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strength, no longer hindered by the ideological pressure of the Swedish absolutist monarchy.
The number of Baltic German students increased in Halle, the centre of German Pietism. One
of the leaders of the movement, August Hermann Francke, also dispatched Pietist pastors to
fill the numerous teaching posts at Estonian church and town schools left vacant by the
Northern War.
Pietism stressed individual religious experience and encouraged the faithful to read the Bible
themselves. The Pietists thus strove to develop the Estonian language and religious literature.
The full vernacular Bible appeared in 1739. The translators tried to eliminate the vast
difference between the `country language' and `church language'. The Bible translation
became the basic text that regulated the written Estonian language for more than a century.
Despite its enormous impact on the development of the Estonian language, individualistic
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