'Seen the "dog girl" lately?' he had asked one of her admirers in the Junior Common Room.

'Haven't you heard?'

'Heard what?'

'The Oxford Group have got her.'

They had, indeed, and to the amazement of the connoisseurs, she stuck to it. Buchman's idea was to 'out-live, out-love and out-laugh the pagan world', and she found that interesting.

The training, given and received, was serious. Of the lunch-time meetings, Alan Thornhill, then Chaplain of Hertford, says, 'They were not the usual discussion circles that Oxford loves. The aim was not discussion. It was to build a new world. These meetings were an intense spiritual training. There was complete informality and you could say what you liked, but the spiritual temperature was such that the dilettante and the armchair theorist soon found the pace too hot for him. People were blunt with themselves and each other. Absolute standards of honesty and unselfishness were applied not to some pleasant pipe-dream of the sweet by-and-by, but to details of the nasty now-and-now. What time do you get up these days? How about your times of prayer and listening? Are you winning your friends to this new way of life? Which comes first - ambition or God? These were the kind of questions flung out and fought out in those daily meetings. With them went the simple, practical training that every Christian university ought to give as a matter of course - the moral basis of Christianity, the steps involved in finding a personal experience of faith, the art of passing that experience on, how to listen to God, the building of an unbreakable fellowship.' It was a fellowship of travellers, a dedication without vows or rules, where no one had to do anything except what he or she felt God told them to do.

On one afternoon each week, all came together for a meeting where visiting speakers or distinguished Oxonians took matters wider and deeper. There were reports on the progress in other countries. L. W. Grensted, by now Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, gave a series of talks on the psychology of life-changing and the Christian life. The afternoons finished with a half-hour service which the Professor conducted in the University Church. People went to their college chapel or other churches on Sunday.

Buchman was, as Thornton-Duesbery often said, 'soaked in the Bible', and made certain that it formed the basis of the training given in Oxford. His recipe for Bible-reading was, 'Read accurately, interpret honestly, apply drastically.' 'The Bible is a manual about fishing for fishermen,' he would sometimes say, in taking people through the stories of the man born blind whom Jesus cured and converted,7 of the woman he met at Jacob's Well whose change affected her whole community,8 or of Philip's daring encounter with the Treasurer of the Queen of Ethiopia.9 He believed that, in order to grow, the infant Christian needed food (the Bible), air (two-way prayer) and exercise - and his young colleagues, here as in China or on his world tour, learnt much about their own natures and the further changes which were needed, as they went into action together.

157