The missionary community's two annual summer conferences, one amid the mountain grandeurs around Kuling and the other in the dry, bracing climate of Peitaiho on the Gulf of Chihli, to which Buchman went during August, must have seemed like another and almost wholly unrelated world. The delegates were virtually all missionaries, and the over-whelming majority non-Chinese. No committed Christians from the country's political leadership had been invited, nor had any of the 'interesting sinners' whom Buchman thought necessary to enliven any conference. They were simply private gatherings of Christian workers. Nor, as Buchman complained later, were they 'personalised'; in other words, too little effort was made to meet the moral and spiritual needs of those who did attend. 'There were walls that could not be penetrated,' he remarked.27

The conferences instead followed what was known as the 'old meeting plan': a series of gatherings culminated in a major 'inspirational' address which was intended to send the missionaries away with a sense of uplift. They were occasions which provided a welcome and no doubt necessary breathing-space in the busy missionary calendar, but seemed to Buchman to have little or no relevance to the state of China.

So far as he personally was concerned, the best thing which came out of them was a friendship with Cheng Ching-yi, the Secretary of the curiously-named China Continuation Committee,* an organisation whose aim was to foster co-operation among the missionaries. Cheng was keen to win over some of the politicians who had gone with Sun Yat-sen to Canton, and wanted to find a way of introducing Buchman to Sun.

(* The leading personalities of almost all the Protestant Christian groups in China, both Chinese and foreign, were on this Committee. Its chairman was Bishop Logan Roots.)

By early autumn Buchman was hard at work preparing for Eddy's arrival. He was by now travelling round China with a team of fourteen including Dr E. G. Tewksbury, National Secretary of the China Sunday School Union, Miss Ruth Paxson of the National YMCA, and Dr H. W. Luce,* former Vice-President of Shantung University. The Chinese Recorder gave enthusiastic reports of this tour throughout the autumn of 1917 and winter of 1918.28 That by Cheng Ching-yi was simply headlined 'Miracles'.29 Buchman had found fresh financial backing, in the shape of the Stewart Evangelistic Fund, which had resources of $3 million. Characteristically, he wrote to Eddy, who had been tardy in supplying promised funds, that Bishop Lewis - the senior Methodist Bishop in China - had described the work he and his team were doing as 'the greatest movement that has yet come out of China',30 and had 'allocated' the Trustee of the Stewart Fund, the Rev Harry Blackstone, to travel with him.

(* The father of the creator of Time magazine.)

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