So far as work was concerned, Buchman provoked no complaint from his tutors. To enter Mount Airy, he had had to pass a qualifying examination which involved translating St Augustine from the Latin and passages of the New Testament from the Greek. Soon he was reading the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. Morning prayers were conducted alternately in German and English, and the students read Luther in the original German at the Luther Abend society to which Buchman belonged.17 His own speech, too, was seasoned with words which were literal translations from the German (‘homelike’ from heimlich); but he wrote to his mother apologising for finding it too time-consuming to write letters in Pennsylvania German and asking her to translate for his father anything he did not understand.18 He was also evidently taking elocution lessons, possibly to iron out the typical Allentown brogue, at the same time as relishing a visit from a friend who ‘enjoys a good joke in the Pennsylvania German’.19

Sometime in 1900 he went to stay at the Hotel Walton, advertised as ‘the only absolutely fire-proof hotel in Philadelphia’, and from there took a momentous step. ‘If you won't say anything, I'll tell you a secret,’ he wrote home. ‘I received three dollars for my first sermon. ... It was a splendid experience for me.... My life work has begun.’20

At this time the Church was increasingly emphasising its mission to the poor, the destitute and the aged. Given the state of American society, it was an obvious and crying need. In the years after the Civil War, the United States had expanded rapidly but painfully. Between 1860 and 1890 the national wealth had almost quintupled, from 16 billion to 78 billion dollars; the coast-to-coast rail link had been completed in 1869 and 100,000 miles of new railroad track were laid in the 1880s alone; and enormous fortunes were made by the new business potentates, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and John Pierpont Morgan. Some of the new plutocrats might have their teeth set with diamonds and provide cigarettes wrapped in hundred-dollar bills, but on New York's East side people lived in squalor, 290,000 to the square mile. In 1895 the Salvation Army served 150,000 Christmas dinners in Boston alone. In New York there were 10,000 destitute children on the streets; while in the Bowery, in one small area six blocks long and seven wide, there were no fewer than 200 saloons. Alcoholism was rife, prostitution flourished; and the thousands of strikes which took place between 1881 and 1894 were merely an outward expression of the desperation of the poor.

In 1901, Buchman attended a meeting of the Lutheran Church's Inner Mission Society and was considerably moved by what he heard. ‘The idea of the movement’, he told his parents, ‘is to bridge over the widening gulf which separates and alienates the masses from the Church by personal hand-to-hand work in densely populated districts, to visit the sick, lift up the fallen, counsel the tempted, cheer the aged, instruct the ignorant and reclaim the children.’21 ‘This, he wrote the following year, was the thing which lay nearest his own heart. ‘Perhaps’, he noted in his diary, ‘the Lord will open this way of serving Him for me.’

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