On the other hand, J. C. Furnas, reporting on a house-party at the end of 1927,20 had clearly found the whole occasion repugnant. He spoke of Buchman's 'oily voice', 'decidedly stuffy' rooms, 'a puerile lust for morbid details'.

In view of the number of people who claim to have heard unwise public confessions, some must have taken place. However, I attended meetings from 1932 onwards myself and cannot recall hearing any. Cuthbert Bardsley, for some years a colleague of Buchman, said after his retirement from the Bishopric of Coventry, 'I never came across public confession in house-parties - or very, very rarely. Frank tried to prevent it - and was very annoyed if people ever trespassed beyond the bounds of decency.' Buchman is reported to have said once, when a clergyman did speak foolishly, 'I think it would have been wiser if he had been checked, but, of course, you can't expect every parson to speak sense. Some of them unfortunately don't.'

Different people, however, are apparently shocked by different things. When discussing this book with an old friend, a Socialist peer, in 1982, I was suddenly asked whether 'all those confessions' of the thirties still went on. Thinking he must mean the kind of thing recorded by Furnas, I asked, 'What confessions?' 'Well,' he replied, 'I once attended a meeting in Oxford, and Austin Reed (the Regent Street clothier) got up and said he had had to overhaul his whole price structure at his shops because he was charging too much.' It must have been painful for a man as reticent as Austin Reed to make such an admission, but it would seem to be the kind of remark which would incline other business men to search their consciences, something which one would expect a Socialist to welcome.

As usual, criticism does not seem to have deflected Buchman. When the Atlantic Monthly asked for an article about the movement, Buchman told its author, John Roots, that he must be quite categoric about the Oxford Group's attitude towards the subject of sex. 'We do', he wrote to Roots, 'unhesitatingly meet sex problems in the same proportion as they are met and spoken of in that authoritative record, the New Testament... No one can read the New Testament without facing it, but never at the expense of what they consider more flagrant sins, such as dishonesty and selfishness.'21

Dr J. W. C. Wand, then Dean of Oriel College and later Bishop of London, gave his impressions in the August 1930 issue of Theology. After stating that 'there were numerous recorded instances of Dr Buchman's marvellous success with individuals through bluntly revealing to them the actual sin in their own life', he added: 'This, be it noted, is sin interpreted as widely as in the gospels. One hears more of selfishness, pride, ill-will than anything else, and the charge that "Buchmanism" is unduly concerned with sexual matters had better be dismissed as the merest nonsense.'

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