At Northfield Buchman had a profound effect on the lives of some of the Princeton delegation. The result was that they decided to launch a much more vigorous programme and they suggested to the Princeton President, John Hibben, that he appoint Sam Shoemaker, now an active colleague of Buchman, as Secretary of the Philadelphian Society, the university's student Christian association. Hibben, who was also a Presbyterian minister, was entirely in favour of the idea. He had been greatly impressed by the results of a visit Buchman had paid to the campus in 1915. William T. Ellis, the author and journalist, reports him as saying that he had never known the student body so interested in personal religion.

That winter and the following spring, Buchman visited Princeton almost once a month. Each time, a steady stream of undergraduates came to talk to him. 'I spent last Sunday at Princeton in interviews from nine o'clock in the morning until one o'clock at night,' he reported to Hartford towards the end of the year. 'The men insisted I return this Sunday and I am taking two men from Hartford with me.'14 On another visit, he had only five hours' sleep in three days. Nor was Princeton unusual. At Yale, he conducted interviews until three in the morning on three successive nights in November 1919.

For whatever reason, men were frank with him about matters they had never spoken of to anyone else. 'It is to be accounted a remarkable thing', wrote a student from Princeton Theological Seminary, 'when a man tells another in the first half hour of their personal acquaintance anything which he had withheld from every other being... Yet that is what I did to Mr Buchman, and it was all done with such a frankness and calmness that there could be no doubt of the vital reality of it all.'15

The young men who had begun to use Buchman's approach were also hard at work in Princeton even when he himself was not there. 'How grateful I have been that you taught me some things about reaching men!' wrote Sam Shoemaker early in 1920. 'Two magnificent opportunities yesterday and today, and two miracles in consequence.'16

Not all Buchman's young friends were quite so self-confident. Henry van Dusen, then studying at Princeton, wrote of two whom he felt he had failed, the first because of 'talking religious instead of moral difficulty' and the second because he seemed unable to help him to become free of past memories of various kinds. 'I don't feel I have given him a bit of help and, frankly, I don't know how to.' For himself, he added, he would not have missed the last six months for all his other twenty-one and a half years. Van Dusen also reported that, after attending a meeting where students trained by Buchman spoke, 'The Dean said it was the manliest thing he had ever seen a group of Princeton men do.'17

88