LIFE-WORK ENDED?

The move from Muhlenberg to Mount Airy took Buchman from one part of the Pennsylvania German culture to another. The seminary, owned by the Ministerium, mirrored its dutiful earnestness. The buildings themselves conveyed an impression of austerity, even grimness, and suggested that a career in the Lutheran Church was not something to be undertaken lightly. At the same time, Mount Airy was situated in the exciting city of Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Constitution and a major port, which still looked to Europe as the centre of gravity of the world. That great world, of which Buchman read and dreamed, seemed a good deal nearer now than it had in Allentown.

At first Buchman was intensely lonely, and compensated by taking a somewhat lordly attitude towards his classmates at the seminary. They were, he thought, rather colourless and narrow. Very few, he wrote his mother, had much general knowledge. They knew nothing apart from what they had studied in books. That was well and good, but a man needed a knowledge of the ‘doings of men’.

At the same time, in the manner of many young men who have newly left home, he was giving his parents a glimpse of his ambitions. They were grandiose in the style of an America saturated with the log-cabin-to-the-White-House philosophy of Horatio Alger, 200 million copies of whose books had been sold in the previous twenty-five years. ‘A man in order to be great must do extraordinary things, not ordinary,’ Buchman wrote to his parents. ‘By the grace of God, I intend to make the name of Buchman shine forth. By earnest toil and labour I can accomplish it.’ Dr Luther, he remarked, had not written hymns until he was forty; and his own ambition was to be a famous author and hymn-writer. ‘Never before’, he concluded, ‘have I revealed my mind to you like this but often I have laid awake and thought of all these things.’1

Not only did he take himself seriously, he also expected others to follow suit. For example, he not infrequently chided his mother for the stationery she used when writing to him. ‘I hate to receive letters on such poor paper,’ he told her briskly. ‘It looks so careless and I want to keep them. So please do me the favour to use better paper in the future. Every woman ought to have good paper.’2 ‘Don't feel hurt about the stationery question,’ he added in another letter, ‘I meant it in all kindness.’3

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