The drab red-brick buildings of Hartford Seminary might seem an unlikely place from which to start such a movement, and a lone man of 41 at least optimistic, if not naive and presumptuous, to think that he could bring it off. Nevertheless, as a first step he conceived the idea of a conference at Hartford, drawing in students from different colleges in the Eastern states. Mackenzie and Jacobus strongly backed the venture, although, as in China, there were a few misunderstandings about the agenda, misunderstandings which were this time settled ahead of the occasion.11 Invitations went to Yale, Harvard, Williams, Amherst and Cornell, among other colleges. After the first conference, demands came for return visits, and each time Buchman took men from Hartford or other colleges with him.

So Buchman sallied forth from Hartford, returning each week to give his lectures. He received a salary ($3,000, plus $500 expenses), but his resources for this rapidly expanding work were slender and he must have hoped for more substantial backing. Indeed, Dean Jacobus frequently mentioned the need for him to gain outside support. In 1920 he was approached to create and lead a movement financed by John D. Rockefeller and others, which would, in its initiators' phrase, 'use all the genius of American industry to carry Christ's message to the laymen of the world'.12It was being planned on a big scale and would have large resources behind it.

Remembering what had happened in China, however, Buchman turned down this offer and, apparently, others which he felt would cramp his work into an organisational framework. He wrote Sherwood Day of his 'hunger to get away for a deeper message, more time alone. I feel my own need ... It is more of Christ for me. I feel about all these offers for next year great dangers. My thought from above is - "wait and see what God hath wrought". We need to sweep the decks clear. And travel with light baggage.'13 When he refused one of these offers, he was warned that he could expect no money for his own work from them, or, it was hinted, from similar sources. 'My answer', he explained later, 'was, "Well, I will starve, because that particular work is not 'of the Spirit'."' It was becoming clearer and clearer to him that he was meant to find and follow an independent road.

Buchman's initial campaign from Hartford received a notable stimulus at the Northfield Conference in the summer of 1919. By then, he had taken his mother for a much-needed holiday and arranged for his father, who had suffered a stroke the previous autumn, to be cared for at a nursing home close to his own lodgings at Hartford.

87