A senior delegate to the league was C. J. Hambro, the President of the Norwegian Parliament and leader of the Conservative party there. It was his custom to use the long journey from Oslo to Geneva to translate books, and he had picked up a copy of For Sinners Only on a station bookstall. The book interested him, and when on arrival he heard that Buchman was speaking in Geneva that September, he made sure of attending.* At the end of the luncheon, he rose and declared, extemporaneously, that what he had just heard seemed to him more important than most of the subjects on the League agenda.

(* According to the biography by his son Johan, Hambro's initial interest in the Oxford Group was aroused by enthusiastic letters from another son, Cato, who had met them in London, (Johan Hambro: C.J. Hambro, Aschehoug, 1984, p. 174.)

In December Buchman invited Hambro to England to speak to British Members of Parliament at Sir Francis Fremantle's meeting, when he concluded his speech with the invitation to Buchman to bring the Oxford Group to Norway. Buchman accepted, carrying Hambro off through a pea-soup fog to a weekend house-party in Eastbourne so that he would understand what he was letting himself in for. So it came about that, through following a series of unforeseen opportunities, Buchman and his team arrived in Norway in October 1934.

Norway was an unexpected country in which to launch a Christian revolution. Most authorities agree that at that time the intellectual climate was more nihilist there than in most European countries. This was in large measure due to the leadership of students and intellectuals influenced by Erling Falk, who had been converted to Communism in America and returned to Oslo to found the Communist-line paper Mot Dag. Moral relativism was a recognised part of FaIk's ideological outlook.2

Carl Hambro was opposed to these trends. He was, perhaps, the most significant Norwegian statesman in the years between the wars, a kind of Churchillian figure. As the Conservatives were a minority party he never had the chance to form a government; but repeatedly he was re-elected President of the Parliament, and he was twice President of the League of Nations Assembly. His successor as President of the Parliament, Oscar Torp, a former Labour Prime Minister, described Hambro on his retirement as 'perhaps the greatest parliamentarian we have had in the recent history of Norway' whose 'name and contribution will live in the pages of history'.3

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