After describing the period when he recognised his own spiritual need and rebelled against the thought of asking for help - during which Buchman made no approach on a personal level, although they did have one game of tennis 'which neither of us played very well' - Perry continues: 'I asked him for "an interview". There, in his office, for the first time in my life I told another person what I was like inside - at least as far as I understood myself. He was not in the least shocked ... About all that he said was, "What you need is to surrender your life completely to Jesus Christ...." It was almost an insult. Was I not studying for the Christian ministry? But I knew what he was talking about was something far more than I had yet done. My earlier decisions had been sincere, but they had not been complete. I had decided to do certain things for God. What Buchman asked was that I turn over the management of my life to God.'4

Buchman's relationship with senior Hartford was somewhat uneasy almost from the beginning. The reasons are not far to seek. For one thing, there as in China, Buchman made no secret of his conviction that the more traditional approach was inadequate. 'The seminary today', he wrote to a friend, 'is an expensive luxury for propagating theology which is often- times wholly divorced from life.'5 Another cause of friction was that Buchman wanted freedom to move wherever he felt the Spirit was leading him. Since he often seemed to feel led away from Hartford even when he was expected to be there, this fitted ill with the seminary's assumption that his prime obligation was to them.

The trouble was caused by the demand for Buchman from other colleges and later from abroad. The fact that Douglas Mackenzie retained him on the staff for so long says a great deal for Mackenzie's large- mindedness.

Mackenzie's position was difficult. He was conscious that although 'there were divided opinions among the professors, some of whom preferred the ivory-tower conception of academic life', Buchman 'won his way magnificently with the students'. In fact, he 'only knew of one or two of the students who did not confess that they had received personal help from his work'.6

All through this time Buchman was burdened by a sense that if the Protestant churches as a whole were to fulfil his idea of their calling, they must change their approach. Organised religion, he told his students, too often meant 'efficiently doing what is not the way'; the Church, he warned, might well tremble 'lest it be abandoned as a deserted city where buildings are standing and all the machinery of human life is silent'.7

Back from missionary service six months after the end of the war, he saw the symptoms of its aftermath everywhere in the victorious America to which he had returned. While President Woodrow Wilson was in Paris attempting to 'dictate a new world order under a League of Nations pledged to universal peace' and his Secretary of State was privately noting in his diary that his master was 'making impossible demands on the Peace Conference ... what misery it will cause'8, emotions held in check by war were bursting out at home. The closing of the munitions factories, a cut-back in the working week, a slump in the price of crops which for four years had poured into the granaries of the Allies, aggravated the situation. Veterans who had been promised homes found only suburban boxes at extravagant rents. Labour, which had been willing to forfeit the right to strike, now felt free to press very real grievances, in the face of employers who had done well out of the war and were flaunting their riches outrageously. An ugly witch-hunt against supposed Bolshevists and the black population got under way.

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