THE CLOTH AND THE CAP

A subtler and more pitiable clash of loyalties was voiced to Buchman by a clergyman's wife: 'I know without a shadow of doubt that I have found God through contact with your wonderful fellowship and that I have got a message which I long to pass on. You will be the first to understand that I don't find things very easy with regard to my husband. He is in no way hostile to the Group, but I always have the feeling he wishes I could have found God and happiness through the Church, and that it must always be the Church for him. I love the Church too, where one finds reality and simplicity as one finds it in the Group movement, but it is so rare. I do care most desperately how the Church as a whole faces up to the challenge of the Group movement.' Later, her husband was to show his active sympathy when the Oxford Group was attacked.

There is no doubt that Buchman was often impatient with organised religion. He felt that the Church was increasingly out of touch with the gathering dangers. 'No one is more jealous for the Church than I,' he once said. 'But loyalty to the Church demands that we see the Church as she really is, and the Church, as she is today, is not going to change the nation. If the Church crowds are not remade, some dictator will remake them. Communism and Fascism have created the greatest crisis in the history of the Church since the catacombs. What does this entail? A whole new orientation - go out into the streets, the byways and hedges. Not our conception of the Church, but the answer that the world needs. This means the fur will fly, but I am ready to go through with it!'

Such opinions were bound to provoke reactions. In March 1933 the Bishop of Durham, Dr Hensley Henson, devoted a Charge to his diocese to what Owen Chadwick, his biographer, describes as 'a sustained indictment of the Oxford Group'.15 It was, in effect, an enquiry into whether 'the Group could be domesticated' within the Church of England, and his answer was an emphatic 'No'.16

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