by the name "Chautauqua." Beginning in the summer of 1874
with a fortnight's meeting in a grove beside Chautauqua Lake for the
study of the methods of Sunday-school teaching, it led to the questions,
how to connect the Sunday-school more intimately with other departments
of the church and with other agencies in society; how to control in the
interest of religious culture the forces, social, commercial,
industrial, and educational, which, for good or evil, are affecting the
Sunday-school pupils every day of the week. Striking root at other
centers of assembly, east, west, and south, and combining its summer
lectures with an organized system of home studies extending through the
year, subject to written examinations, "Chautauqua," by the
comprehensive scope of its studies and by the great multitude of its
students, is entitled to be called, in no ignoble sense of the word, a
university.[363:1] A weighty and unimpeachable testimony to the power
and influence of the institution has been the recent organization of a
Catholic Chautauqua, under the conduct of leading scholars and
ecclesiastics of the Roman Church.

* * * * *

Another organization of the unpaid service of private Christians is the
Young Men's Christian Association. Beginning in London in 1844, it had
so far demonstrated its usefulness in 1851 as to attract favorable
attention from visitors to the first of the World's Fairs. In the end of
that year the Association in Boston was formed, and this was rapidly
followed by others in the principal cities. It met a growing exigency in
American society. In the organization of commerce and manufacture in
larger establishments than formerly, the apprenticeship system had
necessarily lapsed, and nothing had taken its place. Of old, young men
put to the learning of any business were "articled" or "indentured" as
apprentices to the head of the concern, who was placed _in loco
parentis_, being invested both with the authority and with the
responsibility of a father. Often the apprentices were received into the
house of the master as their home, and according to legend and romance
it was in order for the industrious and virtuous apprentice to marry the
old man's daughter and succeed to the business. After the employees of a
store came to be numbered by scores and the employees of a factory by
hundreds, the word "apprentice" became obsolete in the American
language. The employee was only a "hand