Far from being inclined to keep his head down and avoid controversy, Buchman consistently encouraged his supporters at Princeton neither to water down their message nor to take themselves too seriously. In reply to a gloomy letter from Haines in January 1922 he wrote, 'I have gotten your bit of constipated atheism this morning and I am just chuckling to myself. I am still laughing, Chas, and that's what you need to have someone do to you fairly often. Just chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.'

Buchman goes on to suggest the name of another speaker they might invite to Princeton, a man with 'fine humour and everything', just what the undergraduates needed. 'You certainly need a bomb under that crowd,' he declared. 'There needs to be a lot of dynamite loose if you are going to send them home convicted, converted and continued Christians.'10

By May of that same year, however, Shoemaker was writing to Buchman in Britain to say that he had been to see President Hibben and that Hibben 'feared too much sin emphasis, especially of the sort for which we are criticised'. He had also asked - 'in such a way as to make it impossible to decline' - that Shoemaker suggest to Buchman that he should not come to Princeton for a time, 'until some of the misunderstanding has been cleared up'.11Hibben, who had become President in 1912 with a mandate to restore peace to a campus which had been deeply divided by Woodrow Wilson's plan to reorganise it, had an administrator's natural dislike of controversy.

Neither Shoemaker nor Buchman seems to have regarded Hibben's prohibition as other than temporary. In November 1922 Buchman again spoke on the campus and had interviews with no less than forty students afterwards, none of which seems to have called forth any protest from the Princeton President. In April 1923 Shoemaker wrote to Buchman that the Hibbens were 'coming along splendidly';12 and, in October, Buchman paid another, highly successful, visit to the campus.

This visit stirred Buchman's opponents into vigorous action. What seems to have happened is that a number of undergraduates began going, often in pairs, to see Hibben at intervals of four or five days to complain about Buchman's methods. In particular, they charged him with asking students highly personal questions which nobody had any right to ask. This campaign was master-minded by a small group of undergraduates who had sworn to have Buchman and his work outlawed from the campus.13 Their leader, Neilson Abeel, told one of Buchman's supporters that, if he did nothing else in life, he would smash what Buchman was doing. Buchman's supporters believed that a number of their most active opponents were practising homosexuals who felt that Buchman's message posed a threat to their life-style.

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