In regard to home mission work, the Protestant church long lagged behind the Catholic, which had wrought vigorously through its monkish orders. England first entered with zeal into the field, especially dissenters and members of the low church party, and subsequently also the high church ritualistic party (§ 202, 1, 3), which now takes an active interest in this work. Germany, in view of the scanty means at the disposal of the pietists and the church party, made noble efforts. In other continental countries, but especially in North America, much was done for home missions. Soon the whole Protestant world began to organize benevolent and evangelistic institutions. The laborious Wichern, in A.D. 1849, went through all Germany to arouse interest in home missions, and started a yearly congress on the subject in Wittenberg. Till his death in A.D. 1881, Wichern continued to direct this congress and further the interests which it represented.
§ 183.1. Institutions.—The earliest charity school was that founded at Düsselthal by Count Recke-Volmarstein, in A.D. 1816, followed by Zeller’s at Beuggen in A.D. 1820. One of the most famous of these institutions was the Rauhe Haus of Wichern, at Horn, near Hamburg, A.D. 1833.538 Fliedner’s Deaconess Institute at Kaiserswerth is the pride of the evangelical church. It has now 190 branches, with 625 sisters, in the four continents. There are many independent institutions modelled upon it in Germany, England, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, and France. In A.D. 1881 there were in Germany 31, and in the cities of other lands 22, principal deaconess institutions of this German order, with 4,751 sisters and 1,491 fields of labour outside of the institution. The original institute of Kaiserswerth comprises a hospital with 600 patients, a refuge for fallen women and liberated prisoners, an orphanage for girls, a seminary for governesses, and a home for female imbeciles.539 Löhe founded the deaconess institute of Neuendettelsau, on strict Lutheran principles, with hospital, girls’ school, and asylum for imbecile children. In France a most successful institution was founded by pastor Bost of Laforce, in A.D. 1848, for foundlings, imbeciles, and epileptics. In England, George Müller, a poor German student of Halle, a pupil of Tholuck, beginning in A.D. 1832, founded at Bristol five richly endowed orphanages after the pattern of that of A. H. Francke, in which thousands of destitute street children have been educated, and for this and other purposes has spent nearly £1,000,000 without ever asking any one for a contribution, acting on the belief that “the God of Elijah still lives.” The London City Mission employs 600 missionaries. In New York, since A.D. 1855, about 60,000 street children have been placed, by the Society for Poor Children, in Christian families, and 21 Industrial schools are maintained with 10,000 scholars.—Tract Societies in London, Hamburg, Berlin, etc., send out millions of tracts for Christian instruction and awakening. The Society for North Germany successfully pursues a similar work; the Calw Publication Society circulates Christian text-books with woodcuts at a remarkably small price. In Berlin the Evangelical Book Society issues reprints of the older tracts on practical divinity. Christian women, like the English Quakeress Elizabeth Fry, the noble Amalie Sieveking of Hamburg, Miss Florence Nightingale, the heroine of the Crimean war, and the brave Maria Simon of Dresden, who organized the female nursing corps of the wars of 1866, 1870, 1871, helped on the work of home missions in all lands, especially in the departments of tending the poor and the sick.
§ 183.2. The Order of St. John, secularized in A.D. 1810, was reorganized by Frederick William IV. in A.D. 1852 into an association for the care of the sick and poor. Under a grand-master it has 350 members and 1,500 associates. Its revenues are formed from entrance fees and annual contributions. It has thirty hospitals. In A.D. 1861 it founded a hospital for men in Beyrout during the persecution of Christians in Syria, and in A.D. 1868 gave aid during the famine that followed the typhus epidemic in East Prussia, and did noble service in the wars of A.D. 1864, 1866, and 1870.
§ 183.3. The Itinerant Preacher Gustav Werner in Württemberg.—Abandoning his charge in A.D. 1840, Werner began his itinerant labours, and during the year formed more than a hundred groups of adherents over all Württemberg. His preaching was allegorical and eschatological, and avoided the doctrines of satisfaction and justification. On his repudiating the Augsburg Confession, the church boards refused to recognise him, and he went hither and thither preaching a Christian communism. In A.D. 1842 he bought a site in Reutlingen, built a house, and founded a school for eighty children. In order to develop his views of carrying on industrial arts on a Christian basis, he bought, in A.D. 1850, the paper factory at Reutlingen for £4,000, and subsequently transferred it to Dettingen on a larger scale, at an outlay of £20,000. By A.D. 1862 he had established no less than twenty-two branches, in which manufacturing was carried on, with institutions of all kinds for education, pastoral work, rescuing the lost and raising the fallen. Each member lives and works for the whole; none receives wages; surplus income goes to increase the number and extent of the institutions. Vast multitudes of sunken and destitute families have been by these means restored to respectable social positions and to a moral religious life.
§ 183.4. Bible Societies.—The Bible societies constitute an independent branch of the home mission. Modern efforts to circulate Scripture began in England. As a necessary adjunct to missionary societies, the great British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London in A.D. 1804, embracing all Protestant sects, excepting the Quakers. It circulates Bibles without note or comment. The Apocryphal controversy of A.D. 1825-1827 resulted in the society resolving not to print the Apocrypha in its issues. In consequence of this decision, fifty German societies, including the present society of Berlin, seceded. The New York Association, founded in A.D. 1817, is in thorough accord with the London society. The Baden Missionary Society revived the discussion in A.D. 1852 by making it the subject of essay for a prize, which was won by the learned work of Keerl, who, along with the stricter Lutherans, condemned the Apocrypha. The other side was taken by Stier and Hengstenberg, and most of the consistories advised adherence to the old practice, as all misunderstanding was prevented by Luther’s preface and the prohibition against using passages from the Apocrypha as sermon texts.—Bible societies altogether have issued during the century 180,000,000 Bibles and New Testaments in 324 different languages.540