From their Sunday-school work, begun in Bristol in 1810, and gradually spreading over the country, has arisen what is perhaps the most widely influential of the present activities in which Friends are interested on behalf of the working classes--the Adult School Movement. Originally initiated[26] in the interest of loafers at street corners, it has now become a national movement, with a complete organization, upwards of a thousand schools, and a membership in its ninetieth thousand. It is spreading on the Continent and in America. At the meetings of its weekly classes, which are open to all who care to attend (the men's and women's classes are held independently), led by an elected president, who may be an adherent of any creed or of none, part of the time is devoted to the consideration of religious questions and part to lecturettes, debates, readings, and so on. Each school develops secondary interests and engages in special work. [Footnote 26: In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.] Within the society from which this perpetual stream of evangelical work flows forth we must distinguish two distinct types of religious culture. There is, first of all, the main mass, differing only in its method of worship from the main body of Protestant nonconformity--taking, as we have said, its stand first and foremost upon the scriptures. In most Quaker meetings to-day this typically "Protestant" attitude predominates numerically. But while we recognize this state of affairs as one of the inevitable consequences of any endeavour to found an "open" church upon a mystical basis, it is, nevertheless, amongst the Quakers, modified, to a certain extent, in two ways: first, by its subjection to its environment, the framework of the old Quaker culture, the training implied in Fox's method both of private and public worship, in the expectation of unmediated Divine leadership in all the circumstances of life, the training in freedom from the domination of formulæ and deductions, the insistence on the important meaning of the individual soul.