Norway's common school teachers were the most immediate and pervasive agents of a formal process whereby old meanings were reaffirmed and new, more secular symbolic resources were introduced to rural, nonelite strata. Their catechistic activities between 1740 and 1840 prepared the groundwork not only for clerical and lay activists but also for other more or less organized agents of symbolic innovation concerned with the practical and ideological exigencies generated by political and economic developments. No clerical generation from the Pietists to the Johnsonians was wholly successful in harnessing this subordinate labor force to its own distinctive ends. On the one hand, the ambulatory system could be seen as a vast if dissolving bulwark of Pontoppidan Confessionalism since his Explanation of the Catechism remained in all but universal use as a medium of literacy production until supplemented by other, more worldly materials after 1860. On the other hand, we saw in chapter 2 how cumulative contradictions within this relatively stable (if not stagnant) system contributed to a fundamental cleavage in popular definitions of religiosity and the laicization of spiritual initiative. The Hauge and Inner-Mission movements both embodied this cleavage and provided a supplementary educational context within which reading and public speaking skills could be promoted in the service of their experiential demands.