ASIAN RECONNAISSANCE

All was not well at home, however. Buchman's father, now 76, was growing increasingly deaf and cantankerous, and there were signs of a mental deterioration which was to increase with age. Buchman's mother evidently needed trained help as early as the summer of 1915: he wrote from India asking her to tell him 'about the nurse and everything that goes on'.15 Dan also was a cause of anxiety. He had been unable to keep up academically at the excellent Taft School in Connecticut to which Buchman had sent him, and had since been expelled from the technical school where he had gone to learn to be an electrician. Dan seems to have been, from his childhood, weak and unreliable. But Buchman wrote to him regularly, and always with encouragement. 'Yesterday I sat on the beach to listen to the waves as they go dashing in and my thoughts turned to you with love and affection,' he had written from Hohangabad,16 and later, 'There is not a mean bone in your body and we are all proud of you.’17

In August 1916 he sailed for home on the Empress of Russia. Back in America, Buchman needed time to absorb all that he had experienced. 'For two months I didn't want to see anybody,' he said later. 'I wanted to think this thing through for myself, just take the letters that had come to me, and study the needs of the human heart as in a laboratory. I came to this conclusion, that the fundamental need is ourselves.'18

He was offered a part-time job at the Hartford Theological Seminary, a small non-sectarian college in New England with an evangelical tradition. The President, Douglas Mackenzie, was looking for someone who could give his students a thorough training in personal work and several people recommended Buchman, among them Howard Walter, temporarily back at Hartford, his old college, from India. From Buchman's own point of view the job was ideal. It gave him liberty, and an expense account, with which to travel, and the freedom to arrange his lectures when it suited him. He became Extension Lecturer in Personal Evangelism, initially for a year.

His arrival at Hartford was far from popular. His highly evangelistic approach upset students and staff alike. One student recalled later, with a continuing sense of shock, that Buchman had wanted to convert the entire class.19 Buchman also made it clear that he regarded a good many of the existing courses as more theoretical than 'vital'. So far as he was concerned, an ability to deal with the moral and spiritual needs of individuals was a great deal more important than a mastery of theological minutiae. Many of the middle-year students, he remarked, lost their faith, and the faculty did not seem to know what to do about it.

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