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Updated: June 21, 2025
With the progress of the war, the Puritans, who had at first been united in their opposition to the crown, themselves divided; one party, to which most of the peers and of the non-conforming clergy belonged, being anxious to reestablish the monarchy, and set up a rigid Presbyterianism; the other, of whose spirit Cromwell was the incarnation, resolving each day more firmly to crush the king and proclaim freedom of conscience; and it was this doctrine of toleration which was the snare and the abomination in the eyes of evangelical divines.
The regular buyers of a periodical want to read what they have been used to read the same sort of thought, the same sort of words. The editor sees that they get that sort. He selects the suitable, the conforming articles, and he rejects the non-conforming. What the editor does in the case of a periodical, the readers do in the case of literature in general.
As long as Laud ruled in the zenith of his power, deprivation awaited the non-conforming minister, and imprisonment, fine, and the pillory were the certain lot of the writer who dared to lash the real or imaginary vices of the prelacy.
The non-conforming or sectarian movements have commonly proceeded from a mixture of motives, some of which are at variance with that sense of status on which the priestly office rests. Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good part a revulsion against a system of status. Where this is the case the institution of the priesthood has broken down in the transition, at least partially.
Despite efforts of the Establishment to impose conformity, non-conforming individuals continued to be born and to grow up as deviants, misfits and intentional non-conformists. Some of these rebels against the established social order left home, joined the army or went to sea.
Surely the reader cannot be at a loss to know what we mean the renunciation in one hour, on St Bartholomew's day in 1662, of two thousand benefices by the non-conforming clergymen of England. In the same year, occurred a similar renunciation of three hundred and sixty benefices in Scotland.
It is singular enough, that it seems to have aggravated the feelings of the non-conforming Presbyterians, when the penalties which were most unjustly imposed upon themselves were relaxed towards the poor MacGregors; so little are the best men, any more than the worst, able to judge with impartiality of the same measures, as applied to themselves, or to others.
All Huguenot schools are to be suppressed; all children born of Huguenot parents to be baptized and educated as Catholics; all non-conforming ministers to quit the country within fifteen days, on pain of the galleys." "Let us rise, my children," cried my father in great agitation, "and leave this country, which is no longer a mother to us, shaking the dust off our feet. Alas, what am I saying?
Such a priesthood may be expected to show the characteristics of the sacerdotal office only as blended and obscured with alien motives and traditions, due to the disturbing presence of other factors than those of animism and status in the purposes of the organizations to which this non-conforming fraction of the priesthood belongs.
The promoters of the bill alleged, that an established religion and national church were absolutely necessary, when so many impious men pretended to inspiration, and deluded such numbers of people: that the most effectual way to preserve this national church, would be the maintenance of the civil power in the hands of those who expressed their regard to the church in their principles and practice: that the parliament, by the corporation and test acts, thought they had raised a sufficient barrier to the hierarchy, never imagining that a set of men would rise up, whose consciences would be too tender to obey the laws, but hardened enough to break them: that, as the last reign began with an act in favour of dissenters, so the commons were desirous that in the beginning of her majesty's auspicious government an act should pass in favour of the church of England: that this bill did not intrench on the act of toleration, or deprive the dissenters of any privileges they enjoyed by law, or add any thing to the legal rights of the church of England: that occasional conformity was an evasion of the law, by which the dissenters might insinuate themselves into the management of all corporations: that a separation from the church, to which a man's conscience will allow him occasionally to conform, is a mere schism, which in itself was sinful, without the superaddition of a temporal law to make it an offence: that the toleration was intended only for the ease offender consciences, and not to give a license for occasional conformity: that conforming and non-conforming were contradictions; for nothing but a firm persuasion that the terms of communion required are sinful and unlawful, could justify the one; and this plainly condemns the other.
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