degraded and the neglected, and who toiled by deed and word to awaken the conscience and pity of the educated and ruling classes.
In 1820, Zeller opened a reform school at Bingen, and Count von der Recke-Vollmarstein in Düsselthal. In six years there were already twenty-five such institutions in Switzerland and Germany. Amalie Sieveking led the work of women for the sick and wounded from the year 1831. Her life was a large factor in the early stages of the Inner Mission. Limits of space confine this article to typical examples of the multitude of charitable efforts which grew up in that period.
J. H. Wichern was the son of a poor man of Hamburg. By his student struggles to gain an education, and by his early labors as a Sunday school teacher his mind was opened to the needs of the wandering multitude. Neander and Schleiermacher were among the great men whom he heard at the University. In 1833 he founded the Rauhe Haus, at Horn, with twelve unpromising children, some of them thieves. He sought to change the environment of neglected children. When they came to him the past was forgiven and forgotten; they were set to work; a joyous and natural life of home and religion surrounded them as an atmosphere. They were not massed in barracks but grouped in small houses, and their intercourse was made like that of the family.
Soon he saw the need of trained assistants. His board could not support this measure, and necessity turned Wichern to literary activity and travel. In order to secure funds the people must be told of the social need, and Wichern thus became the propagandist of the Inner Mission.
Deaconesses.—In another part of Germany, only a little later, Pastor Theodore Fliedner (1800–1864), the counterpart of Wichern, was working out another problem. Fliedner was not so versatile, learned and eloquent as Wichern, but he had a vigorous will and fine organizing talent. In his travels to collect funds for his poor Kaiserswerth parish he had seen the Mennonite deaconesses in Amsterdam. In England he met Elizabeth Fry.
