Frank & Ernest

Not even the Best People could help tony Evangelist Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman out of his latest difficulty. Plow-nosed, shark-chinned "Dr." Buchman's Oxford Group had run head on into the British Government in the person of blocky, slum-born Labor Minister Ernest Bevin.

When Minister Bevin announced last month that the Group's lay evangelists would not be exempted from military service, there was a great hubbub. To Laborite Bevin's defense sprang Crusader-Humorist Alan Patrick Herbert, Oxford University's Member in Parliament. To Oxonian Herbert the Oxford Group is a bee in the bustle. It riles him to think that Frank Buchman and his brash, eupeptic fishers among the up-&-outs* have the nerve to link themselves implicitly with the great Oxford Movements led by John Wesley and Cardinal Newman.

"Dr. Buchman," Herbert said, "is an American citizen, owing no allegiance to the King. ... He loves Adolf Hitler as well as he loves us, and there is in his preaching record a strange tendency towards flabbiness and Fascism."

Oxonian Herbert's words touched off a row like a summer thunderstorm. One hundred seventy-four Members of Parliament signed a petition supporting the Group. Evangelist Buchman himself was not available for comment (he was last seen in Bath, Me. attending a Group musical show called You Can Defend America), but from his press-relations department came a stream of releases giving testimonials from everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to "the Lord Mayor of Bristol and 52 aldermen and councilors."

Like a thunderstorm, the row did not last. Last week Ernest Bevin stood before the House, told it that the Group was the only religious organization that had tried to claim an exemption. When he sat down, not a voice was raised. The Government's position was accepted without a vote.

* Said a member of the Group: "The Oxford Group appeals not to the down-&-outs, but the up-&-outs."

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