The Eight Points of the Oxford Group

AN EXPOSITION FOR CHRISTIANS AND PAGANS by C. IRVING BENSON. Originally published in 1938. Contents include: FOREWORD .... . . . vii CHAPTER I GOD HAS A PLAN FOR EVERY LIFE 1 II CONFESSION is GOOD FOR THE SOUL 18 III IF THY BROTHER HATH AUGHT AGAINST THEE . . . . 30 IV THE FOUR ABSOLUTES . . . 44 V BE STILL AND KNOW . . . . 58 VI DON'T BE AN Ass! 74 VII ' LIFE CHANGERS ALL . . . . 89 VIII Lo, HERE is FELLOWSHIP! . . . 102 APPENDIX A THE SECRET OF VICTORIOUS VITALITY . . . . - 115 B MY TEXT 129 C MY WITNESS 143 D QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS . . . . 151 IF THIS COUNSEL OR THIS WORK BE OF MEN, IT WILL BE OVERTHROWN: BUT IF IT BE OF GOD, YE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO OVERTHROW THEMj LEST HAPLY YE BE FOUND EVEN TO BE FIGHTING AGAINST GOD. GAMALIEL. FOREWORD: THE CROSS IN LAKELAND. IN all the glory that is England no place has been so chanted by poets and nature lovers as the Lake country in Cumberland and West morland that district which Lowell aptly called c Wordsworthshire.' Where else in the world is beauty more thickly sown where is there such unity in variety as in the sweep of landscape which greets the eye from the shores of Coniston or from Kirkstone Pass? Wordsworth, the laureate of Lakeland loveliness, has described the eight valleys seen from the top of Scawf ell, diverging like spokes from the nave of a wheel. The scenery of Lakeland is a succession of delightful surprises and of ever changing forms and colours. Rugged mountains rise amid velvety valleys; there is the sparkle of myriad waterfalls and the shimmer of ruffled lakes 5 glowing foxgloves and other wild flowers in rich profusion bedeck verdant carpets of ferns and lichen-covered rocks are adorned with colours of vivid beauty. Little wonder that such seers as Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, De Quincey, Arnold and Ruskin fed their souls in this earthly paradise and littered its winding ways and woodland paths with memories of their presence and poetic thought. Wordsworth was born in Lakeland, It gave him his cradle, his home and his grave. He loved it with a deep, penetrating, interpreting love. Every tiniest flower was full of deepest suggestion to him. He listened to the music of its running streams, to the song of the skylark and the cuckoo's call, to the whispering leaves and the wind in the trees and caught the deeper accents of a voice divine and saw the Unseen in the seen. A SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE On a summer day in the year 1908 there came to this haven of quietness and tranquil beauty a clergyman from Philadelphia, smitten with a sense of failure and futility. He was a Lutheran minis ter, sick at heart because of the felt lack of the power of God in his life and ministry. A man cannot give what he does not possess and the high calling of the ministry is to give men God. Religion must be infectious $ it is, as Dean Inge insists, caught rather than taught. Of all the wretched men in this world, the most to be pitied is a minis ter spiritually uncontagious. He may be an elo quent preacher, an efficient organizer, a social success, but if he is a failure in the main issue of his life, he is of all men the most miserable. This pilgrim, Dr. Frank Buchman, went to Lakeland seeking if haply he might find the secret of the missing power. Not in the many meetings of the Keswick Convention, instinct with spiritual ity though they were, did he gain that for which he was hungering. Not yet was his heart open and receptive. Then one afternoon he attended a service in a little chapel outside Keswick town and there to a congregation numbering less than twenty an unknown woman, a m