PICKLE AT PENN STATE

He also seems to have irritated some of the faculty. 'Buchman', one professor is reported to have said later, 'oozed the oil of unctuous piety from every pore. I would not be interested in seeing him again if it were at the cost of having to shake hands with him.'7

The results of his vigour and friendliness, nevertheless, were impressive. Within two months of his arrival, Buchman was writing to his cousin and adopted brother Dan, 'We had 1,100 men at the meeting last night……Entire fraternities are signing up to study the Bible.'8 Within two years, membership of the 'Y' had more than doubled from 491 to 1,040. Within three years, it had more than seventy-five per cent of the student body on its books, compared with thirty-five per cent when Buchman arrived.9

Furthermore, he seemed to have a particular gift for attracting outstanding students. 'Before the end of that first year', wrote Lloyd Douglas, author of The Robe, who was then Director of Religious Education at Illinois State College and who visited Penn State several times, 'it was discovered that the men about the campus who were doing the real things, leaders in scholastic standing, athletics, oratory ... were spending whole evenings in Buchman's quarters …. It seemed easy for Buchman to collect about him the picked men of the campus. Of course, it was not easy, but Buchman had a Napoleonic gift of making people want to do hard things.'10

Buchman himself, however, was far from satisfied with the results of his work. The numbers were impressive, but were men just being influenced a little or were they experiencing the kind of change he himself had undergone in Keswick? Many were making initial decisions to let Christ into their lives. But how deep did these decisions go? The alcohol consumption, it had to be faced, had hardly decreased, and the general tone of the college had not greatly altered. Would the quality of the decisions being made reshape men's careers, and affect their communities in later life? Or would it just be the sorry tale of some reawakenings, where greater religious observance went along with a decline in morality in the community at large? He later described his dilemma: 'I was working eighteen hours a day and I was so busy that I had two telephones in my bedroom. People kept coming to me, but the changes in their lives were not revolutionary enough to be permanent.'

At this point he consulted a visitor to the college - almost certainly the F. B. Meyer he had sought in Keswick - about his inner questionings. 'You need to make personal, man-to-man interviews central, rather than the organising of meetings,' said Meyer.

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