INNERE MISSION.

1. Biblical and Historical Basis.

The phrase innere Mission is applied in Germany to organized effort to promote the spiritual and bodily welfare of the destitute and indifferent who are, at least nominally, within the Church; it is also the name of a society which has devoted itself to this work with much success. The need for such "inner" mission work and the actual existence of it is illustrated in Old Testament history, which shows a service of witnesses ordered by God outside of the law within Israel in the continuous struggle against paganism. The mission of Christ himself was primarily to the people of Israel (Matt. xv. 24, x. 5-6); i.e., it was an inner mission. The apostles were compelled to guard against Judaiatic and pagan corruption in the Christian congregations (I Cor. v. 1 sqq., vi. 18; etc.). The acceptance of Christianity as the State religion by Constantine, the development of the Occidental Church into a legal institution and with it the corruption of divine truth by human doctrine and superstition, and the ignorance and demoralization of clergy and laity led, in the medieval Church, to a reaction which culminated in the Reformation described by Wichern as a great act of the inner mission. After the barren controversies of the dogmaticians in the post-Reformation period, Spener and Francke gave the first impulse to the renovation of the inner life of Christianity in the return to its sources and to a practical realization of Christian love; but it was not until the French Revolution that, with the revelation of corrupt conditions in Church, State, and society, the need of the specific activity of the inner mission was really felt. Johann Hinrich Wichern (q.v.), the founder of the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg (1833), determined, systematized, and secured the success of its work. His stirring appeal to the Protestant Church at the Church Diet held in Wittenberg in 1848 inaugurated a new era. Since then the conviction of the inseparable connection between the inner mission and the Church has spread and influenced both the Church and the social life in various directions.

The first result of Wichern's effort was the organization of the " Central Committee of the Inner

Mission of the German Evangelical z. Earlier Church," which advanced the work of History the inner mission in all church terriof the tories of Evangelical Germany as well

Society. as among the Germans in foreign coun-

tries. Its design was not to control the work, but to give suggestions and impulses for organized effort in different parts of the land. It instituted and superintended congresses for the inner mission (the thirty-first held in 1901) in various parts of Germany, which became the centers

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and starting-points for all efforts relating to this sphere. Independently not a little was contributed to the development of the inner mission by new interest in the circulation of Christian literature early in the nineteenth century; by the zeal for the erection of asylums for children awakened by Johann Daniel Falk and Christian Heinrich Zeller (qq.v.); by the efforts of Pastor Theodor Fliedner (q.v.); by the organization of the Gustav-Adolf-Verein (q.v.) in 1832; and by the impulse given to Christian womanhood by Amalie Wilhelmine Sieveking (q.v.). The growth of the inner mission was favored also by the peculiar development of history: the rising forces of anarchism and social democracy called forth the energies of a countermovement to rechristianize the masses; and phenomena like the portentous increase of crime, the growing demoralization of youth, and the spread of suicide confirmed the conviction of its need, even in circles which, in their zeal for orthodoxy, in the beginning had opposed the new movement. The name was due to Wichern. He refused to turn the Rauhm Haua at Hamburg into an institution for training missionaries for the heathen, realizing that there was a large field at home, and that the home and foreign agencies were of sufficient importance to be kept separate. The "inner mission" naturally occurred to him as the designation for this peculiar domestic work. The phrase had also been used by Dr. Friedrich Lacke in a publication entitled Die zwwfoche, innere and duasere. Mission der evangelischen Kirche (Hamburg, 1843), but with him it referred principally to the service which the Evangelical Church owes to its members in the Diaspora (q.v.).

The inner mission is essentially the continuation or resumption o'f the original missionary activity of the Church within the Christian world

3. Its in order to conquer the remaining nonObjects and Christian or anti-Christian elements.

Agencies. Its basis is faith in Jesus Christ, and the love of one's neighbor as the out growth of that faith. Its aim is to reclaim those who have gone astray and fallen from Christ, to strengthen the weak, to nurse the sick, to conquer the powers which in the midst of Christianity obstruct the building up of Christ's kingdom in individual souls as well as in the family, congregation, Church, State, and society. The means through which the inner mission works is attestation of the seeking, admonishing, punishing, and pitying love of God through the testimony of Christ in law and Gospel, by preaching, circulating literature, and charitable work. In so far as spiritual distress is connected with disease or similar evils, the cure of bodily defects belongs to the work of the inner mission. But it is a wide-spread error to identify the inner mission with the great com plex of associations and institutions which occupy themselves with works of Christian charity. Such associations and institutions are indispensable for the economy of the inner mission, but they in no way exhaust its content. All purely philanthropic and humane efforts are different from the activity of the inner mission in so far as they are not deter mined by the motives of Christian salvation and Inner Austria tnnere Xission the aims of the kingdom of God. The institution of Deacons and Deaconesses (q.v.) is also to be distinguished from the inner mission in so far as their charitable work is necessary and justified under all circumstances and at all times, as long as there are individual members in need of bodily and spiritual nurture, and in so far as it belongs to the church organization, while the inner mission aims at the life of the people and its temporary defects which can not be reached by the church organization.

As soon as professional workers especially trained for the duties of the inner mission came forth under

Wichern's influence, the demand in4. History creased for house-fathers of asylums to 1870. and educational institutions, and new spheres of activity opened, such as city missions (1848); the Herbergen zur Heimat (1854); the service of overseers in Prussian prisons (1856); the care of the sick, mentally defective, and epileptics (1860); and the service of field deacons in the Danish and later wars (see City Missions;