An Apostle to Youth

I

WHEN the Church fails, God sends a man.

Since the Middle Ages there have been three awakenings, each about two centuries apart, each of which forced upon a reluctant world some neglected aspect of truth. Saint Francis sought to free men from bondage to things, Martin Luther from bondage to institutions and dogmas, John Wesley from lethargy.

Since Wesley nearly a century and a half has passed. The language with which he stirred the placid rationalism of two hundred years ago would not arouse a flicker of interest to-day. But something is needed to do for the twentieth century what he did for the eighteenth. It is not something new that is needed so much as a rediscovery of the power which lies hidden in the simplest Christian platitudes. As Coleridge has it, ‘Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.’ His remedy is not easy, but it is simple: ‘To restore a commonplace truth to its first uncommon lustre, you need only translate it into action.’

A small but growing group of people with whom I have only lately become well acquainted seem to me to be doing this. They seek to apply in their own lives the teachings of the New Testament. They work so far as possible within the established churches, but they also reach and reach effectively people, particularly young people, who ordinarily would never darken the doors of a church. Masses mean little to them; individuals everything. They are interested not so much in theoretical aspects of religion or God or Christ as in the daily life which these demand. Each one is convinced, on the basis of personal experience, that God is a reality; that the only barrier which can prevent a man from knowing God is sin, conscious or unconscious; that Jesus Christ is the saviour from sin, and that a man is cleansed in so far as he wills to receive Him, recognizing his faults as sins and turning from them to a life of unflinching devotion to the particular will of God revealed through prayer, expectant listening, and active witness with others. They hold nothing that is not taught in the Gospels and described in the Acts and Epistles. They believe nothing that Christians of all creeds do not profess to believe. Their chief difference lies in the uncompromising manner in which they apply their beliefs to life.

Many people to-day, whatever they profess, assume that for all practical purposes Christ’s standards must be adapted to human nature. This group act on the assumption that human nature must be adapted to the moral standards of Jesus Christ. They believe that human nature can be remoulded radically toward meeting those standards. In other words, they believe in Conversion. Many people to-day, while professing belief in prayer and a divine purpose, pray only in spasms and have never stopped long enough to consider that God might have a purpose for them at variance with the one they are restlessly or recklessly or hazily pursuing. This group take it for granted that a converted life can be guided in all things by God’s Holy Spirit working through the human mind. They believe that prayer for most people who ever pray consists too much in petition. They too believe in petition. But they believe first in submission and audition — surrender and listening. They aim to shape their daily course of action on the basis of luminous thoughts which may come at any time, but come most fruitfully in the quiet of the early morning, and which can never come at all except as their own lives are purged of self-will and remain perpetually poised in eagerness to receive and follow the divine direction. They are convinced not only that this sort of active communion with God is interesting and satisfying, but that it is available to all. In a word, they believe in Guidance, and this involves not only guided work, sleep, eating, recreation, and rest, but also guided witness. Some people may find that they must talk less; others that they should talk more; others that they simply talk differently. But on each one who has found this quality of life is laid the obligation of mediating it to the world — a world composed not of humanity but of human beings. With everyone a worker in his own environment for the same end, there has been born among this group a richness of spiritual fellowship which is the rarest thing I know.

II

My junior year at Harvard, during the winter of 1923-1024, was the occasion of my first contact with it — a small cluster of college men, mostly young, gathered over the week-end at a wayside inn near Cambridge to talk honestly about what life had meant so far and what it might mean. I had just come from one of the great student conventions whose business it is to discuss religion, and was in no mood for more. But the friend who asked me had said that this was a ‘house party,’ that I should meet there an interesting person who had known my father in China, that I could say whatever I wished and leave at any time.

Two characteristics of that group particularly impressed me. One was its difference from much which I had previously associated with religion — the people were happy without being professional, the leaders were sympathetic without being solicitous, and there was no formality or programme. The other point was the transparent honesty of the atmosphere. The first quality made me feel immediately at home. The second conveyed the thought, to me a discovery, that God is real to a man only in proportion as he seeks to apply in his own life the moral standards of Jesus Christ. I had known and accepted the idea in theory. Never before had I heard any normal person of my years speak of Christ as a cure for impurity or a power for honesty. I left this house party realizing for the first time that many of my professed beliefs or unbeliefs had a moral basis, and knowing that there were abroad in the world modern people whose religion was a tempting reality.

The movement of which this was my first glimpse began, as most spiritual movements have begun, with an individual. He is F. N. D. Buchman, an ordained Lutheran minister, just turned fifty. Born in an obscure Pennsylvania town, recipient of an A.B., A.M., and D.D. from Muhlenberg College, of no extraordinary personality, he is hardly the sort one would expect to recapture for the twentieth century something of the radiance of Saint Francis, the mysticism of Fox, the evangelism of Wesley.

Like the founder of Methodism, he finished his seminary course still a stranger to the white heat of Christian experience. There followed a year or two of desultory social-service work and foreign travel, and in 1908 he found himself at Keswick, England. He was unhappy and perplexed. Resentment against certain religious people had been festering in his heart. For some time he had had an uneasy feeling that this was causing the trouble. Always his pride had forbidden humiliation before his enemies.

While in this state of mind he wandered one day into a little country church where a woman was speaking on some aspect of the Cross. He does not know her name, but something in what she said stirred him to the depths, and he saw himself for what he truly was. It marked the turning point. Next day he mailed to America six letters of simple apology, and at the head of each he wrote: —

He never heard from those six men. But for the first time in his life he felt the power of Christ as an inward reality. It was what Johann Tauler, Luther’s spiritual father, used to emphasize as the ‘unmaking’ of a man that he might be ‘made again’ of God.

From then on his doubts left him. ‘Sin,’ he has since explained, ‘is anything that keeps one from God or from another person.’ The sin of pride had been burned away, and the explorer set out to share his discovery with others.

In 1909 he was recommended by Dr. Mott to head the Y.M.C.A. at a large state university. It was no sinecure. The students were hostile, the faculty politely skeptical. Mass evangelism obviously had no place. Personal contacts had. Religious societies in university centres are apt to count heads. The young‘Y’ secretary knew better. He believed that no man was fully won to Christ until he himself was winning other men.

Three men stood out to him as the key points of the situation — the college dean, a popular and cultured graduate student, and Bill ‘Pickle,’ the leading bootlegger of a ring that was the despair of the college authorities. The student, who had a fondness for codes of ethics, had styled himself a Confucianist. To his surprise, Buchman took him seriously, and banteringly suggested that if Confucianism was good for him it should be good for someone else. He dared him to try it on Mike Milligan, a chicken thief with a wide reputation in the neighborhood. By this time they were close friends, and the challenge was accepted. He was to have three months preaching Confucianism. Week after week the earnest young altruist called on the family. He was kind to the wife, gave presents to the children. But Mike remained unchanged. At the end of his period the student returned to admit defeat. ‘I can’t do anything,’ he said. ‘The more I give the more they want.’ Buchman suggested they start together on Bill the bootlegger. He won the man’s confidence; and before long the worst influence in college was not only changed himself, but determined to win his fellow professionals to Christ. The undergraduate was so struck by it all that he decided to try this religion which had succeeded where he had failed. The dean was a confirmed agnostic, but, finding his disciplinary duties lightened by the improvement in the liquor situation, he was increasingly drawn to a faith that could achieve such modern miracles, and finally put himself on record as an active believer. Within three years there were twelve hundred men in voluntary Bible study.

III

Leaving this university in 1915, Buchman toured for a year in India, Korea, and Japan with Sherwood Eddy, returned in 1916 as an extension lecturer at Hartford Theological Seminary, and spent 1917-1919 again in the Far East. During these years there were gradually crystallizing in his mind the principles of Christian work with individuals which he felt the world most needed. A letter written at that time states clearly his purpose: ‘This principle (of personalized evangelism) is the essential of Christianity and the absolute essential of all progress. The depersonalization of all activity is one of the great problems of our day. In business, education, and in every mission activity we must return to the fundamental principle of Christ as a constant and get into touch with men individually. Those whom we long to win must be in touch with the soul of the movement, which is any human heart aflame with the vital fire.’

His principles of action centre about five words — Confidence, Confession, Conviction, Conversion, Continuance. The first is the natural development of friendly acquaintance. The second is the normal result of intimate friendship, when barriers are leveled and each sees the other as he is. The third, conviction of sin, is the normal result of the impact upon a man of a quality of life which he instinctively knows to be superior to his own, the lack of which he recognizes as an offense against God, and as his fault and only his. Conversion is the radical change of values brought about by God’s Spirit working in the heart. Continuance is that lifelong process of growth familiar both to religion and to psychology. In the realm of religion it involves personal discipline— prayer, Bible study, times of quiet for listening to the direction of the Holy Spirit, and it involves personal witness, mediating to others what conversion to Christ has meant to one’s self. In the realm of psychology it involves an outlet in intelligent expressional activity for the emotion which otherwise would either die or show itself in undesirable ways.

There is a further point involved in the principle of Continuance which I feel is a unique contribution to the religious life of to-day. This is the principle of training leadership to carry on the work, not as a loose confederation of units, but as a body of men going forward as they did after Pentecost ‘with one heart and mind.’ It is a principle which takes pains and time. It means laying one’s life alongside another’s and staying by him until he is not only changed himself, but able under God to change others, and until he is willing to work in harmony with those engaged in like tasks.

Four friends of Mr. Buchman occur to me as illustrating this principle — three Americans and one Scotchman. They are all college graduates and could have had the best the world affords had they so desired. What is more, they craved it in one form or another until the day when they met a man who asked them to forsake all for Christ. They had met less radical challenges with which they had toyed or which they had ignored. This idea caught their imagination. It was new. It was startling. It was presumptuous. But it gave them pause. Then, month after month, as they saw more and more of this interesting person, — sometimes traveling, sometimes resting, but constantly in touch with human problems, constantly amazed at the miracles of regeneration which took place, seeing more and more how they themselves could be used to like ends, — gradually there unfolded within them a picture of what they might do for the world were they to give their all.

It would have been so easy for any one of these four to have filled his conventional niche in the business or professional or religious world. But it was not such a spirit that once turned the world upside down.

IV

During the years immediately following the war, the conviction grew on Mr. Buchman that the most neglected and ill-handled field of spiritual endeavor in the English-speaking world was to be found in the colleges and universities of Britain and America. He saw, too, that there was no group of people better able to bring about a vital Christian movement. They were young, intelligent, cultured, but for most of them conventional religion was at best a burden to be endured, and at worst a myth to be ignored. To awaken interest something distinctive was needed. The week-end house party, an established channel of social intercourse, offered an evident solution of the problem.

In the summer of 1918 the first house party took place at Kuling, a Central China summer resort, with a group of about a hundred Chinese and foreign Christians — missionaries, pastors, statesmen, business and professional men. They were together for two weeks, talking about the deepest things in their own experiences, acknowledging frankly where life had been a failure, and seeking to find whether it held more in store for them than they had already found.

Two years later Buchman was in Cambridge, England, with letters to sons of a number of men he had met in the Far East. Two young Englishmen returned with him to visit certain colleges in the United States, and the next summer (1921) there was held in Cambridge a week-end group for university men from both Oxford and Cambridge. A member of Parliament, who was present, set the tone of the gathering by frankly acknowledging that he had spent his life seeking things for himself, that he was dissatisfied, unhappy, that he wished the young men present to profit by his mistakes. Harold Begbie, widely known journalist and author, attended a similar house party later on as a rather critical observer, but was so impressed by the phenomenal change in certain individuals over the week-end that he went to Frank Buchman and asked permission to write a book about his work. The latter consented, provided no mention were made of his own name, and the book, entitled Life Changers (‘More Twice-Born Men’) was subsequently published both in this country and in England.

Since then there have been a growing number of house parties in both England and America. The name has held because it best describes the atmosphere of these gatherings, which in their general setting more closely resemble a secular house party than the usual religious ‘conference’ or ‘convention.’ E. S. Martin has called them ‘the church in the house.’ They range in size from twenty to a hundred and fifty or more. The place is a country inn, a hotel, or a private residence, according to the demand for space. The period of time extends from a week-end to a week or ten days. Youth in the twenties is more in evidence than age, but there are now a growing number of parents, teachers, and older people who come and have learned that a searching Christian experience is no prerogative of the younger generation. Professions represented are apt to run all the way from selling newspapers and bootlegging to presiding over schools and theological seminaries. Younger business men and their wives, college undergraduates, society girls, and stenographers make up the balance.

Groups are held in the living room, and people are free to go or not as they choose. Informality is the order of the day. The basis of invitation is friendship, and this, together with the times when simple introductions are in order, makes for a relationship among those present that is warm and personal.

The object of the house party is frankly to relate modern individuals to Jesus Christ in terms which they understand and in an environment which they find congenial. The fundamentals of the Christian message are covered in a series of informal talks on Sin, Surrender, Conversion, Guidance, and the rationale of intelligent Witness, or how to mediate to another one’s own experience of Christ. Bible study usually takes up an important part of each day. Separate groups for men and women, often divided as to age and profession, provide an opportunity for discussion of various problems connected with sex or money or life work in a more intimate vein than is possible in a mixed gathering. Each morning opens with a time of united quiet, during which thought is directed toward God in full conviction that, to a mind and heart eager to discover it. He can make known His will. The evenings provide a period when anyone can talk who wants to.

A bishop of the Episcopal Church who attended a house party last June has noted down some of his impressions as follows: —

The Minnewaska house party, June 21-28, was a revelation to me. It revealed a kind of vitality which seems to me the fundamental need of the Church and of individual Christians, men and women, to-day. The good fellowship was striking, for it appeared not simply in fun and good times, but seemed to go to the very bottom of the deepest things we know or hope or fear. The emphasis upon the possibility and need of daily, indeed constant, communion with God, and guidance by His Spirit, echoed the many-sided appeal of Saint Paul ‘to the saints that are in Christ.’

Sin was dealt with in the frank and direct way which youth demands. Nothing was glossed over, yet there was no morbidity. Chief attention, in the public meetings, was given to those sins of envy, pride, censoriousness, cowardice, sloth, uncharitableness, and insincerity which are so often fatal to fellowship and spiritual vigor just because they are not recognized as equally serious with the gross and carnal sins. The aseptic atmosphere of these discussions owed much to the fact that the ludicrous stupidity of many sins shone out vividly in obviously sincere confession, and brought out spontaneously the cleansing laughter of the whole group.

Frequent reference was made to the need of discipline, beginning with the regular observance of the morning watch or times of quiet, but refusing to stop short of whatever is required to bring us up to our best in body, mind, spirit, and social relationships.

Most significant of all, I think, was the group life there described and for a few days lived out by a large proportion of those present. ‘Sharing,’ or manifest willingness to ‘share,’ to the limit was at work before our eyes, and through it the Holy Spirit was giving courage to the timid, hope to those on the verge of despair, insight to the blind, in some cases life out of spiritual death, and initiating all who were willing to the hope and joy and strength that come from creative experience in the moral and spiritual realm.

Most people to-day are facing two problems, sex and money. These houseparty groups, I believe, are helping to solve them.

The question of sex needs no emphasis to bring it into the open. It is already emphasized, not to say overemphasized, in literature, moving pictures, and social relationships with a freedom unheard of for over a century. Psychiatrists say that it is an important factor in a great majority of their cases. Doctors state that in some form or other it is a nearly universal problem with both men and women. Every minister who deals searchingly with any form of the confessional knows that he cannot avoid meeting it. Yet the attitude of most parents, teachers, and churches toward this problem in all its perplexing ramifications is marked by timidity and clumsiness if not by sheer cowardice. Sex is discussed nowadays in nearly every conceivable atmosphere but that in which it is most likely to find a solution, namely, an atmosphere dedicated to Jesus Christ.

This group of people, in the first place, recognize the sex problem as one that exists. What some call sexual experimentation they would call sin. In the second place they recognize that the instinct is at bottom a God-given one, and while they do not condone any perversion of thought or word or deed, they know that the real problem is not one of suppression but one of control and sublimation. As in the case of other problems, they believe that the cure lies ultimately not in mere human force of Will, but in the cleansing stream of spiritual life that follows upon a genuine conversion. It is what Saint Paul means when he writes, ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’ It is what a great psychologist has called ‘the expulsive power of a higher affection.’

It is, of course, not a subject for discussion in mixed groups. In separate groups for men and women it is not infrequently brought up, and real help afforded by a frank and aseptic canvassing of various aspects of the problem, including the problems of marriage and divorce. In dealing with individuals it is considered advisable to be alert to its manifestations, to be ready, if necessary, to discuss it very personally and very frankly and always to indicate that the only adequate solution comes from God, whose renewing moral power flows into the life of one who wholly surrenders to His will as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Then there is the problem of money and possessions, with its related problem of social injustice. This is the crux of the communist hatred of Christianity, and is the chief reason why one sees over against the Chapel of the Iberian Virgin in Moscow the Russian motto, ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ It must be faced by anyone or any group that wishes to commend the gospel of Christ to our modern world.

Much is to be said for the communist ideal — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Something like this state ought to exist, but it does n’t. The problem is what to do about it.

It is in his method of solution that the Marxian communist takes issue with the follower of Christ. Michael Borodin, two years ago the dominant figure in South China and chief Soviet adviser to the Nationalist Government, once told me in his picturesque way what he considered the chief difference between pure communism and pure Christianity. ‘You,’ he said, ‘undertake to bring in the Kingdom of God through love. We are striving to bring it in by force.’

The members of this group of which I have been speaking accept this challenge. They sympathize with efforts to remedy economic ills by legislation and to awaken a more sensitive social conscience. They realize, too, that these, like the communist appeal to armed force, are not final solutions, because they seek to mould men’s conduct in one area without sufficient reference to men’s primary need in every area, which is God. They are palliatives, not cures.

Jesus appears in a sense to have chosen between social leadership and spiritual leadership. He recognized that the problem at bottom was an individual one. What counted first of all was not environment but character. He can be said to have founded the ‘social gospel’ only in so far as this is derived from a radical application of the personal gospel. So I feel that this group is true to what was most distinctive in Christ’s method, when it lays its main emphasis not on modifying men’s actions but on changing men’s lives.

Money and possessions are treated simply as belonging to that whole category of material things which are not in themselves either evil or good, which are given for our use, but which, in proportion as our desire for them overrides our desire for God, can effectually keep God out. In so far as they do this, they are a cause of sin, and must be dealt with like any other sin. In a word, they must be ‘surrendered.’ To a man sincerely trying to do God’s will rather than his own, and seeking daily guidance toward this end, there is no problem either of pride in receiving for his own needs or of miserliness in giving to supply the needs of others. There results a form of practical sharing of possessions which seems to me to hold the germ of a truly spiritual solution for the problem of material inequality. There results, too, a literal casting of all anxious concern, for the world and for the individual, upon God, with a resolve to give to the limit whenever guided to do so, but not to worry in general where one cannot help in particular. They and all they have belong to their fellow men, but only because first of all they belong to God.

V

I am reminded of a reflection attributed to Goethe— ‘Truth can never be expressed; Truth can only be lived.’ After all, the unit of interest, like the ultimate unit of value, will be the individual life. Nothing that lacks capacity for radically altering lives is likely to stir the Church, the nation, or the world. I say ‘radically’ because I am convinced that nothing short of a coalition of individual spiritual upheavals will serve to produce the corporate religious upheaval which we so sorely need.

Now an individual spiritual upheaval need not be spectacular. Occasionally it is. It was spectacular when a veteran bootlegger in an Eastern city recently found Christ and started out to vend his discovery in place of his liquor. It was spectacular when a still youthful son of privilege from the South, versed for ten years in the more sordid ways of the world, changed his course and decided on the ministry. It was spectacular when his own experience, shared with a college graduate in an hour of need, proved the medium for a cure which had been beyond the power of psychiatry. But even more impressive, it seems to me, is the experience of a young New York business man¹ and his wife who found in Christianity lived to the hilt a joy they had vainly sought in the glamour of their own social set.

We are reasonably well accustomed to the conversion of a ‘down-andouter.’ His need is obvious. When vital religion lays hold on an ‘up-andouter’ — one of that growing body of pleasant pagans who apparently have all they want in this world and the next — it is time for the professional Christian to be concerned. Something explosive is on foot.

I am told they were the last people one would naturally consider as candidates for conversion. Till two years ago their lives were like the lives of hundreds of other young couples scattered over our broad land. He was a popular member of his class at an aristocratic Eastern university. She was a soughtafter débutante in New York a few seasons ago. Together they went everywhere and did everything. Life rested lightly on their shoulders. They were lovable, attractive, unselfish in a selfcentred sort of way, approved religion, and attended church in so far as this was fashionable. To them might have been applied literally the remark attributed by a friend to Dr. Alexander Whyte of Scotland — that they had every virtue but a sense of sin.

I asked him for an autobiographical sketch down to date, and this is the result: —

From 1913 to 1925 I managed a complete spiritual vacation while accomplishing prep school, college, four years of business, and, in 1924, an exceedingly happy marriage. I had been raised on the customary Presbyterian Sunday-school diet and graduated into prep school with well-defined notions about religion and God. My beliefs were that religion was bounded on all sides by the duty of obeying the Ten Commandments, that God was a combination of school-teacher and policeman, and that if you obeyed the Commandments fairly well He would let you alone. I began then to live without Him. Nothing terrible happened, so I proceeded to forget about Him except when I was in trouble.

I had managed to retain from the boy stage a fairly clean way of life, a high sense of duty toward civilization in general, and a desire to help others — all of which were based on family pride, Mother and Dad having instilled into me the firm belief that people who were anybody showed it by the fact of their desire to help others, and by setting an example that would be a little above their environment. I, personally, thought I had a lot to give other people, and that I could make their lives work out better if they would only ask my advice. No one did ask, however, so I had no chance to find out how useless I was on the deeper levels.

My wife and I thought it was the thing for representative younger married couples in New York to have a church connection and, from many which we tried out, we selected Calvary Episcopal because we found there a younger crowd of people enthusiastic about something. What our life lacked was a joint enthusiasm for something bigger than ourselves, so we started to try to find what seemed to give these Calvary people such a zest in living. They made a natural humorous crowd from all walks and stations of life, but they all seemed to have a definite purpose in view. To my realestate-broker mind, each one seemed to have a big deal on.

We became more and more interested. But I had entered in as an equal with these people, and I found by the contrast of our lives as the year went by that I was not even born spiritually, whereas they were actively growing up. It took many months for my imagination to be sufficiently developed to see clearly a quality of life which was miles above ours. An entirely new picture of sin became clear to me, and many things in my life showed the necessity of being weeded out, not because they were bad in the world’s sense, but because they stood in the way of my drawing closer to God and to the people around me. Among these was my independent attitude toward God — leaving Him out of my whole daily scheme of thought and never asking Him to make plans for my life.

It might be remarked at this point that most people have a distorted notion of just what constitutes sin. Most of us would concede that murder and theft and adultery were sins. Many would be inclined to include lying. Some would add bad temper. Few would be likely to give the definition which is implied throughout the Gospels — that fundamentally sin is independence toward God. Most of us incline to take a passive and negative view of sin as transgression of an ethical code. Jesus went deeper and placed the emphasis on an active and positive quality of life: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart . . . [and] thy neighbour as thyself.’ Not so much by what a man does as by what he leaves undone will he be judged. The criterion is Christlikeness. It would have been hard to convict this young business man on the basis of the Ten Commandments. What did convict him was a power in others which he coveted for himself. He felt no sense of need until he realized that he had nothing but impotent sympathy for a friend in need. That lack he had to recognize as sin.

It is commonly stated that religion would be all right were it only practical. I recall in this connection the distinction drawn by a biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi between a practical life and one that is merely ‘immediately practicable.’ Our business friend’s conclusion follows: —

Difficulties very soon arose in my business because I did not want to let this field into the new scheme of things. It is difficult to turn over your life completely on a basis of faith; and I decided that God could run my social relationships, but that my wife and I would probably starve if I let Him into my business affairs. I dreaded being thought an impractical idealist. So I kept very quiet around the office about religious matters. This was unnatural and doublefaced, and therefore uncomfortable. But certain questions had to be faced and decided because God seemed to want me to stay in business. If I was to control the making of money, could I let God have control over the spending of it? And the questions arose of what to do about time taken out of business hours for guided spiritual contacts, of God’s time crossing my time, of money spent or given away under guidance in amounts that I did not seem able to afford humanly, of what to tell the office people about the times when I disappeared from my desk for an afternoon or an hour, of the question of office allegiance and duty to my employer. It had to be one of two ways — God to have all or nothing. Finally I took the full plunge, surrendered to God my desire for business success, my fear of needing money, my cherished reputation as a hard-headed, practical person, and decided to let Him have His way in all things. Immediately the fears were solved, and business people turned out to be just like everyone anywhere. Where I did not fear the individuals, contacts have become real, business affairs go far better in less time, and the relationship of time spent on different things is now solved because all time belongs to God.

God makes a difference. The step which these two people took shows not alone in a serenity of look and thought and action, and in a quiet joy which the world may ruffle, but which it cannot disturb. It has shown itself also in its direct effect on others. In a little book published some forty years ago, entitled Modern Christianity: A Civilized Heathenism, a cultured Parsee inquires of a worldly Anglican divine just what difference exists between a nominal believer and a high-minded unbeliever. And he continues with this challenge: ‘If the age of miracles has ceased, it must be because the age of personal witness has begun. Never yet was a man asked to believe in a supernatural God without evidence supernatural. This is the evidence which I demand.’ This demand for evidence is one which the world has a perfect right to make of a Church and of people who claim to have found something worth spreading. It is the scientific attitude. It is the legal attitude. It was Christ’s attitude—‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’

I could gather the stories of a hundred or two hundred people on both sides of the Atlantic whose lives have been changed as radically. They come from all walks of life and are of all ages, although the majority are young men and women. They do not represent any unique dispensation of the Spirit. They bear witness to that dispensation which has been abroad in the world ever since Christ died. Only they have received it in terms of their own generation, and they tell of it in the language of to-day.

Throughout the English-speaking world and beyond — in churches, in homes, in offices — little groups are meeting to conserve, strengthen, and transmit to others their new-found secret. It is indeed an open secret. But to each one it comes as a fresh and luminous discovery. Do not be surprised to hear them speak of this ‘way’ with the disturbing authority of firsthand experience and in full conviction that it is available to all. It was a distinguished professor of philosophy who wrote, commenting on a certain ‘divine right’ implied in the apostolic message, ‘Historically speaking, the crux of Christianity is its element of presumption.’ These people have found what is a very rare thing in this modern world — a core of inward spiritual certainty. They have, not a question, but an answer.