Men, Masters & Messiahs

(See front cover)

P: In Calumet, Mich, last week Rev. Joseph Alderic Paquet of St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church declared that during mass he had unlocked the tabernacle on his altar, uncovered a ciborium to distribute Communion. To his amazement three fresh roses fell out, moistly spotted with what appeared to be blood. Father Paquet called the occurrence "mysterious" if not "miraculous."

P: At Ohio State University, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Methodist minister jointly conducted Holy Week services designed to allay the widespread Christian conviction that Jews alone were responsible for crucifying Jesus Christ. C. Near Albuquerque, N. Mex. on Good Friday, Los Hermanos Penitentes re-enacted their bloody version of Christ's Passion, with increased attention from sightseers and the Press (TIME, March 9). C. In Quebec, Good Friday was celebrated as many Catholics believe it should be everywhere. By proclamation, Mayor J. E. Gregoire ordered all theatres, public buildings, shops closed for the day. At 4 p. m. citizens were directed to observe a minute of holy silence while the city fire alarm pealed 19 times.

P: In St. Paul's Cathedral in London, 1,000 worshippers gawped when a shapely young woman of 25 walked to the altar, threw off a long cloak, knelt stark naked, was hustled out. In Rome where Pope Pius XI remained in ailing privacy Easter was the quietest in years. In Moscow, 60,000 die-hard citizens, oldish and mostly women, packed the city's 28 surviving churches.

Thus, on what most historians agreed was the 1,903rd anniversary of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the orthodox Christian world celebrated the miracle of Easter in the orthodox way. Simultaneously in Ollerup, Denmark, a U. S. man of God, famed for his unorthodoxy, made Easter Sunday, 1936, the occasion for his mightiest evangelistic effort to date.

Ollerup Rally. A chill Danish dawn found Rev. Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman asleep in his room at the Hotel Gymnastik. Once awake, he lay abed for an hour "receiving the orders of the day from God." Per orders, Frank Buchman breakfasted with his jolly disciples, later made his way to the private stadium of Physical Culturist Niels Bukh for what he had expected to be the Oxford Group's GREATEST HOUSEPARTY. However, bad weather cut the attendance down below a measly 15,000.

Cried Frank Buchman: "I challenge Denmark to be a miracle among the nations, her national policy dictated by God, her national defense the respect and gratitude of her neighbors, her national armament an army of life-changers. Denmark can demonstrate to the nations that spiritual power is the first force in the world. The true patriot gives his life to bring about his country's resurrection. All those who oppose God's control are public enemies!"

In 1935 God had ordered the founder of the Oxford Group (or First Century Christian Fellowship) to evangelize Denmark. Having just "set Norway ablaze for Christ" (TIME, May 20), Dr. Buchman and a team of 250 seasoned workers descended upon the dairy kingdom last spring. The groupers moved from town to town in Denmark, made allies of many a notable Dane. Among them: Dr. Hans Fuglsang Damgaard, Primate of the State Church (Lutheran); Dean Brodersen of Copenhagen's Cathedral; Director Gunnar Gregersen of the National Technological Institute, and Niels Bukh who some years ago brought to the U. S, 15 "perfect men" and 15 "perfect girls" to demonstrate the results of his physical culture. Though the Group's actual conversions were numerically small, Buchmanism found Danes receptive to its prime idea that the world needs "a moral and spiritual awakening" on the basis of Absolute Love. Last October, on the eve of an election, 25,000 people crowded Copenhagen's Forum and two nearby churches to hear Danish students, an engineer, a carpenter, a nurse, and a night club orchestra leader tell how the Group Movement had "changed" (i. e. converted) them.

Frank Buchman then massed his forces for a big putsch. From ten nations he summoned 500 more picked roundsmen. From the U.S. went Princenton's onetime Professor Philip Marshall Brown; James Newton, onetime New York manager of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.; John Roots, son of the Episcopal Bishop of Hankow, China. From England went retired Brigadier General Charles Trevor Caulfeild, retired Rear Admiral Horace George Summerford, a reformed Communist named James Watt, a Lady Gowers, a Lord Adington who frequently awakens his peers in the House of Lords by sounding off on the Group Movement. Also from England went the Group's ablest theological apologist, Canon Burnett Hillman Streeter, bearded, shcolarly Provost of The Queen's College (Oxford), who has shuttled to Denmark so often in the past year that his colleagues affectionately call him the "Flying Professor."

When the Buchmanite host descended on Copenhagen last fortnight, Dagens Nyheder, a conservative daily, resondingly announced the NATION'S GRATITUDE for the forthcoming Easter meeting. In Danish shop windows and railway stations, posters showed a beam of white Buchmanite light picking out the fortunate isles of Denmark on a darkened globe. At Ollerup, a torchlight parade ggreeted Frank Buchman when he arrived last week from Hamburg accompanied by a devoted German nurse who at the last minute had followed him by leaping aboard his boat. At a time when conventional Christians were taking their own religion without undue excitement, in one small corner of the world Evangelist Frank Buchman was stirring up what appeared to be a respectable spiritual revival.

Prophet's Pudding. In the U. S. the Oxford Group as a species of religious lining has influenced comparatively few people, left more dissenters than devotees in its wake. If the proof of a prophet's pudding is lack of honor in his own country, Frank Buchman qualifies in full measure.

Frank Buchman was born 58 years ago in Pennsburg of a Pennsylvania Dutch stilling family. He went to Muhlenberg College, Mt. Airy Theological Seminary, became a Lutheran pastor. Doing welfare work for Lutheran boys at Overbrook, Pa., he quarreled with trustees of his hospice, went to England with a bitter heart. In 1908 in a rural English chuch he says he had a stirring, heart-warming religious experience which set his life on a new course, revealed new spiritual powers to him. These new powers, enabling him to "probe souls" and "cleanse" by extracting confessions, earned him a shower undesirable publicity in the lively 1920's. It was then that Frank Buchman and his young co-workers invaded British and U. S. colleges, became famed as the religionists who held houseparties, consorted with the well-to-do, got people publicly to "share" their sins--misdeeds which turned out to be mostly sexual.

The Buchmanites also had a healthier side. They radiated good fellowship. The Founder laughed a great deal, sometimes signed his letters "Yours merrily, Frank," declared that the letters P-R-A-Y stood for Powerful Radiograms Always Yours. Without ever holding a salaried position, Frank Buchman all this time roamed the world sleeping in the homes of the rich or in luxury hotels. Said this Anglicized Pennsylvanian: "Why shouldn't we stay in 'posh' hotels? Isn't God a millionaire?''

At Home Abroad. Last autumn Frank Buchman held a swank revival meeting in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, featuring a prize European convert, President Carl J. Hambro of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament). Last winter he and some of his young men sunned themselves in Miami. An active Group headquarters is maintained at Manhattan's Calvary Episcopal Church (cable address: Apostolic). Not a few U. S. socialites have rallied to the faith of God the Millionaire to make the pleasurable discovery that if their servants were "changed," too, they became much more pleasant and effective. Nevertheless. Pennsylvania's Frank Buchman and his doctrine of Absolute Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness & Love seem to be more at home abroad.

Until a religion grows up, it is a cult. Buchmanism is about 20 years old, a mere infant in the range of religious history. It still rallies around one man and its methods are still highly unorthodox. For some reason, the Old World has so far been kinder than the New to the cultists of the Oxford Group. On the heels of the Ollerup meeting, a European author with a respectable following will publish next week the Group's first big literary apologia. Having tried smart fiction (Evensong), pacifism (Cry Havoc!) and horticulture (Down The Garden Path), elegant British Author Beverley Nichols has turned to the Oxford Group. "All I want," says he in his forthcoming The Fool Hath Said,* "is to get as many people as possible to share with me the excitement of living Christianity."

Landau's List. Out this week is another notable book dealing not with one cult but with many, God Is My Adventure by Rom Landau./- A 37-year-old Pole who wrote biographies of his eminent compatriots Ignaz Paderewski and Joseph Pilsudski, Author Landau has set out on a pioneering journey through that religious shadowland which lies between piety and eccentricity, "regions of truth that the official religions and sciences are shy of exploring." Of the nine cultists he has appraised, Author Landau credits Frank Buchman with being "the most successful and shrewdest revivalist of our time." However, Author Landau finds Buchman's movement theologically frivolous, grows sarcastic at the Oxford Group's practice of suppressing or "sublimating" the sex impulse. "Five 'sublimated' Arabs, Italians or Frenchmen," says Pole Landau, "would prove the efficacy of Buchman's sex methods more convincingly than 500 English undergraduates."

Other magnetic priests & prophets on Landau's list:

Baba. The U. S. four years ago was fascinated by the arrival of a long-haired, silky-mustached Parsee named Shri Sadgaru Meher Baba (TIME, May 2, 1932). Called the "God Man," the "Messiah," the "Perfect Master," Meher Baba never speaks. The God Man claims to have been strictly silent since 1925, carries a little alphabet board on which he deftly spells his mute revelations (see cut, p. 37), among which is the declaration that he is in an "infinite state." He became that way, he says, after kissing an ancient holy woman named Hazrat Babajan, remaining in a coma for nine months.

From his London interview with Meher Baba, Author Landau got little. But a female disciple in Manhattan gave Landau a graphic description of the holy man's entourage: "He gets up very early. . . . He takes a very hot bath, and his hair is attended to with the greatest care. . . . He then goes from room to room, stops for a while in front of every bed, looks at the sleeping person, and, no doubt, directs in his own way the life of the disciple for the rest of the day. . . . He never reads books, but he knows everything. . . . Baba does not read a paper. He just goes over the headlines."

Foursquare. In London every Easter Monday posters in front of the Albert Hall announce Easter services of the Elim Foursquare Revivalists* led by a sensitive-mouthed, curly-haired Welshman named George Jeffreys. Whipped up to hot fervor by the evangelical baritone of George Jeffreys, the audience prays, sways, sings, shouts.

Called "Principal" because he is head of an independent theological college, Jeffreys is a literal Bible-believer, practices baptism by immersion (see cut, p. 38). Years ago he suffered a facial paralysis. Studying for the Congregational ministry, he was praying one Sunday when he suddenly felt a powerful "electric shock" which cured him. In the past nine years some 160 persons have solemnly sworn that Principal Jeffreys healed them of paralysis, blindness, tumors, cancers.

Ex-God. Jiddu Krishnamurti, doe-eyed Brahmin-born Hindu, was pounced upon in Adyar, Madras 27 years ago by Mrs. Annie Besant and Rev. Charles Lead-beater, famed Theosophists. They declared that the 12-year-old moppet was "the Vehicle of the new World Teacher, the Lord Maitreya," whose last incarnation on earth was Jesus Christ. Calmly accepting this announcement, Krishnamurti grew up under their tutelage, became head of their Order of the Star in the East. In 1929, however, he disappointed his disciples by renouncing the Godship they had imposed upon him. Still a practicing Theosophist seer who affects soft, open-collared shirts and flannel slacks, Krishnamurti, now nearing 40, has not lost his persuasive ways. Author Landau says he felt such personal pleasure at meeting Krishnamurti that he permanently lost all desire to smoke.

Last week many a Californian journeyed to the Theosophical Society's estate near Ojai where Krishnamurti lives in a hut. Lately returned from a lecture tour of Mexico and South America, the abdicated Messiah delivered the Society's triennial series of talks, will soon depart for more talks in Holland where the Society owns an estate at Ommen.

Harmonious Developer. One of the most unaccountable, unpredictable of modern mystics is George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a Levantine with a huge, shaved head, piercing eyes, walrus mustache and bull-muscled frame. He is the strange head of an odd cult which such people as the late Novelist Katharine Mansfield, the late Editor Alfred Richard Orage of the New English Weekly have at one time or another espoused. At Fontainebleau, where Miss Mansfield died in 1924, Gurdjieff ran the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He taught his followers intricate dances for which he composed 5,000 pieces of music. He enjoyed mirth, appeared to enjoy heroic rages, advocated intense awareness of every muscular function. Six years ago Gurdjieff arrived in Manhattan, was often to be seen in Childs' restaurants drinking coffee and working over a monumental book, Tales Told by Beelzebub to His Grandson (TIME, March 24, 1930).

After interviews in which he asked Gurdjieff searching questions. Rom Landau was told by a Gurd jieffite: ''You almost force him to answer yes or no. He is not used to that, and he does not care for such a form of conversation. . . ."

Author Landau believes Gurdjieff was once a Russian agent in Tibet, that there he learned ancient esoteric lore, that he must now be over 70 although he looks no more than 50.

* Doubleday, Doran ($2).

/- Knopf ($3.50).

* Not connected with Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's Four Square Gospel Church in Los Angeles.

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