two men to help in changing sinners where previously there was one.”

“And who is the most difficult person you have ever tried to change?”

Sherry’s mind wandered back along the line of changed men who had fallen to Frank and himself, and presently he said: “The most difficult man is the one so encrusted with his sins that he has lost the sense of conviction.”

It was late to when Sherry and I had finished talking and he retired to bed. The next morning he was up at dawn, and once again off on an ocean liner to a guided destination -- a house-party at Briarcliff Lodge on the Hudson.

A train journey with Frank to Oxford is just as exhilarating as any other experience with this vital personality. Watch him sailing to the booking-office, marshalling the port-manteaux, directing the porters (who take to him immediately), directing everybody, choosing his meal in a third-class dining-saloon the night after he has been living in a Royal Palace.

Spend a week with him at Oxford while he co-operates in running Ken Twitchell’s ideal home; “God’s house,” Frank calls it. The establishment has been run on faith and prayer for some years, though not without many days when the future was not clear but waited with confident faith like a November fog. But the house goes believingly on. Money comes in, just enough to keep going. And always a stream of visitors to entertain as though there were a regular income or an overloaded banking account.

When Frank enters he seems to bring with him a breeze of the Spirit. He is religious quicksilver each day of a seven-day week. The shouts, that tempers, the pique, the postures, the vanity, the overdone censure and the overdone praise -- these concomitants of dictatorship are missing when Frank is on the job -- he gets his work done a little quicker, and sometimes a good deal more efficiently, without any infirmities of the unsurrendered great.

Only by surrounding himself with men and women living the same kind of life could so much work be got through in so short a space of time. Every post brings a mail gathered from the ends of the earth.

One would think The Group House at Oxford was the centre of an international religious correspondence course -- only there is no charge. News of the spiritual travail of much of the world pours in through the letter-box, and is faithfully dealt with in short, crisp answers, confidential and stimulating. Not answers tepidly charged with good advice, but dynamic messages inspiring the recipient to action in some reciprocally beneficial manner. Perhaps a message to a young man recently in the Group and suffering from one of those periods of colic or growing pains to which all of us are susceptible. Frank’s reply may perhaps encourage a little more honest sharing at home, thus getting straight to the root of his probable trouble. Always the letter is a mixture of stiff challenge and good fellowship.

One of the stiffest letters Frank permitted himself to write was to some persons who were refusing to support him in a certain courageous action for the help of someone in need. Frank said their refusal to extend the help where greatly needed might involve them in a crop of cares they did not foresee at the moment. But it was a friendly warning, nevertheless, free from pique and resentment. Never does Frank mince matters where his correspondents compromise. If the man is living an undisciplined life, he tells him so in plain words. Fearless dealing with sin all the time. Honesty demands it. Spiritual growth is impossible without it.

Fifty or sixty letters a day or nothing to Frank. One night last year in Geneva, following a wearing evening meeting, he returned to his hotel and found the correspondence piling up from all quarters of the world. All through the night until 6:30 a.m. he dictated to Ken Twitchell. One of those letters brought about a change in the life of a nobleman, who subsequently opened up the Group work in Hungry. After such a strenuous day, Frank admits to his mind being tired, that he cannot think so quickly as at the start, but he is still a human dynamo.

All the time Frank is handling his correspondence he is listening for guidance as to the requirements of others in the house. His facility for anticipating a human need before the person concerned is aware of that need or before he can be approached are called to the spot is uncanny. I have been working alone in my room. Suddenly I have found myself stuck in an aspect of Group work I could not understand. I have looked up and found Frank just entering.

“I was guided to come up and see you,” he says.

First you wonder if this is not just coincidence. But these coincidences continue to happen with me, and anybody who knows Frank says just the same thing. He hurried rush from a camp-fire meeting to a near-by tent where a man was in agonies with appendicitis, unknown to another human being, attracted Ray Purdy to Frank. Sherry Day is never tired of telling that other story of Frank dashing into the street without warning to encounter the drunken man of the previous night. All his associates know so many examples of Frank’s uncanny habit that they have ceased to be surprised. They know that he will always appear at the right time or else get in touch by telegram, telephone or cable.

Like the proverbial busy man, he is the person always to find time for extra work. Knowing that the real solution of his own problems demands, as its natural sequence, the solving of other people’s, his mind is always engaged on this altruistic duty. He mat be in the kitchen thanking the servants for the way they have speeded up the work proceeding through the whole house, or be sending daffodils to some neglected person down the street, preparing Easter cards are Christmas cards, are saying just the right word to help his hostess put the self-conscious new arrival at ease the first evening. He thinks of everybody and everything. When he comes to stay, he comes not to be entertained, but to entertain. His wide figure, wide shoulders, wide fore- head, wide smile, providing training-post wide enough to support all comers.

Frank rarely acts alone, but always with the idea of training others. He is the natural pedagogue, often teaching without permitting others to know they are being taught. A visitor sat in his Group meetings for several days watching him in action, listening as he asked first one and then another how he would handle some new problem that arose. Though he may not always have gone round the circle, the visitor noticed with every query that one man’s opinions was invariably asked. Presumably it was because his advice was so good. That was the visitor’s first thought, but Frank did not defer to him more than to the rest. At the end of the second day the visitor sensed what was in Frank’s mind -- this man was to be left in charge of the Group at Oxford when Ken Twitchell was away in America.

Frank’s secretaries are all Group leaders; he feels this must be so considering the highly confidential nature of his work and the necessity of preparing others to carry on when he Is taken away. It is also better so, for he does not necessarily give the final word after he has collected opinions. All through the day he is putting the important matters up to the guidance of the Group in their Quiet Times. When there is uncertainty, a further period of Quiet is called for, and then unanimity is inevitable.

Theoretically, if this guidance is really the Holy Spirit, there should be immediate unanimity. But there are obvious reasons why this cannot always be. Guidance must be thought of as not mechanical, but as becoming clear through reason, evidence, and luminous thinking. God speaks to us in all the ways of our human understanding. No man or group of men and is infallible, but a group of people each individually seeking God’s will and closely united together is most likely to receive the clearest consistent guidance. Often God reveals only one step at a time. Sometimes we have to go ahead on what seems probably right instead of acting on certainty. Guidance ultimately rests on a basis of faith, and if we ask sincerely on what God gives us He never lets us down, say the Group. “All things work together for good to them that love God,” is the guiding slogan.

There is a constant coming and going at The Group House. I was writing in my room when a tall, blue-eyed youth from South Africa, and now a “fresher” at Cambridge, breezed in. This lad began to tell me his quaint experience with the Groups in his native country. His elder brother had come home one evening to urges parents to come down to Muzenburg and see what a Group meeting was like.

“I hadn’t the slightest notion of what it was all about,” said the undergraduate, as he lounged before my fire. “I didn’t even know it was going to be a religious meeting. But I went down just to see what was on. I was a college boy, and naturally interested in what my bigger brother was about. The Group crowd seemed rather happy, and gave me a welcome, which I thought was rather decent for University men. So I stayed on to their meeting, when they began to talk about something which I felt was right and really wanted. Hitherto I had thought religion was rather dull, but the Group seemed to have a look new way of looking at things, which was not morbid, though very personal. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this or what was about to follow.

“After several had told their stories, I was astounded to see my elder brother get up and begin to tell his own experience. To hear one who had always dominated his brothers and sisters stand up in a public meeting and talk so frankly about the change which had come into his life was to set my knees knocking together. I felt it meant I should have to do the same thing, unless I was careful.

“Well, I wasn’t so careful. For I spoke to a happy-looking fellow after the meeting, who told me that Christ was the centre of his life. Nobody had talked to like that to me before. It made me think. I could see he was thoroughly happy. After that I had a chat with my brother, and discussed pretty frankly some of the things in my life which I had not liked to the discuss before. That helped me tremendously. Then I saw Cleve Hicks, and with him I made my surrender to God. I saw that a new power came to me, accompanied by a great peace and joy; though there was nothing emotional about it.”

“What about your parents?” I asked, knowing that the undergraduate’s father was a prominent King’s Counsel in Cape Town.

“Oh, they seemed quite pleased about it. Especially, Dad was. We all went home, and my elder brother and I had Quiet Times together, and also took part in the School Group at spell it Diocesan College where we both were. Then my younger brother became interested, and next my younger sister -- all four of us. Made quite a difference in the home. There was much less scrapping than formerly, which so surprised my father that he decided to come in too. The thing which caused him the most astonishment was the sight of all four of us dashing off one evening to get his spectacles when he asked for them -- this, instead of our being asked several times to go, and each passing the buck to one of the others. So all four of us children, and father as well, now had Quiet Times together in the same house. Father is very enthusiastic. When the car hadn’t arrived at the station on time to meet him, instead of losing his temper he spent the waiting period witnessing to a porter.”

“What other changes occurred in your home-life?”

The undergraduate mused on the pleasant South African home thousands of miles away, for which he was slightly homesick.

“It to us all on a different relationship, of course. We found that most of us had to cut out some selfishness which we had nourished. That made life much happier for everybody. We had Group meetings every Sunday, and the fellows who came in about that time are still holding strongly.”

News that this young man’s father had associated himself with the Oxford Group speedily became known in the South African Bar. One day he was addressing a High Court Judge in Cape Town when he used the phrase, “Now, my lord, to be perfectly honest . . .” Whereupon the Judge jocularly interpolated, “Come, Mr. B____, no Oxford Group here.”

The Chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge, was another to arrive that day. He had been suddenly whisked up from Cornwall to rearrange plans for and April house-party in his University town, a party which he ran magnificently. A tall, slim, athletic figure with the lightest blue eyes, he had once distinguished himself as Captain of Boats at Wadham College, Oxford. Of the Rev. Make Wait placed the invitations to the forthcoming house-party on my table, stretched to his long lay eggs before my fire and became ruminative. He had some very poignant recollections of his first meeting with Frank, which was as far back as 1922, when he was attending a house-party of Oxford men at Keswick. One evening Frank came in to supper and prayer. After supper twenty of us sat round in a circle to hear him, and two of us subsequently came into the Group -- the Rev. Howard Rose and myself.”I

“Tell A. J. that story of ’ Rose, Rose, Rose,’ and’ Wade, Wade, Wade,’” Frank had advised, when I was being introduced to the Chaplain.

Nick Wade (perfect name for an Ethel M. Dell) told me the yarn.

“I had listened to Frank’s stories of changed lives -- typical stories of Frank’s,” said he, “and next morning awoke feeling rather rebellious. I felt there was something in religion and that I hadn’t yet got it, and that perhaps Frank could explain. I went out and, oddly enough, found myself walking down a cul-de-sack, running parallel with the road I meant to take. Exactly how I got into that I don’t remember. Just then Frank came unexpectedly out of a house and hailed me. It seemed rather queer when he said he was just coming to see me that I should have unconsciously, out of my way to see him. I told him this. Whereupon Frank opened his notebook and showed me the entry:

“ ’ Wade, Wade, Wade; Roses, Rose, Rose.’

“I said: ’ Why did you write that down?’

“Frank replied that in his early Quiet Time he had heard two names -- Wade and Rose.

“That,” said the Chaplain, “was the first time I realised how an ordinary man could be in close touch with God. So we had a great talk, which opened to me a whole new vista of practical adventure and possibility which before had been just theoretical and theological. Very soon followed Immediately, but soon there came a new realisation of the challenge of Christ to live so close to Him that He could guide and control my life all the time and use me in the lives of others.

“A. few years later I travelled around the world with Frank and a small-company, including Loudon Hamilton, Sherry Day, and Sam Shoemaker, seen a cross-section of life in the Near, Middle and Far East. We mixed with missionaries, and people who had no use for missionaries. The discipline of that traveling team and my experiences during that year abroad with Frank, together with the vision it brought of the need of the modern world for Christ, led to my decision to prepare for ordination. That year with Frank was amazing. Barriers in my departmentalised life were broken down everywhere, and I was taught how to be willing to do anything that Spirit of God wanted and how to do it. I found that Frank thinks of everything, always with the object of expanding God’s Kingdom. A whole new quality of life became possible through the principle of guidance. I found that if one is ready to pay the price, there really comes a power to diagnose the trouble and provide the cure in one’s own life and in other lives all the time.

“More and more I came to understand how everything centres round an experience of Jesus Christ, so real, so vivid, so great, that it dominates the whole life. It is a dynamic relationship that issues in power. Since then I am continually finding that people, even conventional Christians, keep so many areas from Christ’s control that they live merely a departmentalized life. My contact with Frank swept me to a higher level, where nothing now was either secular or religious, but everything spiritual and real. This life gets you more and more. I was asked to come up here from Cornwall quite suddenly, and I had no wish to come. But here I am. I know the only right thing to do is what God tells me to do.”

Nick Wade is a popular Chaplain. He is priceless as the host at a big house-party; that he feels a sense of divine guidance and power in the details of his daily routine can be seen by anyone with half a blind eye who observes his earnest face and radiant manner. Lunching with the Chaplain of Downing means not a formal talk about generalities, but a heart-to-heart talk about the deepest needs of a man’s life, those needs which the English gentleman is so expert in hiding from his closest friends.

Later on I had a chat with the Rev. Howard Rose, who is the Donald Hankey-Woodbine Willie type, and the well worth a detour to meet at his Vicarage in London, or to hear preach in Christ Church in the same accessible thoroughfare.

Howard Rose a slight, tallish, with a wiry, athletic figure, ready to carry on alone without a curate for sometimes twenty hours a day. He has a domed head, a ruddy complexion, and the happiest of dispositions, with a completely disciplined character, which makes you ready to give him your confidence.

It was Howard’s experiences during the War which decided him to get the business and enter the ministry. And one instance he was the recipient of special guidance which saved the lives in himself and the whole company.

Howard was leading his company out of the front-line trenches back through the dangerous terrain under a rain of shell-fire to rest billets when he approached a fork in the road. Both arms of the fork led to the billets, but the one to the right was better marching, further away from the enemy’s guns, and in every obvious way the more desirable.

Howard wavered between the two roads -- he knew nothing of the Group in those days -- and asked God to guide him, trusting for an immediate answer. The answer flashed back clearly:

“Take the left.”

The Sergeant Major was astounded to see the commander taking the worst road, and protested. The men, too, began grousing, but followed. Everybody was sullenly convinced the captain was wrong, for the enemy shells were now falling nearer than before. Suddenly there came a fresh salvo of shelling, and then the other road to their right, at the exact spot where they would have been marching, was blown shapeless.

Seeing this, the men’s feelings changed instantly, as was shown later when Howard addressed them before the dismiss. He said he felt they should know the real reason why he marched left instead of right against everybody’s better judgment, including his own. Ten of his company (including some of the N.C.O.’s) afterwards wanted to know more about religion, and, thinking they would catch it by being confirmed, approached the Brigade Padre for this purpose. Says Howard:

“The Brigade Padre was one of the very best, and had already won a Military Cross and Bar for conspicuous bravery. Knowing what I stood for, he put up to me that I should prepare my own men for Confirmation. At first I was taken aback, and told him I was not a padre, but just a soldier. ’ True,’ he said. ’ But you are also a soldier of Jesus Christ. Tell them simply what He means to you.’ Accordingly, at my next opportunity, when the battalion was out at rest, my Confirmation class was begun. It comprised of a sergeant, a lance-corporal, and eight privates. We met some dozen times, and these talks have since formed the basis of my Confirmation talks as an ordained parson. They had been practical and real to meet the circumstances and needs of acting service, and so probably got across better than the classes I had myself attended as a boy. My candidates word duly confirmed by Bishop Gwynne, Assistant Chaplain-General, and one now deeply interested in the Groups, and it did seem to make a very real difference, not only to them, but to the whole battalion.”

These incidents and innumerable talks with officers and men finally led Howard into the ministry.

“It was just after my ordination,” he says, “that I met Frank for the first time and was deeply impressed not only with his quality of life, but with his emphasis on the need of unhurried quiet in the early morning. Twice Frank visited me in my parish in Sussex, leaving an unmistakable influence on my life, and after the second occasion I determined at whatever cost to keep an unhurried quiet time daily. The change in one’s effectiveness was instantaneous, and shortly afterwards I was called to Oxford as a chaplain on the Pastorate ministering to undergraduates. It was here that I found no way so effective as that advocated by the Group in dealing with students.

“In my six years in Oxford over one thousand students, both men and women, came of their own accord for personal talks. Many of them had deep needs which I knew I could not have met had I not had my own needs met by Frank or someone else. Each term several hundred men and women came into my home. It began the centre of the activity of the Group in Oxford, and in 1928 it was my privilege to lead the first team to South Africa, from which date I have been wholly identified with the work.”

Howard’s congregation has trembled during his first six months as Vicar.

During my stay at The Group House, Oxford, I had ample chances of observing Frank’s love of festivities. His delight in making Easter Day happy for everybody was thoroughly infectious. Easter cards from him appeared on plates and desks, a fine Easter daily from somebody was ushered into the drawing-room, Easter eggs for the Twitchell Tots secreted in, behind and under the chairs. Frank can play with children and make them as thoroughly at ease as he makes the growing-ups. He waxed merry at my amazement in finding the number around the table for the special Easter Day lunch was -- thirteen! No such thing as superstition in the Oxford Group. I whispered to Garrett Stearly to sit in the middle of the train that afternoon, as he and Nan (his ideal wife) left for Wolverhampton -- just in case of accidents. The table were incredulous that anyone could be so sensitive to the figure thirteen. Then Marian (Mrs. Twitchell) unconcernedly announced that she was born on the thirteenth day of the month. One felt more certain that something would happen to that train to Wolver- hampton. This was just tempting fate. The next day the Group came together and fixed the date for a luncheon to Editors, calmly deciding on April 13th!

Presumably, the reason why there was no accident to the Wolverhampton train was because some worse fate was developing for these daring people who hurled their defiance at the skies of superstition. I had piquant memories of buying stocks on the morning of a certain November 13th, to see them crash on the afternoon of the same unlucky day. Later I called on the broker for tea at his private address. He lived at Number 13. On a subsequent February 13th I saw stocks I had just sold short goes soaring to the clouds, leaving me more broke than usual. One Friday, December 13, I signed a lease for some new business premises. Three serious operations followed immediately afterwards, of a complexity of further misfortunes ending in the great depression. And while I was finishing this chapter the 13^th President of France was assassinated. The Group of thirteen sitting around Mrs. Twitchell’s table smiled complacently at superstition. I was not so confident. Telephoned bell rang. A message came through from Europe inviting Frank to be the guest of a celebrity over the week-end. That was the answer to this Number 13 recklessness. He the boat would go down like the White Ship. But Frank returned smiling the next week. And I have still to discover what ill-luck was brewing and went astray. A new moon peeped at us through the glass of the railway compartment on our way to Cambridge just after. About tragedy still held aloof.

Twitchell Tots -- Skippy and Baby Anne -- aged four and two, take their place with family and guests at the Group dining-table, which says a lot for “Modi,” a young Swiss Quakeress, and whose charge they are. The Twitchell Tots have not yet begun their official Quiet Times, although they are unconsciously practicing them. Their shouts for Daddy and Mummy to come “say prayers with them” is evidence that religion will come naturally without the coercive methods which do so much harm in a past generation. Skip it is a tall, serious boy, with a fair complexion, fine dark lashes, a kindly nature and the promise of a poet. Baby Anne has a wide forehead, lots of brains behind it, much coquetry and a face full of mischief.

There is one point of exact similarity between all four -- Ken, Marion, Skippy, Baby Anne. Each has a pair of fine dark brown eyes. All appear to have been made from one model, a prize brown eye, multiplied eight times into a brown-eyed family octagon.

To see the family at work in The Group House, one would hardly suspect the discipline which underlies its happy freedom. All are in the world yet to not of it. Marian and Nan disprove the contention that two women in one house do not agree long. Sharing is again the explanation. Watched these two, used to the gay social round, imparting a rarer gaiety to the work of The Group House, so obviously enjoying their life of faith and prayer and surrender to God.

One morning at breakfast with Nan read a letter from Miss Round, the Wrightman Cup tennis-player. I asked her what Miss Round was doing in the Group. Oh, Nan had met her at a house-party up in the Midlands, from which the tennis celebrity went home deeply impressed. As was well known, Miss Round had a strong religious background. Her mother asked her what the meeting was like -- “Goody-goody?” “No, the real thing!” So the tennis celebrity had become a witnessing enthusiast for the Group basis of life.

Donald MacKay blue in one day from South Africa. Donald is a merry fellow. Having once overstayed his leave as a soldier, he gave this cheeky explanation to his Colonel: I’ve had a damn good time, and am ready to pay for it to.” He paid -- lightly! He had done all sorts of he-man jobs on the veldt. Once he lived in a forest hut. The mice came and ate his food. One day they disappeared. Relief for a fortnight. Then he encountered a large cobra outside his hut and tried to kill it. The cobra ran into his hut and was killed as it entered a hole where It had lived -- inside the hut -- for a fortnight, protecting him from -- mice. One of his jobs was driving wild horses from Rhodesia down into the Transvaal to save the pound-a-head railway fare. He is the kind of man to do the right thing when the extraordinary happens, as he did in the middle of the night when his mob of wild horses were stampeded by a pair of undimmed headlights. He has a delightful fund of hunting stories. He told me a quaint incident connected with one of the Group meetings in South Africa. A young student had owned up to stealing money for cigarettes, whereupon the Negro servant promptly and unexpectedly confessed to having stolen the cigarettes his young master had bought with the stolen money!

But to his best yarn is the tale of how he tried to dodge Loudon Hamilton in Pretoria back in 1929; how he went to his first house-party -- a camp on the veldt-- ostensibly to give his dog a swim, but really to find an answer to life’s riddle; how he found it, and has since become a troubadour for God on three continents.

When the 1931 house-party at Oxford ended, we were all invited to the University Church of St. Mary to witness the pretty welding of two experienced leaders -- Bill Browne and Polly Fox. There were ten bridesmaids. I described that ceremony under a banner headline----------

Frank had given an address, in which he said the wedding was a challenge to a world of materialism, for they would be trusting to God only for their sustenance while they sought to extend His Kingdom. Polly and Bill were known frequent callers at The Group House. I asked them how they fared in married life on faith and prayer. Amazingly well! Once they got down to just enough for the next breakfast. Then a little money had come in by post from a working girl in the North who had been helped to buy them. A clergyman had heard of the incident, and had sent along a couple of pounds. From then onwards the faith and prayer life had continued to work out; always the cruse of oil, rarely an abundance. Subsequently Bill Browne took charge of a house-party at Matlock, which he ran with outstanding ability. Patrick is the name of their baby son.

Ray Purdy and Elsa Purdy were among those constantly coming and going to and from The Group House while I was staying there. Both radiant as ever, both ready to come forward and lead or efface themselves as usual, both doing good work which nobody heard anything about until perhaps a year or so after, when someone, telling the story of his or her life-change, would announce, “And when I met to a Ray Purdy.”

It was like saying, “And then came the War.” The inevitable had happened. They were now off to South Africa, where R