By this time, he had already become involved in a wide variety of social work and flung himself into it with the same ardour as he showed in his social life. He joined the Sunshine Society, founded to help orphans, and visited hospitals and the aged.22 In 1901 he and a group of colleagues opened a new Sunday School in Kensington, one of the poorest districts of the city. On the first Sunday fifty-one children were present, unprecedented in Philadelphia, wrote Buchman to his mother; on the second, seventy-four, though the collection amounted to only $1.06. ‘I have charge of the infant department.... They are all interesting and all have beaming faces.’ He had a distinctly lively sense of the wider significance of what he was doing. ‘We are’, he said, ‘making history for the Lutheran Church in Kensington.’23

In the summer of 1901 he had been to the Northfield Student Conference in Massachusetts, founded by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody and now run by John R. Mott, the Assistant General Secretary of the YMCA and perhaps the dominant figure in the student evangelical movement. The visit, Buchman reported, ‘completely changed’ his life.24 ^’Never have I had such a splendid week.’25 It seems to have been there that he decided that winning people to Christ must be his main objective in life, and that therefore he ought to win at least one person before he got back to Allentown. A visit to New York diverted him from this resolution, recalled as he was buying his train ticket home. The first person he laid eyes on at this juncture was a black porter. Buchman launched in.

‘George, are you a Christian?’

'No.'

'Then you ought to be.'

The conversation continued in this vein, ending with, ‘Now, George, you've got to be a Christian.’

‘Thus ended', recalled Buchman, 'my first crude attempt to bring the unsearchable riches of Christ to another man. Whether he became a Christian or not... I can't tell. But that day the ice was broken on a new life-work.'26

Another influence on Buchman at this time was said to have been his Aunt Mary, who had a habit of asking him over Sunday lunch, ‘Well, Frankie, how many people got converted today?’ ‘Meeting Mary is as good as going to church ten times over,’ said Buchman's father.

His letters at this time display a marked increase in piety, frequently ending with a text or motto for his parents' edification. He also developed a deeper interest in his fellow-students. ‘The other week’, Buchman wrote to his parents in 1901, ‘I did a work for one of my fellow-students which has changed his entire life. He was on the verge of leaving the Seminary, feeling that he was not leading the true kind of a life. Today that man is the happiest fellow here. He is such a fine fellow and today he owes all he has in way of position in this institution to me.’27 The tone is self-important, the theology no doubt unsound, but Buchman's desire to help individuals seems to have been starting to bear fruit.

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