Buchman would no more formally disown the name than he could formally have adopted it. He accepted it with its advantages and disadvantages. Whether he was wise to do so has been questioned even by friendly critics. Sir Arnold Lunn, for example, wrote that Buchman and his friends were 'bound to have enough trouble on their hands if they confined themselves to their legitimate objective, the campaign against sin, and it was a great mistake to risk a head-on collision not only with sin but also with Oxford'.35 Certainly this first clash immediately affected the policy of The Times and other newspapers, and later became manifest in various government departments where Oxford men abounded.

The disadvantages, indeed, grew with the years. After 1933 the name 'Oxford' stood in the United States for something known there as the 'Oxford Oath' - a pledge adopted by students of many American universities following the example of the majority in the Oxford Union who had declared they would not fight 'for King and Country'. 'Oxford' from this moment stood for 'pacifist' in America, and the Oxford Group there was suspected of both pacifism and Communism. Nor was it a great advantage in countries where British rule was being challenged by nationalist and independence movements, and at one point even Mahatma Gandhi's friendship was strained by this. It finally became, as Sir Michael Sadler had foreseen, too narrow a term and was eventually to give way to 'Moral Re-Armament'.

The controversy over the name did nothing to diminish the interest aroused by the campaign in London during the winter of 1933-4. Seven thousand crowded into St Paul's Cathedral. The Archbishop of Canterbury, receiving the party at Lambeth Palace, pointed to the pictures of his predecessors and said that though many of them would possibly have shared the fears of certain writers to The Times, he for his part was convinced that the Oxford Group was called by God to London.*

(* In August 1934 Dr Lang told his Diocesan Conference: 'The Oxford Group is most certainly doing what the Church of Christ exists everywhere to do. It is changing human lives, giving them a new joy and freedom, liberating them from faults of temper, of domestic relationships, and the like, which have beset them, and giving them a new ardour to communicate to their fellow creatures what God has given to them.' (Church of England Newspaper, 14 September 1934.)

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