Reports of the campaign in the press were at first unenthusiastic. A highly positive report of the first meeting then appeared in Social-Demokraten 43 and Kristeligt Dagblad, the Christian daily, remarked indulgently, 'You can't expect Americans to get it right on the first night.'44 Emil Blytgen-Petersen, the Dagens Nyheder reporter assigned to the Group, returned to his paper saying he had been unable to interview Buchman. The paper's star feature writer and associate editor, Carl Henrik Clemmensen, went down to try personally. A three-hour talk resulted, at which both men asked questions, and each was equally frank.

Clemmensen wrote a little later, 'I cannot understand how any church- man could think it did not matter what millions of men and women are making out of life. I cannot understand any form of Christianity that has any other goal than a revolution of the unchristian world we live in. And that, of course, implies a revolution, a thorough-going and drastic change of the life of the individual.

'I can understand the Oxford Group. I can understand that group of men and women who, in one remarkable way or another, have found themselves brought together in a common work, with the object of producing the kind of Christian revolution I have described. I can understand the Four Absolutes. None of us, perhaps, will completely succeed in living up to them, but they will always be a standard measuring the quality of our lives and marking how far each one of us does reach. I can understand people who refuse to sit with folded hands, watching the world go to ruin, but who are convinced that in their work to save the world they will receive daily inspiration from the one source from which we can hope for inspiration, if only we will become what a Danish author has called “open" people instead of "closed" people...

They spoke to me on an entirely new wavelength. They spoke in a language I could understand. They did not scare me with any theological terminology. They did not make me apprehensive or suspicious by unfolding a vast mystical apparatus.'

And of Buchman he wrote: 'Calm and smiling is the man who started the whole Oxford Group ... He has strength. He is a quite outstanding psychologist. He deals with people as individuals. He never deals with two people in the same way. He knows all about you when you have talked with him for a few minutes. He is an ambitious man, but I have a living conviction that he is ambitious only that what is good may triumph. I could easily name straight away at least five eminent church leaders who would do well with a considerably larger equipment of that kind of ambition. He is positive. I have never heard him say a single negative sentence. He never replies to attacks. I have never seen him put on an artificial smile. I call him "the laughing apostle". All round the world I have met very few people so completely harmonious and natural in their ordinary pleasures and happiness.’45

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