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590 of social beneficence was closely and causally connected with the larger circulation of the inspiring book. Some Catholics, for a time, joined in the movement, but their efforts were checked by papal decree. Rationalistic pastors who had been hostile to the "Christian Society" assisted in this effort, and collections were widely taken in the Protestant churches.

The German Bible movement, at first due to English influence, made itself independent in consequence of the refusal of the English to print and publish the Apocrypha (1825–7). The British society excluded these books from their editions on the ground that they were uncanonical. The Germans demanded that they should be admitted, claiming that even canonical books vary in degrees of inspiration, and that the Apocrypha contains much material of value to the spiritual life. This doctrinal difference hastened the independent development of the German church.

Sunday schools.—Sunday schools did not originate with church authorities but with voluntary associations composed of zealous and far-sighted members of the church. Robert Raikes began this form of work with a small group of helpers in 1780, in Gloucester, England. He was moved to pity and action by observing the degraded condition of poor children who ran about the streets on Sunday, unclean and ignorant. He gathered some of them in a room and taught them the elements of knowledge and religion. At first he employed salaried teachers, but later advanced to unpaid workers. J. G. Oncken was agent of the British Bible Society in Hamburg, and was in correspondence with England. He established, in cooperation with Pastor Rautenberg, the first German Sunday school in St. George, a suburb of Hamburg, in 1825. This same Sunday school is famous for being the training school of J. H. Wichern, "father of the Inner Mission," founder of the Rauhe Haus at Horn. Oncken afterwards became a Baptist and the leader of that denomination in Germany. The Sunday school in Germany has not followed the English course of development, but has its own peculiar German form.

The circulation of Christian writings.—The English influence is