Buchman had clearly taken considerable risks in encouraging a group of inexperienced young men to confront problems which older heads had seldom had the courage or insight to tackle. But his work at Princeton soon had marked results. Considerable numbers of young men, who had not been thinking of the church as a profession, took the cloth because of contact with him. In May 1920 twenty Princeton men who entered the ministry in that year presented Buchman with a pair of gold cuff-links and their grateful thanks. In 1934 van Dusen, who had by that time distanced himself from Buchman, wrote that 'of the fifty ablest Ministers on the Atlantic seaboard to-day, somewhere near half were directed into their vocation through his influence at that time'.18

At the same time Buchman was accused by a few of an abnormal and morbid emphasis on sex and of conducting an unwarranted inquisition into men's private lives. Stories of alleged sexual confessions went round the campus and there was talk of emotionalism and even hysteria. Robert P. Wilder, a senior Director of the Philadelphian Society, came to the conclusion that those who opposed Buchman did so because 'Frank strikes too close to them.'19 By the spring of 1920 van Dusen had begun to think that Princeton would not stand for what he called 'apostolic work'. Buchman disagreed. So did Shoemaker. 'They talk about emotion,' he wrote to Buchman. 'I don't believe in working it up for its own sake but no man can come to the profoundest decision of his life without its having an emotional reaction afterwards which stirs him to the depths.'20

Shoemaker was equally definite about the accusation that there was an undue emphasis on sexual indulgence. 'Of the sins which root in the flesh, any fool knows that sexual sins are likely to insinuate themselves into the first place in people's minds. They are common. Men want help there where the battle rages and there we must help them if we have anything to help with. We emphatically do not believe that it is the basic trouble. The basic trouble is always the pride of trying to get along without God.'

On 3 July 1920 Buchman sailed for Europe, taking with him two students from Yale. They joined up with some of his Princeton friends who were in Britain on an athletics tour. The peripatetic fellowship was on the move. They attended an evangelical conference in England and travelled round Europe, and were shown something of each country's art and architecture, as well as meeting Buchman's friends.

In Lucerne he took them to a hotel to meet Queen Sophie of Greece. She, with her husband and their son, Prince Paul, were visiting Switzerland with their German relations, the Hesse family: Sophie's cousin, Princess Margaret, and her two sons, Richard and Christopher. This was the first time Buchman had met the Hesses, but he seems to have rapidly won their confidence. 'For us young people coming from a Germany impoverished as a result of the First World War, these were very dazzling and tempting surroundings, and Mother, with her keen instinct for the inner worth of a man, viewed them with real mistrust,' wrote Prince Richard nearly forty years later. 'Only in the case of Frank was it a quite different matter. He moved around in that atmosphere without being contaminated or influenced by it, which gave us great confidence in him.' What he chiefly remembered was Buchman's 'infectious laughter' which 'revived everyone's spirits just to hear it'.21 Thereafter, Buchman and his friends became regular summer visitors at Kronberg, the Hesse home near Frankfurt; so regular, indeed, that in the family it became known as 'the Buchman season'.

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