He wrote to a friend, 'I never knew death could be so wonderful. It was a glorious end and I spent the last two hours and a half with him. He was so happy to have me near.'28 And when, many years later, a student in Australia asked Buchman why he believed in life after death, he said, 'Because I saw my father die.'

Meanwhile, in January 1921, Buchman had invited three evangelical Cambridge undergraduates - Godfrey Buxton and the brothers Godfrey and Murray Webb-Peploe - to join him in America. Godfrey Webb- Peploe was prevented from going by a war wound, but the others had what his brother, a medical student, describes as 'a fascinating three months ... in the eastern universities - mainly Harvard, Yale and Princeton, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ and our experiences of God's presence with us in the war'. Those weeks, he adds, 'were to convince us of the three fundamental and practical facts concerning the leading of God: that God does guide; that where he guides, he also provides; and that he works at the other end, confirming and preparing the way.'29

From America he wrote to Buxton's fiancée, 'I have learnt more in the last ten days than in all my life about this game. ... This work has convinced me more than ever of the amazing truth of the Bible, every part of it, and of one's belief in what it teaches, but I have been seeing, I think, that I have been allowing my Christian doctrines to be a barrier between me and the man who needs a Saviour and a surgeon. I have been getting down to where men live, and sharing with them the mess I have been in and the temptations that come every day. ... By this sharing one gets "cross-sections" of men's lives ... in a way one never did before. Men seem to open up right away and one can ask plain questions and they like it when they realise we are both just plain sinners.. . . If one may generalise, though it is always dangerous to do so, we in England who are evangelical are getting our air and food - prayer and the Bible - but are short on exercise; really getting down to where men live and diagnosing a man's trouble - "getting his history" as we say in medicine.'30

Buxton recalled later, 'Buchman had an amazing gift for personal work - for leading individuals to Christ. He certainly based what he said on the Bible, but he rarely spoke from it directly or spoke holding one - he said it might put off worldly people. I don't think, however, that he used the Bible as realistically as Murray and I had learnt to do. He tended to specialize in converting the influential and the rich - the "up-and-outs" as he called them. He reckoned they were harder to reach than the down-and-outs, through having less sense of need.'31

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