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In the 18th century, one group of Dissenters became known as "Rational Dissenters". In many respects they were closer to the Anglicanism of their day than other Dissenting sects; however, they believed that state religions impinged on the freedom of conscience. They were fiercely opposed to the hierarchical structure of the established church ...
Dissenters were required to register their meeting houses and were forbidden from meeting in private homes. Any preachers who dissented had to be licensed. Between 1772 and 1774, Edward Pickard gathered together dissenting ministers, to campaign for the terms of the Toleration Act for dissenting clergy to be modified.
"Old Dissenters", dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, included Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians, and Presbyterians outside Scotland. "New Dissenters" emerged in the 18th century and were mainly Methodists. The "Nonconformist conscience" was their moral sensibility which they tried to implement in British politics. [22]
The Protestant Dissenters Act 1852 required dissenter sects to register a place of worship effectively making illegal the use of open spaces for worship. The sect was threatened with legal action for unlawful meetings by the parish authorities in Loxwood in 1861 and many letters were written by both sides but no action was taken.
America began as a significant Protestant majority nation. Significant minorities of Roman Catholics and Jews did not arise until the period between 1880 and 1910. Altogether, Protestants comprised the majority of the population until 2012 when the Protestant share of U.S. population dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religion of the ...
Free and Candid Disquisitions [note 1] is a 1749 pamphlet written and compiled by John Jones, a Welsh Church of England clergyman, and published anonymously. The work promoted a set of specific reforms to both the Church of England and its mandated book for liturgical worship, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
The term has also been applied to those bodies who dissent from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, [1] which is the national church of Scotland. [4] In this connotation, the terms dissenter and dissenting, which had acquired a somewhat contemptuous flavor, have tended since the middle of the 18th century to be replaced by nonconformist, a term which did not originally imply secession, but ...
In another attempt to champion the rights of Dissenters, Priestley defended their constitutional rights against the attacks of William Blackstone, an eminent legal theorist. Blackstone's Commentaries , fast becoming the standard reference for legal interpretation, stated that dissent from the Church of England was a crime and argued that ...