'No, my dear Frank, no new forces are at work. I am never free from a very old force though not without regrets for lost hopes. I disapprove of you but hold you in deep regard.'

This seems to have been the last letter the man wrote to Buchman. The friendship had not been strong enough to survive the pressures which he mentioned. Buchman was sad to hear that, after a brief but brilliant career, he died while still a young man.

Buchman spent the summer of 1922 travelling in England and Europe. He went with Hamilton to Eton for the Fourth of June celebrations* - 'a very interesting function', he told his mother, 'where one wears top hat and morning coat and white spats, and the young Etonians take great pleasure in wearing very swagger clothes'.8 In July he led a house-party at the home of a banker at Putney Heath. Later the same month he was at the Keswick Convention meeting friends like Colonel David Forster of the Officers' Christian Union. It was here that Buchman met Eustace Wade again. After a couple of days Wade had had quite enough of the solemnity of the convention, and was on his way to the railway station when he ran into Buchman. Buchman said he had had clear guidance from God that they would meet. They talked over tea in the garden of the Keswick Hotel and Wade was interested enough to stay another two days. 'He expressed to my young spirit something I failed to see in humdrum church life,' recalled Wade in 1977. 'What he was doing seemed like real adventure, that's what drew me.'

(* The annual celebration by the school of the birthday of King George III.)

Others at Keswick, like Julian Thornton-Duesbery (later Master of St Peter's College, Oxford), would have nothing to do with Buchman at that stage. 'A friend of mine in Oxford had told me awful stories about him,' said Thornton-Duesbery, 'something about unhealthy confessions of sex problems, so I was very careful to avoid him.' Later he met Buchman, found these stories untrue, and worked with him for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, opposition to Buchman at Princeton had been steadily gaining in strength and his visits to the campus were becoming a matter of controversy. In December 1921 Charles Haines, who was now an Assistant Secretary of the Philadelphian Society, wrote that the student 'Cabinet' of the Society* had been discussing whether they should invite him to Princeton. Some, said Haines, thought he should come and have personal talks with students, but that the visit should not be advertised too openly 'on account of the general feeling on the campus'.9 Others argued that this was too much like working under cover. Their conclusion was to invite him to address a large open meeting if he was willing to come.

(* The 'Cabinet' was a group of 18 elected by the undergraduate body of the Society.)

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