For Sinners Only

by A. J. Russell

During my travels with it Oxford Group, weighing carefully and critically what was said, watching carefully and critically what was done, I was often wondering what was the real opinions of Senior Oxford (faculty and administration) on this remarkable movement spreading outwards from their midst. As a journalist I felt confident in my estimation of its news value. I felt, too, that I could appraise the movement spiritually with the spiritual; for I had sought and found God. But I was an amateur in the psychological and theological aspects of the message.

Therefore I decided to probe a well-known figure in Senior Oxford who is entitled to speak authoritatively on the Group Movement. He is Canon L. W. Grensted, one of the foremost scholars and psychologists in the Church of England, Oriel Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, the Bampton Lecturer of 1930, a member of the Archbishop’s Committee on Doctrine and on Spiritual Healing, and Canon of Liverpool.

Canon Grensted has one of those flying, massive heads that we admire, while not eager for the burden of carrying it around. Bypassed an enjoyable afternoon and evening catechising him. It was a rich experience. The Professor has a fine, dry humour, a wry, sympathetic smile, a way of saying deep things with simple clearness, together with an engaging and boyish self-consciousness which takes occasional liberties with his great intellectuality. I asked some very pointed questions requiring a definite yea or nay, and he gave me the definite answers. Some of them he pondered over, but the Professor’s mind is so large that it requires a lot of weighty evidence to incline it even slightly to one side.

I asked him why he had associated himself with the movement, and he replied that no Christian could stand aside and not be interested in it. At the start it was arousing unfair opposition, that irresistibly drew him towards It to see fair play.

“And what do you see in it?”

“An immense amount of hope for the whole spiritual life of the world. Without committing myself to any details -- only the principles -- I see plenty of the essential things that I need for my own spiritual life.”

This was a very sweeping committal for a professor of philosophy.

“Are those in the Groups balanced and really sane?” I next asked him.

“The right answer to that,” he said, “is that the leaders and those in responsible touch are undoubtedly balanced and sane. Moreover, some who have come into touch, who were obviously not so well balanced as they should have been, have become much better balanced. The people who move about in that teams do learn discretion and tact and trustworthiness. I suppose there are exceptions, as in the churches. But there are no more unbalanced persons in the movement than in the churches. In fact, not so many.

I had heard it suggested there were dangers in the movement. So I asked him bluntly: “Is the Oxford Group dangerous?”

“Oh, frightfully!” He spoke with irony. “It might upset the world, as Christianity did at first, for its possibilities are simply enormous. I find the greatest encouragement in its vitality. It shows a new and infinite power of adventure. It is a real inspiration to see this new creative work, suggesting to us once more those stirring stories in a Act’s of the Apostles.”

That was all very well. But rash things might be said at the meetings which would spoil the movement. When young folk of culture get up and witness, they know what to say and what to lead out. But when this movement becomes general and the unlettered begin to witness frankly in the Groups -- “Suppose they blurt out something shocking.”

The massive head wagged humorously.

“And suppose they do? It wouldn’t do much harm. For the fact is you can say anything you like that’s true, provided you say it carefully and in the right way. And don’t forget that human problems are being shared all the time in a great many places.

“A mother’s welfare meeting would positively shock a Group meeting. So when much of the talk in modern drawing-rooms. A meeting of a Vigilance Committee is much more explicit. In the Press and in many public places problems are openly discussed without the answers to them being supplied. There is the danger. The Group touches lightly upon the problems and stresses the answers. It is always the answer that matters.

“Moreover, there is a Group check in team-work. As a rule, people don’t share frequently in public until they have shared privately with the team. And in practice unlettered -- if there are any left -- are just as tactful as the highly educated in their public utterances. All classes have joined in the Sharing practised by the Group. I know of homes where the maids are helping in Group leadership. In the factories of St. Helen’s, Lancashire, there are Group meetings every day for Quiet and Sharing. And these are working with the same success that attends Groups run by University men.”

I butted in:

“Yet things may be said which will be misunderstood. The scoffing mind Is always alert.”

The Professor was not sure that ridicule mattered very much at all, as it was based on misunderstanding. What mattered far more was the danger of not Sharing. The life shut in on itself fell into disaster. The danger of Sharing could never be so great as the danger of bottling up. This led to all kinds of tragedies -- including suicide and murder. As there were many recent examples.

“Sharing is a positive good,” emphasised that Professor. “It is the real answer to so many problems. For it is almost impossible for a person to see his real problems straight unless he has an outside view on them, and he can only get that by Sharing. And weather done in a movement like this or elsewhere -- and Sharing is not confined to the Oxford Group -- it must be beneficial. Sharing has been neglected far too much by the modern Church. But,” he broke off, “there is a long theological history behind that statement. And we are now in a phase which great reticence is general. That was not always so. There were times when so many effort possesses were committed in the opposite direction that theCh regularisation of the ministry became necessary. Though we haven’t got anywhere near to that in the Group, and I don’t think there is any possibility of our doing so.”

“When might we reach that stage -- if ever?”

“Only when a wide range of people come to be unbalanced emotionally, as happened in revivals of a certain type whose basis was emotion, and not the new birth through a changed will. Of course, any sudden change must have an emotional effect, the consequence of a re-grouping of impulses. We explain it in this way. When the ego makes a response to anything to which It can respond, that response is the will -- the self in action. The emotion arises with a response. What takes place is really the formation of a new sentiment, of which the best example is the sentiment of love. There is then a whole new readjustment of impulses, now turned into the service of a new object. Changed sentiment around personal relations or the love of God cannot possibly happened without some emotion. The really serious thing is that people so seldom feel any emotion about the love of God, as they do about other mundane sentiments like their breakfast, fresh air, their dog, their car, their position in life, their being highly respectable -- which fits in with saying their prayers and church-going, but not necessarily with putting God first. Then when something like the Group comes along and suggests that God be put first, in the right place, and people find their disordered sentiments threatened -- God first -- they naturally begin to feel annoyed.”

“But can the tenets of the Oxford Group be said to answer every human problem?”

The Professor weighed this sweeping question carefully. “I do think,” he said, “that the general principles of the Group are generally applicable. There are certain persons who need specialised help, and there is serious danger if anybody thought this teaching could work by rule of thumb. And so the Group train leaders who can deal with difficult people, just as is done elsewhere. The Group change men. They know that if you try to solve a conflict by effort from within, you never solve it. But if you try to solve it by a higher Power from without you always solve it, though the solution may not necessarily be what you are others expect.”

“Then what is the real difference in movement?”

“It is positive and all essentials,” replied the Professor, “It has so many modern books which ventilate the difficulties of the times. While I write futile, emotional, impatient books unless you can offer a cure? In a load movement of this kind you see something being done, and if the Churches are not taking the lead, the duty of the movement is not to criticise, but to awaken them by action. As it is doing.”

“What about the effect of the movement on scholarship?”

“There is always the danger that a certain type of man may come obsessed religious work. Team-work is again the proper check. But, so far as I can see, the scholarship results are in entirely to the good.”

One of the points stressed by the Group, which often sends men sorrowfully away, is Restitution. I asked the Canon what he had to say on this prickly point.

“Restitution,” he said with emphasis, “should only be made under guidance with a view to helping the people concerned. Don’t make restitution for your own amusement. There are people in the world who are spiritual Pharisees, making restitution for the sake of working off an emotional complex. I have heard of men going round confessing they had committed murders which had never been committed. Which is absurd. In a Group a man may ask guidance from other members of the team, but in principle he must himself decide. The old books on casuistry are full on debatable cases of restitution. The man who through the Groups gave himself up recently to that Oxford police because he had committed a number of thefts, undoubtedly in the right thing. The rule in these matters of difficulty is to get at the real motive. And there must always be a willingness to make restitution; though some kinds of restitution cannot be made. Being hanged for murder isn’t restitution. You don’t restore the life A Bishop has recently been perplexed, he tells me, because somebody has written to him from South Africa, following contact with the Groups, to restore something stolen. But the Bishop has not been able to estimate what was taken or to give the inquirer correct leading as to what he should restore. Nevertheless, the Bible teaches restitution. The Church teaches restitution. And restitution should be made whenever possible with a view to helping the persons concerned.”

I knew that the Canon, like the Bishop of Leicester and the Bishop of Hankow, and the other Church dignitaries, His own guidance-book, a practice often criticised by those outside.

“Is note-book guidance an advance on memory-guidance?” I asked Canon, expecting him to be a little gun-shy.

But he was prepared stoutly to defend the practice.

“I find that carrying a guidance-book saves a tremendous amount of time, for it fixes a great many fugitive ideas, some of which may be genuine guidance and may be lost if they go unrecorded. Unless you take all means of securing what comes Into your mind when trying to get guidance, all the resistances there are in human nature will rise up and block the most important things,” he warned. “Behind that lies an important psychological principle. Forgetting is actually necessary to ordered thinking. We forget irrelevant or unwanted things so that all we know shall not crowd into our consciousness and interfere with the direct line of our thinking upon the matter in mind at the moment. Forgetting is a positive help to thinking clearly and acting straight. If we remembered everything, our lives would be just a muddle.

“When guidance comes, it may be distasteful or even dangerous to our self-esteem, and so would be thrust on one side by forgetfulness unless we take steps to prevent it. For a long time I had felt I should give up smoking, which was not good for me, but I shouldn’t have done it unless I had written it down in guidance. Hitherto I had just forgotten it or shelved it. Smoking is a habit in itself neither good nor bad, but for my own life I found the discipline of not smoking carried with it a piece of God’s grace large enough to give me victory over much more deeply ingrained habits of self-indulgence. And this I believe has been the experience of many men in the Groups. I’m not saying that everybody should give up smoking. Of course, also, it may be carried to excess and become physically injurious and wasteful of the money we hold in stewardship. Each person must do what he honestly feels God tells him.”

The massive head inclined towards me as we probed deeper the matter of guidance.

“Of course, nobody pretends that all one’s thoughts are guidance. There is no knack about it. Guidance often comes in the form of good impulses -- the work of the Holy Spirit in human life. I get strong and certain guidance about some things, and then some guidance which is not so clear. Often I get guidance on how best to handle people who come to me for advice in trouble. Yet the guidance that comes to one person is not very different from what comes to anyone else. It is simple and elemental. If one compared guidance-books, there would not be much difference, save that each contains things applicable to the person who wrote it for the time it was written.

Guidance is often getting a new sanction for what we know already. Once it came to me and guidance to take a certain text, ‘Go into the City and Is it shall be shown you what you must do’ -- a text I had no wish to preach on, but I did, and three persons came to me afterwards to thank me for the special help which they had received. I often get guidance to speak on a subject that I have not prepared and to abandon the prepared subject. I always follow such guidance. A great advantage of guidance is that with it you have to make only one decision on one subject, whereas otherwise you might make twenty. For a while guidance may differ in a group of several persons, but eventually it is clearly shown that no real duties and life conflict. Which shows that the leading is part of a plan of God.”

The Canon continued: “I was once worrying as to which I should do: go a long journey by car or by train. After a long wasted in weighing the pros and cons, guidance came suddenly through with the message: ‘Don’t be a fool, go by car.’ If I had trusted my guidance instead of my reasoning powers, I should have been told not to be a fool much earlier.”

The Canon was convinced that willingness to do the Will of God was the measure of a man’s true under-standing of His Will, and that in team life could be found dependable confirmation or correction of individual guidance. A unified Group of surrendered people would be more sensitive to the Spirits full plan than would the individual.

I thought of those occasionally luminous flashes that had come to me in various parts of the world at various times.

“Do you get both guidance and super-guidance?” I asked him.

He shook his head. While not discrediting my experience of super-guidance, the Canon could not claim luminous flashes of outstanding intensity.

“You think everybody needs this guidance?”

“Unquestionably. Especially those who ascend in the world. As men climb to more important jobs, they find the difficulty of preserving a sense of proportion becomes far greater. By constantly referring their work back to God, it does put them into proportion for all sorts of situations, and helps them to add just the difficulties of others. One does not like to make claims for oneself, but in so far as I have been able to make spiritual progress, it has been largely through the insight which has come from these Quiet Times of listening to God. More marked, perhaps in my case has been the progress that has followed through little definite acts of decision for Christ. Some of these things have been very small, with not much meaning to them except that they have meant a personal loyalty. When those little impulses came, they knew they meant definite landmarks (what the Group calls driving in stakes).”

I was pressing the Bampton Lecturer to tell me more of what his association with the Group had meant to his own spiritual life when Frank observed that Canon Grensted was already a prepared instrument when they met. Their association had heightened and deepened the spiritual experience of both. Without Canon Grensted’s insight and knowledge, the Group might have encountered great misunderstandings, which would have seriously prejudiced progress when difficulties presented themselves. He was a sure guide, and brought a wealth of experience that matched what was the best in the Groups.

“It wouldn’t be true for me to say,” said the Canon, “that I owe anything like my whole religious experience to the Oxford Group, for most of it was lived before I came into touch with them. But I have seen the help and power that have come into other peoples lives through the Group and the great possibilities which may come from Sharing, although I have not progressed very far myself in that direction.

“But the things relevant are these. I came to know the movement here seven years ago. In those days the difficulty of knowing men and of doing real work as a College Chaplain, as opposed to my office to job, were the things that worried me. I knew that people needed help, but I could rarely get near them, for I didn’t know how it was to be done. My contact with the Group was multiplied many times over my contacts with individuals whom I had been seeing through the Group on things that matter to them. Until then they had not come to me, because I wasn’t getting that note in my preaching which made them want to talk to me. Of course, I had got a certain amount of interest before, but that has been a great deal heightened and deepened by these past seven years.

“What I have now come to see is that the keynote of preaching is in something personally felt and experienced, and that the moment it becomes official it is dead. This does not mean that theology is untrue, but that it has no life unless it is related to personal experience. This new impulse of personal experience in preaching came to me from contact with the Group. My sermons may not be so good as before, but they seem to produce more results.

“I remember preaching one under guidance at the last house-party in Mansfield College of which this distich was the theme:

Watching God’s terrible and fiery finger

Shrivel a falsehood from the Souls of Men.

In that sermon I was thinking of the tremendous majesty of God at work not only in the Group, but everywhere.”

Wondering how many more words of wisdom I should be able to extract, I urged him on, and the Canon continued:

“More and more I am coming to realise the impossibility of there being any finality in one’s religious development. The idea that at any one point in life one knows the whole gospel and is ready to preach it seems pitifully inadequate. Trying to work with the Group, I find myself continually being brought back to simple religious experience -- often to the simple religious experience I was missing because I was getting too sophisticated. In my early Group experience I missed a lot because I was too much the Court of Appeal. When I ceased to be that and worked with a small team I found quite a new experience. It brought home the importance of ordinary and simple things. I found that I was getting friendship and fellowship with a degree of naturalness and sincerity I had seldom found elsewhere.”

One of the other Group leaders told me that he had seen a meeting of ministers dissolving into a meeting of men just because the Canon had shared his own true experiences. In actual fact, crows are black the whole world over.

“Again and again,” the Canon went on, “I have seen the intense need of the clergy for that real freedom which Sharing can produce. The clergy are often very lonely, and the great many disastrous things occur in life because of loneliness.”

The Oxford Group are enthusiastic over the new zest in life which the fellowship produces. With all barriers broken down there follow a naturalness, a trust, a freedom, an abandoned, which are neither offensive nor presumptuous. I asked the Canon about this. He, too, was enthusiastic:

“The fellowship provided by the team helps you to face the world and bear the world,” he said. Nothing but God can help you to read and understand the Oxford Group at St. Helens, where I observed a real world -- not the unreal world of the newspapers -- placed before the people. Only Christ can enable one to see the real world. Only Christ can produce this kind of fellowship which is part of it. As Canon of Liverpool I invited eight vitalised youngsters to come up from Oxford to confer with some of the clergy as to the possibility of the work. Our sample team met with there is little groups and developed certain interesting contacts. We had with us John Watt of Edinburgh -- a highly converted Parson -- who was perfectly admirable. The others, thewith one exception, were about to be ordained in the Church of England. Preparatory work been done at Liverpool by Basil Yates, a recent convert, who once thought he was an agnostic, but was perhaps mistaken. While a lecturer in philosophy he had become an enthusiast for the Group. He and I (and some of the others) had had doubts of one another. At our first Quiet Time we said so, and our difference of outlook simply disappeared. The team was welded into a unity in a matter of minutes. We had the guidance we wanted. Good work was done and good preparation was made for the St. Helens mission which successfully followed.

“It was at this time I first began to take down notes of my own guidance, and it was this consistent note-taking by everybody that helped to cement the work of the team. And it was in Liverpool where my first piece of written guidance came -- that about stopping smoking. I may get guidance to start smoking again some day. But I doubt it. None has come so far.

“The important thing about that sample team was that a body of people of different ages and outlook found they could work within a common purpose, not muddled by their emotions. The great difficulty in life is that we are all next up with so many purposes, not all Christian, and owe a kind of loyalty to a variety of people. But it was shown in our team that there is a possibility of personal relationship of a high and rare quality of which most people are unaware.

“Of course we work together in our ordinary life, but on much too low a level. We accept the people we meet as to decent folk. We work with them and like them, and leave it at that. But it is not satisfactory. And our production is not satisfactory. Some people are left outside, while the work of the world as a whole is pretty badly done. The Oxford Group takes all comers, shows them how to live the highest life, knits them together in an efficient unity, and elevates them into a fellowship resembling the pattern made by Christ with a Twelve Apostles.”

Canon Grensted now holds a regular Tuesday afternoon service for the Oxford Group in the University Church of St. Mary. It is purposely a simple service of worship, and is not confused with other elements -- practically a service of meditation, rest and quiet. There is very little preaching. The institution is important, as, for a good many people, it means the realization of worship in a life resting completely on God. The service is meeting the needs of the Group, by whom it is gratefully accepted.

Canon Grensted goes to St. Mary’s some time before the service is to begin, for a time of Quiet. Usually there are some forty or fifty worshipers. They began with a hymn and remained standing for a brief silence. Then a passage of Scripture is read, followed by a ten-minute talk. Then the congregation sit or kneel, as they choose, for five minutes or more of silence. There follows another hymn, and then an act of worship of some kind. During most of the service -- and this is an important point -- the Canon turns his back to the people, to stress the impression that the whole service is directed towards God. All who attended speak of the quiet, refreshing quality of the service, which builds and sustains them for the work in hand and inspires them for greater work ahead.

The number of persons ready to back a promising religious venture is scarcely less than the number ready to support a racing certainty. And the motive which inspires the big crowd may be the same in each case -- “What can I get out of it?”

When there is no inducement of earthly gain apparent or underlying a new movement Godwards, we usually find “Not many wise, not many mighty, but the weak things of this world are chosen to confound the wise.”

The why is often stand aside not because there is nothing to gain, but because there is a lot to lose by identification with a new untested religious movement. Like Gamaliel, they are unwilling to oppose what may be a work of God, but also like him are unwilling to espouse it openly until confident of no prejudice to themselves through public identification. Believe in associating without affiliating -- appropriating the kudos and avoiding the kicks. They circle about the fringes of the Oxford Group enjoying the company of the people within, whom they like and admire to a point just short of emulation, but persist in addressing them as “You” instead of “We.” Timid souls these, both clerical and lay; vacillating souls some, who may have previously been identified with movements from which the Spirit of God was absent, and profess a reluctance to take the wrong step again; some are convinced, but just afraid, fearing to “let go” and trust themselves to God because to them God is too small or too feeble to compensate for the surrender of cherished self-Interest, some point of pride, social popularity, ridicule, or even a little as delicately administered persecution, common properties of the Cross in all ages.

There are scholars in Oxford of this order -- hesitating, waiting for the very new to become the very correct. But the chief complaint against scholarship at Oxford, like the complaint against scholarship elsewhere, is of its aloofness, even divorcement from life. When they Oxford Group began to make its first stirrings in the University it was not a new philosophy, but a new life. What would the theological dons say to it? Would scholarship identify itself with the new abundance Holy-Spirit-directed life that it proclaimed? In the days of the Wesleyan Revival, a don at one Oxford College said rather querulously that all his younger colleagues were no sooner elected than they proclaimed themselves Methodists.

One Sunday evening not so long ago the Chaplain of Corpus Christie -- an intellectual College -- unexpectedly revived the old Magdalen College custom in his own chapel In regard to him the newly-formed Group Movement. He quietly in interpolated a few phrases into his sermon which caused very little immediate comments and were unreported in any newspaper the next morning. Nevertheless, they were startlingly significant, since they were made openly in presence of both senior and junior members of the College, and therefore amounted to a formal public espousal of the new religious movement by an Oxford Don in the performance of his official duties.

Pausing in the main thread of his sermon, the Chaplain announced that he had been convicted of not being quite honest with his colleagues. Through fear of what they might think of him, he had withheld the declaration of his complete identification with the Oxford Group movement. He then mentioned his friendship with Frank, through whom he had come to a deeper experience of the Christian life than previously, and learned the necessity of absolute surrender to God as the directing force of his entire life. Thence he had come to understand that to reach a state where guidance was all in all he must be obedient all the time, in spirit before guidance was given, and act when it was received and through the entire process of fulfillment.

The setting of this little scene, which may live in history of the Oxford Group movement, is worth visualising. Corpus Christie College Chapel, hiding itself and its alliterative name in the far corner of the Front Quadrangle, might be described as “The Concealed Chapel of Oxford.” The building is smallish, sixteenth century, with much find dark panelling obscuring some of the windows and darkening the friendly Gothic interior. There is a pulpit, but that is obsolete. The Chaplain preaches from the chance of steps which is no hindrance, for he is tall, and is not use those sermon notes so embarrassingly difficult to hide. Of the immediate results from the Chaplain’s announcement were a new release in his own life, consciousness of more power In his work through surrender of his unwillingness to identify, and an interesting conversation with one of his own undergraduates. Nevertheless, the step he had taken that day was a forerunner of other acts of identification by Oxford Dons.

His own act was particularly significant, because one of the youngest members of the Theological Faculty had come into the open and officially identified himself for life with a new evangelism, then and still exercising the minds of many of the University. For the Chaplain of Corpus Christie was the Rev. Julian P. Thornton-Duesbery, a scholar with Three Firsts to his credit in the Oxford examinations -- “Mods,” “Greats,” and “Theology.”

His kindly eyes of deep blue, quiet dignity of personality, and his great intellectual powers are the first points you observe about him, points reproduced from two wonderful parents who provided him with the ideal home life and upbringing. His father was a bishop -- the Bishop of Sodor and Man -- and his mother a gifted mission-worker in Manchester at the time they met. Both parents were consecrated to the life of Christ, and they constantly maintained the true Christian atmosphere about him, although, as he says, “I did not always realise what it meant.”

Before becoming the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Julian’s father had labored in Barrow-in-Furness, Islington, Leyton (where his principal parish work was done), and then In a fashionable church in Marylebone, London.

Growing up in this inspirational environment, Julian did not wait until his first encounter with the Group to answer the Master’s call. “What I look upon as the decisive moment in my own conversion,” he told me, “came at Keswick through Bishop Taylor-Smith, before I knew anything of the Oxford Group movement. And it came through the concrete dealing with the known fact of sin as focused in one particular sin of my own life. From my own powerlesssness to overcome that sin I was led on to seek power from the Powerful One whom I knew only in theory as Jesus Christ. Of the divine of validity of that experience I have no doubt. This decisive moment was followed by some authentic works of the rebirth -- the discovery of the Bible as a new book, a new experience of prayer, and the beginnings of a message for my friends. Both then, and still more afterwards, I had considerable intellectual acquaintance with soteriology. But it was not until nearly eight years later, during a Group house-party in Scotland, that a major realisation of sin as a betrayal of divine love and trust in my ministry led me to the personal apprehension of what Christ had done on Calvary for me. . . . From which it would seem that you cannot hasten an act of God.”

In amplifying and me what he meant by the regeneration which was made possible for him through the effort running work of Christ, and his view of surrender of self and God, the Chaplain of Corpus Christie gave me this, as a favourite quotation from E. F. Scott’s Kingdom of God and the New Testament: “. . . It belongs to the essence of the message that everything depends on one great decision. The one necessary is to surrender oneself to them will of God, and all else will follow of its own accord. The will that has become one with God’s will can henceforth be trusted to take the right path in all those moral complexities which had to be carefully mapped out under the old law.”

The future Chaplain of Corpus Christi had now learned that the cost to God of forgiveness, “the Cross planted in time on Calvary, and the Cross set for all eternity in His Heart, may or may not be realised by the penitent, but in any case the cry of the prodigal is answered by the Father, and when the door has been opened the Lord comes in to sup. We must trust Him by His Spirit to guide the new disciple into all truth in His own time and way.”

He is confident that guidance comes whenever necessary, and that It must be followed without compromise and irrespective of personal desires. Presently he came to see how Christian experience often gives back what we think it may take away. His real desire in life at this time was to be a Don and teach the classics. He went back to his school and began to teach Latin and Greek, preparing to become a schoolmaster, returning to Wycliffe Hall to be ordained. There he was to be tried out before going back to his old school, but instead was asked to join the staff at Wycliffe Hall to teach theology only, and not his favourite classics. For some time he was undecided what to do, to return or stay, his inclination being to return to his school to teach classics, his wish to do the right thing irrespective of his desires. Unable to settle down to his work until a decision was reached, he wandered down the Woodstock Road praying for guidance, until he came to St. Phillip’s and St. James’ Church. His speed for this walk was typical of scholastic progress -- a mile an hour. He rolled and cogitated. Returning to his school meant running into temptations which were better avoided. That pay offered at the school was higher, but that did not matter. Then definite guidance came with sudden clearness that he must stay where he was and surrender his desire to be a Don and teach the classics. Some time after this there followed the offer of a Fellowship and the Chaplaincy of Corpus Christi with tutorial work -- an offer which would not have come to him had he returned to his school.

As a University Don he found that contact with Frank had shown him how to teach a new evangelism which would satisfy both intellectuals and non-intellectuals. While not shirking a genuine intellectual difficulty, he knew how to get down to the needs of all, whether really intellectual or merely masked under the cloak of intellectual problems. “When teaching men who are going to be parsons,” he told me, “I find that my association with the Group gives me an increasingly clearer vision of the relationship to life of my subject. All the time I am conscious that it is not mere scholarship, but the only possible life I am teaching. Of course, lots of persons discovered this before I did, and lots failed to discover It. But it is a discovery which everyone must make before he can be of a real use. And that is not involved any belittling of real painstaking and being exact scholarship, for the genius of Oxford education is a wide grasp of general principle combined with the discipline of exact attention to precise detail. The one real temptation of the college tutor is to think of pupils in terms of the grading they will achieve. While just as keen as ever that they get Firsts, and so reflect credit on the college and my teaching, I am able to look beyond and feel more concerned that after they have taken schools (final examinations) -- which is only the means to an end -- they shall be physically, mentally, spiritually hold when they get into their life-work: in fact, the complete man. Any man who passes through Oxford should leave equipped to face any problem that may turn up in his life, irrespective of where he lives and how. But it is only during the last three or four years that I have seen how to teach this all-round knowledge, and have realised how everyone gets up against personal problems, with many of which he is unable to deal through lack of training for their coming. Not that the Group exclusivity helps in these matters, for the Principle of Wycliffe Hall and some others I know see the same need, and give wise preparation for meeting personal problems.”

The Chaplain of Corpus Christi caused quiet a stir at one of the public Group meetings in Oxford at the end of the Easter Term in 1932. Suddenly called to speak at this meeting, he announced that he was a parson and a Don, one of the class apostrophised by Mr. Belloc as “remote end any effectual.” After quoting the old lady who was pleased with her new minister because the learned men was six days invisible and the seventh in- comprehensible, he startled the assembly by saying that if one were a Don and a parson of that type he was at the same time two distinct kinds of parasite -- a phrase which enlarged into newspaper headlines the next day. He also stressed the necessity for a Don and a parson to justify his existence by results just in the same way that the member of any other calling justified himself by results, and declared that If, as a parson, he did not know he had the answer in Christ to every human problem, including one in Oxford that he had encountered a few days ago for which there was no human solution whatsoever -- he would resign his Fellowship and leave the University.

Another startling view that the Chaplain of Corpus recently expressed is likely to be rehearsed a good many times in the future. He is not convinced that the days of persecution for Christ’s sake -- perhaps martyrdom -- are yet ended, even in the more enlightened countries, possibly in England. He expressed to me his feeling that Oxford was now In for a time of open war (perhaps with pens only) more better than the city had experienced for a considerable span. Never had the Gulf between secularism and Christianity stretched so wide as at present in the University, now experiencing the full effects of the change of sixty years ago, when it was decreed that the Fellows need no longer be In Holy Orders. Though he was not anxious to see the old order reinstituted, he felt disquieted to observe that nowadays the Fellow who was in Holy Orders was the exception. “All the same,” he said, “we have still many earnest Christians among the lay heads of Colleges, and whatever conflicts may lie ahead of us, I am convinced that Christianity at Oxford is stronger and more vital to-day than at any time in the last eighty years.”

The association of a true scholar in touch with life and not swamped with scholarship, who is prepared publicly to maintain the implications of his own spiritual experience, means much for the new evangelism in Oxford. A young man under thirty, his remarkable lectures on the Christian doctrine of God are woven out in deep experience as well as from theory through deep thinking. Even though not all of his pupils follow his precepts, his “God-guided” life in an inspiration in the age when modern scholarship knows so little of the Holy Spirit from personal experience.

Julian Thornton-Duesbery has an unruffled composure himself for every occasion. To see him conduct a meeting of Senior Oxford, reply to comments, the subtle catch, the straightforward disavowal, in quiet, scholarly accents, laughing with his critic against himself as readily as turning the laugh, and to hear his own laughter, midway between a roar and a growl, is an entertainment. He has a quick and cherry answer for everyone, unerringly locating the exact spot.

Julian’s work on Tuesday afternoons in training leaders has enabled the movement to expand at greater speed, and his Bible-steady classes at house-parties have been invaluable. It was largely through him (supplementing the work of pioneers already on the field), when traveling with a party of students from Wycliffe Hall last year, that the work opened in Egypt, Palestine, and the Near East.

“Fellowship with Group,” he says, “has kept the highest steadily before my eyes, and when I have failed, I have been enabled to realise it pretty quickly. I am coming more and more to realise the worth of fellowship and the price of having It -- honest sharing -- also to realise that two are better than one, that it Is the team and not the individual which has the better chance of success; and that is a good thing for a skeptical individualist like me to learn.”

“There are plenty of scholars of Church History who know all that in the abstract (says Sam Shoemaker in Twice-Born Ministers), yet to concretely never get away from their own inveterate individualism or learn to merge their own experience and activity with others whose knowledge and experience will challenge and perhaps modify their own. It is much easier to study St. Francis’ movement than it Is to throw oneself Into a contemporary movement which is in its initial stages, whose final outcome is not certain, and which tests the faith of its participants all the time. One need hardly say that self-identification with a modern movement which raises real issues and challenges so much in contemporary religious activity is harder for such a man . . . than for almost any type. The intellectual of all men finds it most distasteful to lose himself in a movement where the institutional emphasis is deep and to become one of a functioning group bent on definite evangelism.”

The Chaplain of Corpus feels that the Group movement is making a real contribution to the Christian life of this generation, challenging all to a more vital witness for their Lord. It touches men whom ordinary pastoral methods do not reach, particularly the “hearty” type. The free and unconventional and intensely sincere atmosphere of the Groups finds acceptable to the modern mind, with its frank facing of every problem as opposed to the “Hush-hush” methods of the past.

He believes that the challenge to a full surrender to Jesus Christ, the insistence upon discipline, especially the “Morning Watch” or “Quiet Time,” is in accord with all that is best in our ecclesiastical history and heritage, and that men and women to-day are hungry for the unification of life which acceptance of these standards always brings. Nothing can be more definite in its committal or stirring in its outspokenness than his recent challenge to a gathering of fellow-Churchmen:

“Whatever we may think of the Oxford Group, it has thrown a challenge to the Christian Church. Time and again, half humorously, half pathetically, clergy, both Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical, have said to me there must have been something very wrong with the Church if the Group had to arise. And I am afraid that is profoundly true. The Group has no new methods, no new theology; it calms with the old good news of Jesus mighty to save; and it flings the challenge to the Church that professes His name to experience that saving grace of fresh, individually and corporately, and so go out to battle with the world. We are moving forward from a long period of trench warfare out into an open war of movement. Christianity and Secularism stand face to face. The battle is being joined all along the line, even in placid, respectable, academic Oxford. There is no room for compromise. The only vital people In the world to-day are those who are right out for God or right out against Him.”

The voice of the new evangelism to-day in Oxford.

To find out everything about the Oxford Group when Frank knows your credentials is an easy matter, but try to get at the core of a changed life for unscrupulous evangelistic in ends, and see how difficult things become. The Oxford Group know how to protect their spiritual secrets just as well as the Christians in the Catacombs knew had to protect theirs. But once convinced Frank of your bona-fides, and he becomes a kind of spiritual impresario ready to produce any information you may be in need of, or any interesting character whose experience seems to coincide with your requirements.

The door flew open and Frank’s arms flew wide as he introduced one of his outstanding -- of Eton and New College -- a man who prefers to call himself the Introducer. He is another six-footer, for the University atmosphere is stabbed praying giants.

Here’s a young man who will look well in your dental chair,” laughs Frank, and another Oxford rowing-man takes the place just vacated. Some men are born saints, some die saints, some do neither. The first look of the newcomer told me he was born a saint. What on earth does a man with that pale, ascetic face, dark hair, rich voice and earnest manner want with the Group -- an institution that attracts sinners only? He is the kind of man whom you know at once will start life as the over-worked secretary of a missionary society and lose it in a Boxer or Bolshevist rebellion when he is the youngest missionary bishop in the Far East.

The Introducer was once, in fact, the Secretary to an influential religious organisation, so I asked him why he of all persons wanted to come into the Group. His story was revealing.

“Just because my own personal life was wrong,” he admitted.

You look at him and feel certain his lying, only he Is a born saint, and never does those things. He had been seeking to meet the intellectual requirements of people without meeting their need for redemption. There was a lack of power and a great absence of joy and peace in his own life.

“Before I met the Group,” he confessed, “I did not know just how to put those things right. W. E. S. Holland, the well-known missionary, told me one day that Group were touching a type of person we were unable to get near. That annoyed me, for I knew our society was doing a good work. Then two things occurred which gave me jolt. We had a committee of seven in our society, and one of the first persons to be changed was Francis Goulding, who seemed to radiate a wonderful new life. That made me wonder. About two weeks later, Julian -Duesbery, also a senior member of the committee, came to me transformed. Instead of being shy and negative, he had now a missionary love of men. He said he had been in touch with Group, and that made me wonder again. For I felt I had failed. Another incident occurred just after which seemed to prove my conviction. I went to Henley in a New College Eight. When I entered the bedroom at night with the other tough crowd I hadn’t courage to kneel down and pray. That was the test of my Christianity which I failed to pass. To nights went by before I produced the necessary courage. That was how far my preaching had taken me. When I should have been the happiest of witnessing Christians.”

The saint in my chair paused:

“Then my father died suddenly, and I now realised I had been depending upon his faith more than my own. I was facing ordination in pursuance of my fathers wish, and went to Oxford, where I came into touch with Ken Twitchell, who showed me I had not fully surrendered my life. All sorts doors were still left open to the world. Fear was one of them. I had two sets of friends, a lot of worry, loved smoking, loved self-indulgence. These and other unsurrendered things I did surrender, asking for grace to give me power over my temptations, and joy of victory and ability to help with the lives of others. I started with the Group, and during the last two years passed from content to discontentment with self, feeding a constantly increasing need for God. Of course I have had wonderful times, especially in the campaigns in Edinburgh and St. Helens.

“I realise now only too clearly that self-satisfaction and contentment are the gates to a religion of conven-tionality, to a religion which has no message for others, to a religion which lacks joy and which begets a worried, fretful mind. Only he whose will is continually broken in the valley of humiliation can experience the joy of victory in Christ. ‘We are so apt,’ as somebody has written, to drift into ‘the genteel inanity of a conventional religion which neither satisfies us, nor helps our friends, the glorifies God.’

“Surely in all religious work of the future we must stress more heavily these two facts -- the necessity for a continual sense of need which can only find its answer in a fuller and more complete surrender to Jesus Christ, and secondly, the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit in the facts of life.”

“Do you get guidance?” I asked him.

“Yes. During Quiet Times I have a sense of God being in my head and understanding, whereas previously I thought my own unconsecrated thoughts. There have resulted an utter dissatisfaction with the merely good and a passionate longing through discipline for the working of the best. And such love for God that I have a tremendous love for men, and never like to leave them in a state of spiritual mediocrity. Of course, I have slipped, but the Group never let me relapse. They hold me up. They give me a passion for winning souls -- which is one means for the sublimation of passion.”

“And have you made progress?”

“God alone knows that. All I know is that my vision has been clarified in certain directions. Once I used to take a man alone to Group meetings when I was bent on helping him. Now I’d try to turn him to Christ, which seems like progress. Anyway, that is now my real aim in life -- to bring my friends to Christ as St. Andrew brought his brother and the boy with the barley loaves. St. Andrew was the Introducer, and I wish to be the Introducer too.”

If the Bible contained a comprehensive list of Bewares as well as Beatitudes we should probably find in it “Beware of the Stung Conscience.”

The thought was expressed in several parts of the Acts of the Apostles, though not in epigrammatic form. When they heard this they were pricked (or cut) to the heart. The first reference is followed by the news that three thousand souls were added to the Church. The second time Gamaliel stood up and warned the Assembly that if the movement was of God they might be found to be fighting against Him. On the third occasion, the crowd the silenced their stung consciences by the stoning of Stephen.

There may be several motives animating the critic of the true Christian or of a deeply spiritual movement: fear, misunderstanding, deliberate wrong-headedness, hate or envy and other powerful elements that move humanity to action. But the stung conscience is usually the first cause. Humanity is so full of sensitive complexes that explode when touched by look, word or deed -- sometimes by the very presence of a pure character who is challenging life is taken as silent judgment on the critic.

I have seen more than one instance of this kind, especially when an earnest Christian encounters one who has back-slidden. An attempt is made to ease the stung conscience by fastening on the weak spots in the other, man or movement. Such persons often project to their own failings to the other person, blindly believing the other is the sinner.

Canon Grensted told me the story of two temperate ladies who indulged in champagne for the first time. Presently one of them leaned over to the other and exclaimed:

“Your drunk! You’ve got two noses.”

“That,” said the Bampton Lecturer, “was just a clear case of projection. Drunk herself, she was accusing the other person. Another example of projection is the common one of a man losing his temper and the immediately blaming the other for losing his, while the crowd looks amusingly on.

“A prude is a person defending an inner conflict by being censorious of another’s conduct. Christians are criticised more than sinners by Pagans because sinners did not sting consciences.

“Unfortunately, a Christian is so often pitifully trying to defend himself against this projection that he develops a censorious attitude himself. He should disregard such criticism remembering with Browning:

With me, faith means perpetual unbelief

Kept quiet like this snake ‘neath Michael’s foot

Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

“Not that all critics attack openly,” says Canon Grensted. “Every psychologist knows the patient who agrees with everything he says so as to avoid trouble. But it is only superficial agreement. There are also many who talk about other persons’ problems so often that they prove thereby they have similar on solve problems of their own. The real key to the criticism made of the Group’s uncompromising activities is in the emotions stimulated when attention is directed to any problem by particular words.

Some people try to solve the world’s problems by silence, and by shutting their eyes to them. Then win something breaks through with sufficient emotional vigour they blow up. A man may threaten to do something drastic because sex has been mentioned at a Group meeting, though he rarely carries out his threat. Perhaps he has been living in a fantasy world where there is no sex, or is projecting some moral offence of his own in criticism of the Group. When the war broke out in Austria, some old ladies shut themselves in their house and declined to have anything further to do with the outside world. For them there was no war. But some of us know there was a little scrap in progress about that time.”

The accuracy of Canon Grensted’s diagnosis is indicated in the stories of attacks made on Christianity in the early centuries.

According to Tacitus, the early Christians were universally hated on account of “the abominable deeds of which they were guilty and their hatred of the human race. They execution of their leader gave a temporary check to the pestilent superstition. But it broke out afresh, and extended to Rome, or everything that is vile and scandalous accumulates.”

Another complaint against the Christians was that they despised the temples as dead houses, scorned the gods and mocked sacred things. Gatherings of Christians for prayer and worship were looked upon as secret societies, and popular imagination ran riot in surmising what transpired . . . the practice of the kiss of peace suggested divers abominations to the impure mind of the masses. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper and the holding of love feasts were capable of various interpretations.

Early Christians were said to be a people “who skulk and shun the light of day. It was a common charge against them that they separated themselves from the rest of mankind. . . . Many persecutions were popular outbreaks, and revealed the deep hatred which the people felt towards the Christians. We can see from the Act’s that the preacher of the Gospel interfered with vested interests and provoked violent opposition. The fortune-tellers at Philippi and the silversmiths at Ephesus had no difficulty in creating riot, but they were careful to conceal their true motive. . . . But what roused the hatred of all classes most was the seemingly supercilious aloofness from the life of society of the followers of Christ.”

And the chief opposition to the Oxford Group still comes to not from people who are blind to sin, but from those whose consciences are stung. One day a man came to a house-party and opposed the work on psychological grounds. It was dangerous, he said. Two weeks later he was forced to leave the town because of his own misconduct. Of course, the teaching was dangerous to the life he lived.

An Oxford graduate stood up at one house-party and told to the Group they were a psychological fraud, and sat down. Nobody took much notice, and the meeting proceeded on its own serene way. After the meeting he said he proposed to leave the house-party (such sometimes do). Garrett Stearly made what he thought was a guided contact, and in conversation the next afternoon the man faced for the first time a marriage problem in his life. Later he stood up and admitted he was the fraud, not the Group.

There are “letting-down parties” at some house-parties: people who get together and say things privately in criticism of the work. Usually there are several stung consciences among them. Before the house-party ends the letting-down parties usually become the “bucking-up” parties. Two children had attended an Oxford Group meeting and returned home different. They were behaving so magnificently that their father grew suspicious. What had they got hold of? He came to a house-party to see if anything everything was O.K. Silent at most of the meetings, he liked the getaway to one of these “letting-down” parties. But one day he got the better of his stung conscience and privately shared his real problems -- embezzlement and adultery.

How two sides of a person’s nature will work on the question of honesty was shown at one house-party. Ken Twitchell tells of a girl attending a gathering who saw her own problems challenged by the Group, and attempted to turn the edge of the challenge by intellectual arguments. Some well-meaning but misguided of the pious attempted to answer her abstruse questions about the existence of God, but there were others who got nearer the trouble. She left the first day, and went away saying she was through with the Group. Arrived home, she enlarged on their stupidity, confessed all their sins, including some not there, and found all her family in agreement. Then she began to change. The more her family agreed and took the point of view she had just propounded, the more she excused the Group she had just derided. Finally, she found herself hotly defending. So she returned to the house-party and accepted the Group’s basis of life.

One who came to a house-party was a middle-aged businessman, secretary of a Chamber of Commerce, proudly Orthodox, boastful of his Bible Class. A few of the boys in his class were changed through contact with the Group, which introduced a most disturbing element into the aggressively Orthodox life of their teacher. He stood up at one Group meeting, waved a Bible and dramatically announced: “I believe in this Book from cover to cover. I came to this house-party to see if the Group is orthodox, for I have a nose for orthodoxy. My life is based on it.” The Group believed much more than he; they not only believed but they live life.

With some difficulty he was it induced to stay. Though he wanted to nose out their orthodoxy, he required only one whiff. He found the honesty of the Group increasingly painful. But one night he sat up until morning with a Group-leader cogitating on this new honesty. In the Quiet Time next morning he openly confess to his false piety, and that he now so his life had to be re-made. Most of all, he had been convinced that he was “just a big gas-bag.” Though he could talk religion for hours, he had never been honest at home. He had superimposed his will on his son, who had left home, and on other people, asking them to do what he was not doing himself.

He called together the Chamber of Commerce and made restitution. He asked them to attend at his place of business to hear of certain matters of personal moment. He openly admitted his faults aggressiveness and his garrulous by piousity. Some who came more impressed and associated with the Group; but some criticised. This same man also toured the town making restitution to a number of people whom he had treated wrongly. His estranged son was seen, and a better relationship followed. A new unity came to his family through the children being allowed to develop their own initiative without parental browbeating.

A young critic, a Scot, who came to the meetings, opposed himself to the teaching, alleging that he was concerned about the unequal distribution of wealth, the truth of which statement he subsequently proved by admitting that he was in the habit of ringing up the wrong change on his employer’s cash register.

When the Gospel is preached in the Holy Spirit and either convicts or enrages. A middle-aged professional man, forceful but suave, had been very successful in business, and was about to retire to a comfortable life of golf. He heard, when on holiday, of the Groups coming to his city, and being the son of a minister, he considered he knew all about that sort of thing. When he came back he found all the men in his club talking about that Oxford Group. He immediately telephoned to his most Pagan friend and invited him to dinner. He packed off as soon after dinner as he conveniently could and went home disgusted. Soon afterwards he had a business appointment in a distant city, where he had a talk with one of the shrewdest magnets there. Thoroughly on his guard against this clever man of the world that he should not be cheated, he was taken aback to be thus addressed:

“Mr. Browne, I’ve been in touch with the Oxford group. And I want to own up to you I’ve over-reached you twice in a business deal.”

This was a staggerer! But the minister’s son held out manfully. A week later he went to another city, where he hoped to have a pleasant afternoon with a charming young lady, motoring in his car. To-day she was not so affable or responsive as usual. In the middle of their drive the girl produced a note from a friend who had just joined the Group and was urging her to do the same. This further blow from close-home completely punctured him for the day. His evening was spoiled, and not improved by the girl’s suggested that the Oxford Group were running a house-party near at hand. He determined to go and prove they were absolute charlatans; he would expose them thoroughly. He arrived barely managing to get a spare room among the cheery crowd. He was entertained by a bright young Englishwoman and sent to the first meeting mollified by her charm. He heard a sophisticated Scotsman, a typical man of the world, with close-cropped mustache and military bearing, stand up and witness in the semi-humorous, nonchalant manner that the world understands.

In the language of the smoking-room, Loudon Hamilton told how Christ had turned him from a waster into a worker for Himself. The visitor writhed under the honesty of this worldlings who had become as wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove in Christ. Disliking the man -- such is the phenomenon of conviction -- he was irresistibly drawn to the speaker. For hours they talked, and ultimately he found that same new life for himself. He now knew who was a real charlatan.

If you ask people to make radical changes in their lives and they don’t obey, they must pick holes in you. As Canon Grensted has it: “When something like the Group comes along and suggests that God be put in the first place always, instead of the tenth, and people find their disordered sentiments as threatened, they naturally begin to feel annoyed.”

The Gospel preached in the Holy Spirit either convicts or enrages. The Stung Conscience trics to Sting.

As this is a book for sinners, and as most sinners, myself included, or rather hazy about what sin is, it seems opportune to supply the answer in this chapter.

An Irish Rector told me that a famous preacher delivered a fine sermon on sin to a village flock, and was afterwards embarrassed to be told, “Sure, your riv’ence -- we didn’t even know the manin’ of sin until you came here.”

After one of the meetings at the last Cambridge house-party Frank burst into my room, exclaiming: “You should have heard Loudon Hamilton’s talk on Sin. Fine! Great! Never heard anything so revealing. That’s what you should get for your book.”

High inveigled Loudon into my room and induced him to go through his notes and give me the gist of his talk. He looked thoroughly at home with his subject, as his Highland figure lolled magnificently before my April fire. Loudoun has a fine head, dark brown hair, eyes and mustache, a strong voice and a witty, paradoxical turn of phrase. That day -- at a religious house-party in Selwyn College -- he wore a white sweater, a bright leather belt, navy blue shorts and (below bearing these) a pair of stockings that were “red like crimson” -- the sin colour! A picturesquely powerful figure suggesting anything but his old role of the master at the Eton. He told me they were the colours of the London Scottish Rugger Club, of which he had been a member.

Loudon began to give me this illuminating Group view of Sin:

Many people don’t believe in sin, but they still live in it. We are indebted, it would seem, to Bertrand Russell, with some assistance from Mr. Huxley, for doing away with sin. Unfortunately, they have not been able to do away with temptation. I wish they had. But the fact is that men and women are still tempted, even intellectual people. And sin is what happens when we give way to temptation.

“If you were to write my epitaph,” said a friend to Dr. Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh, “you would say: He had every virtue but a sense of sin.”

A small sense of sin means a small Christ. It is however moreover however necessary to be definite about sin and thoroughly honest with ourselves. Much of our efforts to deal with the wrong things in our lives is vitiated because we are too vague about them. We speak of forgiveness of sin in the abstract without getting deliverance from specific sins in the particular.

Sin is a force. It may be likened to a mathematician. It adds to a man’s troubles, subtracts from his energies, multiplies his aches and pains, divides his mind, takes interest from his work, discounts his chances of success, and squares his conscience.

Sin does for things to us. First of all, it blinds. While motoring in Switzerland we ran into mist. After some time the mist cleared, and to our surprise there appeared gigantic peaks in the sunshine almost overhead. We had thought we were high up. Actually we discovered we were on a very low level indeed. Similarly in a spiritual realm, we are befogged by sin and unaware of our real position in relation to Christ.

Secondly, sin binds. We are bound by fears, chiefly of other people -- of their opinions about us -- of the future, of our money and health, and a hundred other things.

Thirdly, sin multiplies. The lesson of the first chapter of James is that man is beguiled and lured by his own desire. Desire conceives and breeds sin while sin matures and gives birth to Death.

When we tell one lie we have to tell a number of lies as a rule to cover it up. Hence we have Christ’s emphasis on being faithful in that which is least. And Alpine mountaineer knows that one false step is enough in certain places to precipitate an avalanche. Many of us have taken that false step, congratulating ourselves that sin avalanche will not ensue; and when it has come we have made futile attempts to stop It half-way down the hill, with the inevitable result of disaster.

Fourthly, sin deadens and deafens. A hot cinder put on the heel of our hand may not hurt as much, but if put on our cheek would cause of sharp pain. The temperature of the cinder has not changed, but only our sensitiveness to it. By repetition and habit many of us have lost the sense of sinfulness of certain things In our lives. We need to be made sensitive again. Sin has defended us so that we cannot hear the voice of God. It is sometimes convenient to be deaf. Many of us have even become hardened to church services, and by repetition are dulled to the simplest truths.

The best definition of sin that we have is that sin is anything in my life which keeps me from God and from other people. Note that it is something in my life, and not In the other person’s. Most of us like to confess other people’s sins and not our own. But the first need Is ourselves, and not the other person. We can’t change others until we ourselves are changed.

Let us get region of false distinctions right away. Most of us make an easy distinctions between big sins and the ones. No such distinction exists in the Bible. Paul uncompromisingly states that all unrighteousness is sin. Sometimes we may excuse sin because it is occasional; we say, it is all right occasionally to get drunk. Then is it all right occasionally to commit a murder? The problem of most of us is not the open sin, but the secret; not the sin that makes us uncomfortable, but the comfortable sins. We must cease dealing with symptoms and get down to root causes and motives.

Christianity has a moral backbone. And let us take for convenience four of the simple moral standards that we see in Christ’s own life -- honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Those standards are absolute. No one has ever yet proved He compromised on any one of those four. Let us take them one by one and see how we measure up to His standard.

HONESTY

A child once gave a definition of an abstract noun as the name for anything which didn’t exist, like truth or honesty. Take the matter of the tongue. Sins of the tongue are myriad. First is mis-statement or misrepresentation, by exaggerating or am minimising or giving a false emphasis, usually to our own glory. Secondly come concealment and dishonest silences. Thirdly, we evade by the simple device of polite lying and false excuses. We call them by more comfortable names. We call sin failure, or amiable weakness, or ascribe it to temperament are our characteristics. We appeal to heredity and environment. We say it runs in the family, or tacitly excuse it on that score. Let the sin have an intellectual name and it becomes quite respectable. It is “so correct” to call a thing “inferiority complex,” when it Is really a very simple but deadly form of pride. Fourthly, there is criticism, of which we will have more to say, and negative discussion about people or their work. Fifthly, it is easy to slip into double-dealing: saying one thing to a person and another thing about him behind his back.

Then in the matter of stealing, some of us travel first-class on trains with a third-class ticket or travel further on the train than our ticket allows. I have myself entered a football ground by the cheap entrance and have gone out under the ropes to the more expensive section. Shortly after meeting the Group I had to send the money for the dance-ticket for which I had not paid. We sometimes borrow books and other things and somehow forget to give them back. Will you go to your library shelves and look through your books and see If you have any you ought to return? A friend once said she could tell a lie, but she could not write one; so she got her secretary to make out her income-tax return for her. When the B.B.C. (British Broadcasting Company) announced they would have an inspection to stop wireless pirates, over ten thousand new licences were taken out during the few days before the inspection began.

There are sins of attitude -- often sins of pretense, pose and affectation. How common is the business of wearing a mask and trying to make an impression on others, the anxiety to appear better with the deliberate concealment of things that are unfavourable to ourselves. Indeed, we often defend the flaws in ourselves by criticising them most bitterly and others. Being socially inferior, we may affect an Oxford or a Cambridge accent, though Heaven knows why we should want to do that. Or we are like a chameleon taking our colour from the crowd we are with. We are one thing at home. We can be religious if necessary with our pious relatives, and we can be hard-boiled at a Rugger or rowing dinner. We can be sentimental and romantic with our dancing-partners, anxious to display what we fondly imagine to be the nice side of our natures. We must be honest about our motives, which are always apt to get mixed even in the best-regulated religions.

Another form of dishonest attitude is that of patronage of a movement like the Group movement. It amounts to this. We are approving of a thing we won’t pay the price of doing ourselves. The Group doesn’t seek patronage, is not much concerned about approval, and is not content with parallelism. (“We are running on similar lines.”) It is not that the Group is one method and the others have other methods. Either we are living the maximum experience of Christ or not.

PURITY

Feather-investors are not sufficient for purity, nor is it good enough to squirt a little rose-water into the atmosphere and hope for the best. There was once a negro preacher who wouldn’t dare preach about chicken-stealing because all his folk were doing it most of the time and he did it himself occasionally. What we need is a rotary street broom to clean things up. Equally bad is the pharisaic sin of being comfortably blind or willfully ignorant or unhealthily inquisitive about these matters. Parents there often live in a fool’s paradise about the needs of their children. It is easier to live and deal superficially with people. But what would we think of a doctor who refused to make a drastic diagnosis of a disease from which we are suffering? What if he refused to deal with certain types of cases in his wards? Christ’s standard of moral purity began with the eye and the thought. How would you feel if your thought-life at certain times were suddenly thrown upon a screen in the view of mixed assembly?

We may need to deal with the tongue and the touch. For many of us our history is this -- the look, the thought, the fascination of the thought and then the fall. And, further, with regard to our relationships with the other sex there may be fellowship, but there must never be familiarity.

LOVE

Thomas Carlyle, after hearing a local minister preach on love, said that he had been like a flea in a tar-barrel. Love is a vast subject. The Bible tells us that hate is equivalent to murder. The one is as bad as the other. Is there anyone for whom you still cherish feelings of dislike, resentment and lack of forgiveness? The issue is fairly serious.

The sins against love are common with the tongue. Suppose we read the third chapter of James before our next tea-party. Let us deal with gossip. So live that you can sell your parrot to the town gossip with an easy mind. Most of us need to buy a padlock for our tongues and to throw away the key.

Criticism often hides much ill-will. Remember we criticise in others what’s wrong in ourselves. The Pharisees condemned the woman taken in adultery and tried to get Christ to condemn her too. But He was free of the sin. They showed by their action they were not. Christ condemn this sin, but saved the sinner. “Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more.” Remember me reveal ourselves by our criticisms, our prejudices, our silences, and our nervousness. Criticism is the sin par excellence of Christian workers. Only say at about the others what you say to them. Is Christ the silent listener to all your conversation? We cannot help others if we laugh at them.

Jealousy Is devastating to peace of mind and spiritual power. So our snobbery and superiority, whether social, intellectual or spiritual. Snobbery may take the form of liking to be known as one who goes a lot among the poor. We may thank God we are not as other men are, and so do they.

In tolerance of other people’s points of view are of their weakness as can be an equally devastating form of lovelessness.

And there is reserve. We say something was are too sacred, when the real truth is we are too selfish. Most of us are in the grip of a false reserve. I used to pride myself on my reserve until I found my reserve was really pride. False reserve makes us rigid, separates us from others, gives them a false impression of what we really are, and, worst of all, prevents us from helping them or entering sympathetically or intelligently into their difficulties.

Temper cuts across love. Have you apologised for the last time you lost your temper to anyone, with a member of your own family, a bust conductor or a railway clerk?

The sin of Fear is a sin against love. Perfect love casteth out fear. Most of us are afraid of others and consequently don’t help them.

UNSELFISHNESS

Finally, let us take the difference between ourselves and Christ as regards to our conduct, our attitudes, manner, judgments and feelings towards others.

Self-- Let us make a list of the different forms in which self operates in our lives. Archbishop Temple has said, “Your problems are mixed up with the things you love most and of which count most to you.” Self-love shows itself in the love of praise and popularity and social success. Often we stand on what we are pleased to call our dignity. In fact, our dignity is so well stood on that there’s really not much the left. We dread almost more than anything to make a fool of ourselves. We develop what we are pleased to call sensitiveness, but which we can better call touchiness. Then self-pity creeps in. We feel inferior, we positively hug failure and point to previous defeats as evidence of our limitations. Or we may develop a martyr complex with all its faults heroics. We say we “can stand anything.” The truth is we may stand anything, but we don’t change anything. Then self-importance often gives rise to jealousy and makes us run on our position and reputation, though inwardly defeated. We develop “self-respect.” That usually means ninety per cent. self and ten percent respect. We ask for special treatment like Naaman the Syrian, or we enjoy being Interesting invalids. But times are so urgent that there is no place for the interesting invalid in the front-line trench. He ought to be shot at dawn.

Again, self-interest about money or possessions shows itself by being unwilling to lend them or give them, being fussy about them, but spending too much time thinking about them, suffering from an exaggerated carefulness about our own things. It makes as preoccupied and worried with our own affairs. We become penny wise and pound foolish. We painstakingly practice “the economy that leadeth to poverty.” We only believe in Matthew vi. 33 so long as the stock market is sound. This constant self-Interest leaves too nerves and irritation. How often is the root cause of nerves just sin!

Another form of self-seeking is the ambition that disregards the interest of others and is not over scrupulous about its methods of obtaining its objects. The profit replies with direct simplicity, “Seekest thou great things for thyself; seek them not.”

Self-consciousness reveals a life and habits of mind that are still rotating around the axis ego. In most of us there is the instinct for self-display showing itself in love of attention and in the willingness to do our best as first string, but not being ready for the same effort when less credit will come our way. Such self-consciousness often appears in clothes and manners and in the subjects of our conversation.

One of the commonest forms of self is self-indulgence. There is self-indulgence in food and physical comforts. But we also indulged it when we are lazy, or we procrastinate, and we are unpunctual. We say we’ll put off until to-morrow the thing we can do the day after! Some things we do in the sweet by-and-by which need to be done in the nasty now and now. We indulge ourselves by airing our prejudices about people, airing our likes and dislikes in matters of books, furniture, and furnishings generally; and we are tremendously taken up with whether a thing or a person appeals to us are not. We often regulate our behavior accordingly, and have no hesitation in even being rude to people we may not like or whom we consider socially inferior. Often we give way to moods when we become, as a lady said of her debutante daughter, expensive to keep and difficult to live with. Some of us are extravagant in money, sentimental about our friends, whether of the other sex or the same-sex, and vindictive when we are crossed.

Then, again, there is self-centeredness. Most of us are born rotating on the axis ego, and continue to do so until the end of our lives, often at an increasing rate. One result of that is that we are never able to keep friends for any length of time. It not only loses us friends, but often keeps us from bothering to make them. A girl once told me she had a private cinematograph tucked away in the back of her head, and that when her mind was not otherwise occupied she would set the film in motion and the like to watch scene after scene, now romantic, now tragic, now pathetic, now sentimental, now heroic, in each and all of which she herself was the central figure. It finally culminated in the imaginary scene in which her own deepest desires were fully gratified with curtains and sofa covers of the right colour and the husband with hair to match. All of us have our day-dreams in one form or another. Though not necessarily wrong in themselves, so far as they are centred in self-interest they are wrong.

And now for one of the biggest monsters of the self -- self-will. We simply want our own way, and will not yield. The results of it are as obvious as they are disastrous. It brings friction with others and tiredness for ourselves. It is one form of pride. We do no diagnosis, and are consequently useless to the people and the situations around us. With self-will unchecked we become precipitate in action, unguided In decisions, demanding in our efforts and inpatient of restraint or advice. It is the most prolific source of quarrels in families. The objects obtained are always unsatisfying, and the result is that we crave more indulgence in the vain hope of more satisfaction. The final indictment against self-will is written by the prophet, ”We have turned every one to his own way.” It is also, if we only knew it, incredibly stupid. We often mistake obstinacy for strength of mind.

It is extraordinary how prolific our minds are in finding reasons for our own failures which we endeavour to make satisfactory to ourselves and, if possible, to others. It is the well-known art, self-justification. When corrected, we seek to justify. And with that dislike of correction in ourselves goes a love of correcting others. Nothing alienates the hearts of people more quickly than that.

Then there is the very common business of being self-opinionated. We do love our own opinion about a thing.

We are very ready to assert it. We are confident it is right. We resent disagreement, even though we may know little about the subject. It makes us seek to impose our point of view, instead of sharing a quality of life. And there is the sin of the pet point of view. We allow ourselves to be so much absorbed by our own that we never see anyone’s else. It is like Nero fiddling a little tune of his own while the horror of a burning Rome is all around him.

Again, there is self-sufficiency, which makes us feel no need of other help. This results from too small a conception of Christ and His demands, and too large a conception of our own capacities.

The last self we will deal with is the final atheism of self-effort. We do God’s work, but not His will. It is our choice, in our way, on our strength. It leads immediately to a false objective, and self-chosen service. We do not God’s best, but a good of our own. The results which ought to accompany the working of the Holy Spirit are manifestly absent. We are all the more eager, therefore, to achieve success in the false activity to cover up an inward sense of dissatisfaction, futility and frustration, which haunts all of us at times, when our lives are run on self-effort.

The same self-effort makes us “Divided Personalities.” One Church-worker before she met the Group had two distinct sets of friends -- the officially religious people and her unofficial Pagan friends. There was no question in her mind which set appealed to her the more. We can run and organization on self-effort, but so can the devil. We don’t change lives; the devil does. And an all full coldness math be the last for sandals on a church or any religious body when it is run as an organisation. A minister told us that he felt each Sunday as if he were performing a solo on a spiritual ice-rink.

On the basis of self-effort we began to departmentalise. We say, “My job is so and so. It is somebody else’s job to change lives.” That distinction is thoroughly false. Either we have measles or we haven’t! If we have measles, we give It away to everybody; if we haven’t, nobody will get it.

Finally, self-effort makes us take refuge in a full-proof theology. We develop a point of view instead of living a quality of life. This draws us on to preach things which are beyond our experience, and are therefore unreal or even distasteful. We become wooden and rigid and falsely pious. I develop a false sense of duty, and live in the grip of secondary things, instead of being at the command of other people. We begin to run on principle and technique, and not on the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Our prayer-life is spasmodic. We do the jobs within the reach of our capacity, and only think of asking God’s help when the limit of our capacity has been reached. We use God like the Fire Brigade, and only call Him in in a crisis. We ask Him to control only part of our lives, instead of being Lord and Master of all.

These are some of the world’s alternatives to a Christ-centered and Christ-controlled life. Let us recognize in these sins what we really seek. We seek compensation for our defeat and for our lack of Christ. We take to substitutes for power. We need anodynes to stop the pain and discomfort, and to help us forget. We play with alternatives to facing Christ. We adopt camouflage to cover up our defeats and to hide from one another.

“Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Frank sees both sides of a subject, right through a man, and all round the earth.

Ten years ago he was thinking In terms of a spiritual awakening in many countries, which is now beginning to be manifest. When a man begins to think big like that, he naturally looks round for a big backer. Frank could have had a comfortable life-job that was offered him. He waved that away, and set out to initiate a world-awakening backed only by infinite faith and prayer.

Coupled with his world vision was the friendship of a handful of young men -- two English, two American -- University graduates who had been changed and with training might become pioneers of a world awakening. The traveling five were Sherry Day, cam Sam Shoemaker, Loudon Hamilton, Nick Wade, and -- Frank. They were away a year. Be visited many distant lands, passing leisurely through Europe, Egypt, India (where Frank had done an amazing work some years before), China (where Frank’s last visit was still talked about), Australia, America and home again.

When five friends travel together In close proximity for twelve months, their friendship may break under the strain before the tour is over; it would probably have broken on this tour had Frank not evolved the principle of Sharing. The tour ended, and the five parted better friends and when they started, and are still in the closest friendship after ten years.

The tour meant a stretching of vision and discipline that have since made them compelling leaders. Nick Wade returned and became Chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge, and leader of the work in the University. Sam Shoemaker went to New York and set Calvary Church alight. Loudon Hamilton went to Oxford, then to South Africa where he did an amazing national work for a whole year, and then to Edinburgh where he started the work moving strongly among the Scots. Frank and Sherry are here, there and every- where, watching developments and opening new fields of Group work in all corners of the earth -- in Iceland, in South America, in Geneva, wherever the Spirit leads them.

The South African work of the Groups is one of the most amazing adventures, for which that world tour was a splendid preparation. It really began, says Garrett Stearly, when two Rhodes scholars, a Rugger enthusiast, probably the handsomest man in the Oxford Group, aiming at a brilliant medical career, and a boxing blue, both from South Africa, condescendingly attended one meeting.

No sack-cloth or ashes here, no pious psalm-singing. But a breeze and a gaiety and a sureness of direction outlived, outlaughed, outloved their own crowd. They were fascinated, then nettled by its challenge, and finally went all out for this highest quality of life they had ever seen.

This new altitude of living was too good to keep to themselves. What of their University friends back home in South Africa? The two Rhodes man began to dream dreams of their homeland captured to the same fascinating life.

Always men of action, they collected a team of six Oxford me, including Howard Rose, and one Hollander, like-minded with themselves; and the next long vacation set out for South Africa, trusting God for funds, and the power to capture a nation. Foolhardy venture; but the foolishness of men is often the Wisdom of God.

They sought notably city, no large mass meetings. Their first move in Africa was a two week’s camp with ten men from Rhodes University College. A small beginning, but these ten were leaders in every walk of University life, and that the end of the two weeks each of those men had found a never-two-be-forgotten spiritual adventure. They brought this new life to the University. News of it spread up and down the land, opening for the team of seven men opportunities everywhere. They went to the capital, Pretoria. A leading minister was convicted and captivated by their uncompromising gospel. They went to Stellenbosch, center of Afrikaans culture and of anti-British sentiment. The Stellenbosch Rugger Team, heartiest In the country, listened entranced to this news from Oxford. The president of Stellenbosch Club was convinced, and has since come into mission work for the black peoples.

But time was short. The team had to return from its long vacation. Loudon alone stayed on to prepare the way for a larger team the following year.

In the summers of 1929-30 teams of first nineteen and then twenty-three Oxford Group people sailed from South Africa -- business and professional men and women, students, privileged and underprivileged. The House-parties were the held in all the large cities throughout the Union. The seven Oxford man had lit a torch. By now the veldt was on fire. Their vision and their courage had not been foolishness. It was a modern romance of God’s miracle-working power.

What happens in such a romance? In 1928 seven men sailed unknown and unheralded into the horseshoe bay of Cape Town, the Tavern of the Seas -- nestling at the foot of the awe-inspiring Table Mountain. Two years later the team of twenty-three, at a civic reception in the City Hall, was welcomed by the Mayor, who said, “I have long been thinking that our religion was in need of a bit of gingering -- I believe the ginger has arrived.”

What caused this amazing awakening? Not oratory, not publicity, not organisation, not dramatic appeals. The teams had nothing of this sort. They were plain men and women, but they had found in Christ a quality of life which enabled the ordinary man to do the extraordinary thing. Life-changing miracles in individual lives was their secret and their goal.

At Kimberley, the world’s diamond centre, the Oxford Group team met in the sporting hotel in town. There came to it, thinking it was some new club, the city engineer, an acid atheist, notorious for his hard drinking and fast living. He found a charming company in evening dress. The engineer settled in for a top-hole evening of good stories, the latest from Oxford. A giant Scotsman, with clipped mustache, carefully tailored clothes, and the air of a man of the world, began to talk. He told how Christ had changed his life. The engineer was shocked beyond measure at this perfectly natural mention of Jesus Christ in a social gathering. “ Horribly bad form,” he whispered to the man next him. Later, soft drinks appeared. “A rotten show,” he said to his friend as they went home late that night. But he could not forget that broad-shouldered Scotsman and the quiet challenge of his words. They met next day for a motor drive, and the engineer found a new life. His change startled the town. He made a habit of dropping in on the padre for what he called a “spot” of prayer. In his office, once blue with expletives, it was no longer bad form to talk of the issues that change men’s lives.

The new leaven throughout the nation is not confined to any one class. While lunching at a well-known Cape Town hotel, a member of the team noticed that his waiter was extraordinarily happy and attentive, and remarked about It to him. “Well, you see, sir, I belong to the Oxford Group,” was the reply; and between the courses the whole story came out. Gambling and drink had done their usual service in breaking up his home and propelling him out of a job into the gutter. Then a fellow-lounger had facetiously suggested to him, “Why don’t you see So-and-so,” mentioning a well-known and popular K.C. “He belongs to the Oxford Group; you ought to get a soft ’hand-out’ from him.” The barrister not only got him a waiter’s job, but gave him an experience of Christ, on the basis of which this man was building a reunited and happy home. And at the end of the meal the waiter whispered with a week -- “I’m out to win the headwaiter.” That’s the sequence. Across all social classes, into the most unexpected corners, goes the witness of Christ.

One of the most surprising places into which the Group found its way was a fire-brigade in the world’s gold city of Johannesburg. Six years before, a fireman with a shock of red hair and a temper to match, had married a temperamental young woman, musician to her finger-tips. His passion was gambling, and hers was stage. Incompatible from the word “go,” they had separated. The Group came along. The wife discovered its contagious quality, and returned to her husband in Johannesburg. At her request he went to a Group, with much inward ridiculing. He came away convinced, and began to witness in his fire-station. The test came and they began to call him “softie,” and say that he had lost his manhood; for his temper and his physique had made him the fear-inspiring leader of brigade. One day an inferior in the firehouse dared to censure him for some mistakes. He felt a blaze of fury burn within. He prayed to Christ. The fury went. He realised that to serve Christ he must be willing to take criticism smiling, and replied, “You’re right,” and thanked him. The inferior was staggered. “I would rather he had knocked me flat,” he was heard to murmur. And now that hot-headed fireman and his wife have a weekly Group in their home, which the fireman and their wives attend, always praying that the firebell will not ring during their meeting.

A new shaft of light was thrown on Africa’s problem of Church unity when, at a house-party, people of all de- nominations and all shades of belief lived together for ten days in such perfect unity that a sister of an Anglo-Catholic Community, who attended throughout, wrote of it: “We lived on so high and altitude of Christian experience that we completely lost all sense of our differences.” This spirit is in many quarters initiating a new working co-operation between the various denominations.

In the pressing problems of black and white antagonism it was significant that one of the best Negro minds in South Africa, Max Yergan, once told Frank that South Africa had sufficient personal religion, and needed no more. Two years later he spoke enthusiastically to Sam Shoemaker of the astonishing racial results.

Still more striking is the fact that fast-living ranch-owners are being turned into life-changers working among their own native employees. No professional missionary appeal has so convincingly staggered the heathen black men as the simple about-face of their once-careless “big boss.”

Not only a new spirit between black and white, but a new fellowship between English and Dutch is apparent. Because of the Groups many Dutch are learning English and many English learning Dutch voluntarily. This new cordiality of feeling was epitomised at a house-party in Bloemfontein, when three hundred Dutch and English stood up and took this vow inspired by the inscription on the Christ of the Andes: “Sooner shall this limitless veldt pass away, sooner shall this endless sunshine cease than we Afrikans and English-speaking South Africans shall break the peace which we swear here at the feet of Christ the Redeemer.”

South Africa was an amazing romance, but I was more eager to discover what the Group would do in an anti-Christian country. Then I heard of another exploit which came about through contact with the remarkable Loudon Hamilton. Three Oxford undergraduates met him, committed their lives to Christ, and decide to invest their future in missionary work in Persia. They went out singly to Stuart Memorial College, Isfahan, and educational mission for Persians, Armenians and Jews. Each of these races by traditional custom regarded the other two as veriest refuge; so here, if anywhere, the Group message had a chance to prove its potency.

The three Oxford men set to work quietly changing lives, finding that crows the same glossy black as they were in Oxford. A Persian lad of such low character that all regarded him as hopeless was winning other students within the first six months, Armenians and Jews as well. Ancient hatreds began to melt. A team of four, an Anglo-Saxon, a Persian, a Jew, and an Irishman, set out to help a lonely missionary station. By honestly sharing and surrendering to Christ their race prejudices, they welded themselves into such a glowing unity of power that eight others were drawn in to form a modern Apostolic band. Their impact on the mission-station was so great that a group of Moslems was changed, and the days of isolated work were ended for the lonely missionary.

I asked one of these men on furlough in England just how he got his convictions across to a Persian. He told me the story of The Three Tailors. A man at the College brought along a Persian neighbour to the Oxford man with the cryptic remark: “Hosham as a sense of sin. Help him to get over it.”

This was a complaint rarely known in that corner of the world. But for Hosham it became the jumping-off place into a radiant life. Some months later Hosham’s partner Mehdi turned up.

”Hosham has a new joy. I want it.”

In the lands where Christianity is not good form, people may make most direct and disturbing demands.

“Very well, Christ meets you at the point of your greatest need,” was the reply. “Let’s begin with your sins.”

“I haven’t any,” he said.

“Glad to hear that. But I found I had when I began with honesty. Are you always honest?”

Mehdi grinned and added confidently, “What do you expect? Don’t you know, a tailor?”

“Yes, but Jesus Christ demands absolute honesty. Go away and think about it.”

Six months later he returned. “I decided to try, but I can’t do it,” he announced, as though no interval had broken the conversation.

“Why not give the whole of your life to Christ? Then He will give you the power.”

This he did, and his wife became his comrade instead of his chattel. His neighbours were astonished at him. Within the month a third partner in the same tailoring house, a Jew, joined in. They witnessed radiantly in the bazaar though they incurred thereby the risk of being stabbed to death.

But The Three Tailors are allied and witnessing intrepidly.

Wherever Frank and his friends traveled in their round-the-world tour ten years ago Groups have since sprung up. Be passed through Egypt. Last year a Group house-party was held at the foot of the Pyramids on the edge of the desert. “From the house,” says Ken Twitchell, “the desert appeared to be a huge wall of sand, with the Pyramids standing high above the valley. There was an after-glow of purple on the rolling hills of sand and stone, while above a full moon looked down on three thousand miles of stretch of desert -- a stirring sight, heightened by the thought that so many of the great religious leaders had desert experiences.”

The doctor of one of the most influential Cairo families witnessed at a large Group in a family drawing-room, where she told simply and naturally of the experience of Christ that had come to her The Oxford house-party in the summer. She is now one of a group of several girls who are beginning to change the rather worldly and bored upper strata of Cairo’s society.

A young man, a University Don, came along and said he had been trying to help students under his charge, and was not able to do it. He needed help himself. He surrendered, and began to live under God’s guidance. A week later, when going to luncheon with the Head of the University, the young Don said, “Last night so many of my students came up to my room to talk to me that I had to send some away and tell them to come back later. And I was able to give more help to those men that night than I had been able to offer any man in three years.”

A dignitary of the Church told of a complete revolution in his life during the past few days. The head of a business said he had realised that for him surrender to God meant a restitution of wrongly-appropriated money -- fifty pounds had been unfairly added to an invoice -- and he wrote a letter explaining what he had done and included a cheque for the amount. This house-party also brought about a change In the life of his son, and the two are now working as a team.

There came to the house-party a leader of a great group of Egyptians who declared they must have this basis of life for their own work. A whole day was spent at Helwan with forty leaders of young Egypt, whose showed the greatest interest in the new evangelism.

“You were used of God to do a world of good while here,” writes a correspondent of the Cairo Groups, which have now come into vital being.

“Echoes of the day continue to come in. Stories of a real blessing in the lives of men. Three house-parties are being planned as a result of that wonderful day in the country. Two of us passed on your message to our Moslem Group, all of whom agreed to keep their Quiet Time each morning and evening and to report the results. . . . I feel this is a way of approach to Moslems for us and a way of approach form Moslems to Christ that has great possibilities.”

The direct approach to Christ is that experience is better than human level of arguments.

The successful development of the work in Cairo was part of a spiritual pilgrimage for Constantinople right down through the Holy Land -- where an atheist was changed -- back to Egypt. The team comprised Professor and Mrs. Alexander Smith, Ken Twitchell, his wife Marian, and his mother.

Ken told me a wonderful story of the work in Zürich, where to psychiatrists sent along a very difficult patient to a house-party, and one of the team was used to relate this person to Jesus Christ, so that his fundamental needs began to be met. A few days later he testified to his new experience in the house-party in the presence of the two astonished psychiatrists. As a result of his witness one of these two men became convicted of the need in his own life and later followed his patient’s example.

When I heard that Group talk of South Africa and Egypt, I became restive. News that would sell a newspaper was usually news about England. When Mrs. Alexander Whyte proposed that the Group go to Geneva to introduce a challenging spiritual leaven into the Disarmament atmosphere, I was still more indifferent. Only a few old fogeys were interested in Geneva, I thought, but Frank’s guidance was that the Group should go there, and Frank’s guidance has a queer knack of being right.

The Oxford Group entered Geneva last January, and achievement definite results among individuals variously placed in Geneva society -- results that will become more apparent as the leaven begins to penetrate the fear, criticism and contempt which certain sections of the city seem to have for the others. The Group cut clean across the social life, the national differences and differences of language which are keeping the national representatives in water-tight compartments.

With the following debt duration of its principles, the Oxford Group announced its arrival in Geneva:

In this time of the distress peoples and nations are eagerly awaiting, not more plans, but power; not machinery, but men.

The modern world -- disillusioned, chaotic, feverish -- demands a solution adequate to its disorder.

The international problems of to-day are, at bottom, personal problems.

Men must the change if problems are to be solved.

Peace in the world can only spring from peace in the hearts of men.

A dynamic experience of God’s free spirit is the answer to regional antagonism, economic depression, racial conflict, and international strife.

God-control is our primary need.

For years to Group had included in its life men and women of international affairs. To these it was a truth strikingly clear, that whoever held the secret of changing individuals, also held the secret of changing nations. It was a truism that the change of men’s hearts wouldn’t decide the direction of men’s policy. And they looked ahead to the day when the wind of the Spirit would blow the Group to the great centre of international life.

Those whom you the fact saw the need. Great as has been the ideal of the League, even its enthusiastic supporters deplored the failure to realise the ideal. With all the good work that Geneva had accomplished, idealism without God was not enough. Until two people joined together in marriage learned to care more about God then about themselves, are each other, there is no real solution to their problems. Until all the members of a family make this vital discovery, self-interest blocks the best unity of their home. And so it is with nations. Until the welfare of the whole family of nations comes to them more strongly than their own self-interest alone, until they learn that he who would save his life shall lose it, self-Interest rides high in inter-national politics. And behind the veil of pious pronouncements and resolutions, the blind policy of self-interest pulls the reins in secret diplomacy.

Geneva leaves out God, and plugs along. But it is weary with its plugging. Many men came hoping to find a city of love, and they found a city of loneliness. They came to find in Geneva, at last, the peace where nations had fellowship together. They found instead the rivalry and jealousy they had left behind. They came, many of them at great personal sacrifice, to throw themselves into the work of building a new world. But they found that the issuing of reports did not rouse the world into great redemptive action

Men must be changed if problems are to be solved.

Into this city of disillusionment, of idealism and cynicism, the Group came with a simple, personal message. There was no organisation to be set up, no conference to be held, no funds to be collected. There were no resolutions to be passed. Meetings of refreshing simplicity and friendliness were held in the midst of preparations for the Disarmament Conference. Personal problems were dealt with and the solution was indicated. Lives began to respond, and, turning to God, were changed.

Members of the Secretariat, heads of international organizations, Genevese business men, and their families, came into the release of the new life and the romance of the work. At a service in one of the churches of the city, the lady who had been chosen to represent the women’s organizations before the Disarmament Conference spoke of the fresh experience of Christ which had come into her life, and told of her conviction that only as men and women were entirely surrendered to God could they bring positive results out of their work at Geneva. At the same service one of the heads of men international organisation testified to the new honesty and joy that had come to him and to his family, and were now major characteristics of their family life. Others, of different ages and various groups, gave evidence of the new adventure begun.

The team for the house-party had been drawn from many countries, and presented for the Head of an Oxford college, in speaking of the Group, had described as “a traveling League of Nations.” To give their maximum message to the city a service was held in the historic Cathedral of St. Pierre, where, from the pulpit which still held the chair of John Calvin, that message was delivered. A Justice from Germany, an Admiral from England, a Doctor of Divinity from America, a Baron from Holland, a Prebendary of an English Cathedral, all gave what God had given them to say, to the hundreds gathered below them, Geneva and Oxford, the two great homes of religious life and learning, linked together by their common King.

Marvelous work was done among the women of Geneva. The message began to raise the feeling of depression and put new hope in place of despair, and God in place of an obstructed human will, and defeated intelligence.

One outstanding result was the case of a journalist well known in France, in the Far East and an America. She writes signed articles dealing with the politics being worked out in Geneva, and these are broadcast over France. The whole poem of her brilliant writings has been cynical, disclosing the general atmosphere found in Geneva, where so often the routine work is carried on all waiting for a roof to fall In.

This woman writer came to her first Group meeting with no belief in what the Group were doing, only to get copy for articles. Also to get material for what she thought was a new effort to sustain the Christ-myth by a group of English and Americans whose self-interest she strongly suspected. She meant definitely to discover the secret of that self-interest and expose it. Instead, she became convinced of its sincerity and reality. She began to attend regularly to get convincing evidence of what was offered, and soon showed that she, too, was personally as much in need as anybody. She talked to several people after the meeting, and next day saw Olive Jones. Following that talk there came and upheaval in her life. She called it a revolution.

Her life had been one long series of tragedies, including alienation from her own family and her husband’s family as well. She lost her husband during the War. Gradually she resumed her writing, but with a strong tone of cynicism and despair. God was denied. A bitter sense of life’s injustice was the chief motive governing her life. When she faced her sins the restitution to be made appalled her. But as one by one she put things right, each asked brought Its own terrific struggle of surrender, and also, renewed peace and joy. Finally she faced the more difficult issue -- her feeling about her lost a husband and the causes which led to his death. She changed her attitude towards national relations and politics, the chief themes of her writing. This meant surrendering into God’s hands all her work, for there was now the possibility that her new views would be unacceptable. Her influence and three countries was tremendous, and though she still continues her writing, it is in a totally different vein. She regularly attends meetings of the newly-formed women’s group in Geneva.

As I reached the last page of this book there sat by me at dinner the vicar of a small English Village, who told me some of his experiences in putting Group principles into operation in his parish. He had gone back from a house-party and apologised to his choir for showing irritability toward them, and afterwards he had advised his congregation not to come to Easter Communion until they had first put things straight with their neighbours, as he had done with the choir. Consequently, Group principles are being freely discussed in the village public-house, while children in the church Sunday School listen-in to God during service. Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals meet together in the Rector’s drawing-room and share. And the bells in the belfry, the oldest six-bell set in the country, which have been ringing over the shire since Queen Elizabeth, are pofealing to a new spirit of peace and goodwill in his parish.

So much for one English village. What of the towns and cities? Group house-parties and city campaigns are being held so frequently in various parts of Britain that as soon as one ends another Is about to begin elsewhere. Men specially need changing, those men unable to conquer the drink habit, people with tangled matrimonial troubles, the man who is “broke,” and the rich man suffering from ennui, enjoying the company of consecrated sinners, as well as an infinite variety of religious folk who seek a new fellowship of the Spirit.

The movement is growing rapidly in England. Within a year or two it may have spread throughout the country. It must grow, for it holds the answer to life’s riddle, and makes Christianity intelligible to the man in the street.

“These little groups,” writes James Douglas, “are spreading all over the world. . . . They are proliferating cells. They have no churches, no organisation. They are vitalising all the creeds and all the sects.

“Nobody knows how many of these spiritual groups are in existence. There are know statistics. . . . The process of permeation is going on under the surface of life. The Churches are aware of the silent religious revolution which is being wrought. They are sympathetic. . . . The great renewal of the human spirit for which the world is waiting gathering force secretly and silently. It may before long put in new life into the dying forms of religion. It may do for the twentieth century what Wesley did for the eighteenth century. Who knows?”

All round the earth there are bursts of Holy Spirit flame. The new world revival is surely at hand, and coming to us in the same way that Christianity first burst on a Pagan world when Spirit-filled man, accused of being full of new wine, went everywhere witnessing to their experience of a risen Lord.

This story of what I saw and did in the Oxford Group is finished. There only remains to be told what the Oxford Group so and did in me.

Unquestionably Frank and his friends showed me the secret of victory over certain personal problems by which I had been frequently defeated -- problems which were casting a shadow between myself and the God I thought I knew, and which I assumed were too difficult and deep-rooted in there to be conquered completely.

Had I not discussed those problems frankly with the Oxford Group, as I had never been encouraged to discuss them frankly before, I should know we never have realize the liberal truth of Wesley’s line: “He breaks the power of canceled sin.”

The Oxford Group showed me in practice what I knew in precept: that ”the heart must be at leisure from itself“; and that to share is better than to preach; to lose is really to find; to “let go” is to be held secure; to surrender all is to possess all things.

The Holy Spirit is still quick and powerful, and sharper than a two-edged sword. That God still owns this world and still controls it, although he has let it out to all children, not sometimes, but all times when they are surrendered to His guiding will. That it is safer to gamble on the unsearchable riches than to trust in bank balances.

By really living the life around me, the Oxford Group took me a great step forward in the secret of the living. By continuous daily demonstration they showed me that the only true social life is the Fellowship of the Spirit --

the social life of eternity. And that, since God often comes to us through His children, to be unfriendly to another is to recede from God.

Even when the Group irritated me by holding me up to my highest high ideals ,I would find for them no worse expletives than those used by dear old Balaam:

“Thou shall l curse whom God hath not cursed? . . . Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like he is.”

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

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