Word Finder - dissenters

definition

Someone who dissents (disagrees), especially from an established church.

Indeed it is estimated that there are more than 12,000,000 Dissenters in Great Russia alone.

In 1673 he opposed the Indulgence, supported the Test Act, and spoke against the proposal for giving relief to the dissenters.

With a passionate hatred and distrust of the Catholics, and an intense love of political liberty, he united the desire for ease to Protestant Dissenters.

In 1687 James made a bid for the support of the Dissenters by advocating a system of joint toleration for Catholics and Dissenters.

In April 1687 he published a Declaration of Indulgence - exempting Catholics and Dissenters from penal statutes.

By an unscrupulous use of the dispensing power he introduced Dissenters and Catholics into all departments of state and into the municipal corporations, which were remodelled in their interests.

In the session of 1834 his most important performance was a speech in opposition to Hume's proposal to throw the universities open to Dissenters.

He has recorded the fact that " the very first opinion which he ever was called upon to give in cabinet " was an opinion in favour of withdrawing the bill providing education for children in factories, to which vehement opposition was offered by the Dissenters, on the ground that it was too favourable to the Established Church.

In dealing with nonconformity he was tolerant, and even advocated a revision of the Prayer Book if that would allay the scruples of dissenters.

While he pointed out to the dissenters the scandalous inconsistency of their playing fast and loose with sacred things, yet he denounced the impropriety of requiring tests at all.

In this conjuncture Defoe had really no friends, for the dissenters were as much alarmed at his book as the high-flyers were irritated.

He continued, however, to take the side of the dissenters in the questions affecting religious liberty, which played such a prominent part towards the close of Anne's reign.

Heresy became henceforward a purely ecclesiastical offence, although disabling laws of various kinds continued to be enforced against Jews, Catholics and other dissenters.

His own initiative is more clearly traceable in the Toleration Act, extending liberty of private worship to Dissenters.

At that time the population of Poland was, in round numbers, 11,500,000, of whom about r,000,000 were dissidents or dissenters.

The Waldenses of Savoy and France, the Brethren (small communities of evangelical dissenters from the medieval faith) of Germany, and the Unitas Fratrum of Bohemia all used the same catechism (one that was first printed in 1498, and which continued to be published till 1530) for the instruction of their children.

He died in London on the 8th of December 1691, and his funeral was attended by churchmen as well as dissenters.

It was chiefly through his advice that the king appointed an ecclesiastical commission for the reconciliation of the Dissenters.

Almost two-thirds of the population belong to the Evangelical Church, and rather more than a third to the Church of Rome; the actual figures (based on the census of 1900) being (%) Evangelical Protestants, 62.5; Roman Catholics, 36.1; Dissenters and others, .043, and Jews, fO.

He was always suspected of being a Roman Catholic, and invariably treated Jacobites and Papists better than Dissenters in the Athenae, but he died in communion with the Church of England.

Bunhill Fields, City Road, was used by the Dissenters as a burial-place from the middle of the 17th century until 1832.

There is no Anglican church, the inhabitants being Dissenters.

Nor can we regard " Plato and his followers as the authorized teachers of the Greek nation and the sophists as the dissenters."

In a word, the present writer agrees with Grote that the sophists were not a sect or school with common doctrine or method; that their theoretical and practical morality was neither above nor below that of their age, being, in fact, determined by it; and that Plato and his followers are not to be regarded as the authorized teachers of the Greek nation, nor the sophists as the dissenters, but vice versa.

Of less importance are his very numerous polemical works, though his famous book On the Unity of the Church of God (1st edition, Wilna, 1577) directed against the dissenters, especially the Greek Orthodox schismatics, will always have an historical interest.

This work he published, under the title The Gospel worthy of all Acceptation, soon after his settlement in Kettering; and although it immediately involved him in a somewhat bitter controversy which lasted for nearly twenty years, it was ultimately successful in considerably modifying the views prevalent among English dissenters.

One of the firstfruits of his work was the entrance of John Bright into parliamentary life; and by 1852 forty Dissenters were members of the House of Commons.

She detested equally Roman Catholics and dissenters, showed a strong leaning towards the high-church party, and gave zealous support to the bill forbidding occasional conformity.

But a new code of laws outlawed many of these people as dissenters, and in 1676 a burdensome tax was laid by the unrepresentative assembly.

From this time the old order was doomed, for the up-country, the dissenters and the reformers had combined against it.

Strictly, the term includes the English Roman Catholics, who in the original draft of the Relief Act of 1791 were styled "Protesting Catholic Dissenters."

It is in practice, however, restricted to the "Protestant Dissenters" referred to in sec. ii.

The Act of Toleration of 1712 allowed Episcopalian dissenters to use the English liturgy.

The ministers of the "three denominations of dissenters," - Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, - resident in London and the neighbourhood, had the privilege accorded to them of presenting on proper occasions an address to the sovereign in state, a privilege which they still enjoy under the name of "the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers of the three Denominations."

Long after the Act of Toleration (1689) was in full forcein England, the Boston Baptists pleaded in vain for the privileges to which they were thereby entitled, and it required the most earnest efforts of English Baptists and other dissenters to gain for them a recognition of the right to exist.

Dissenters are bound to contribute to the maintenance of the Swedish Church, in consideration of the secular duties of the priests.

He sincerely believed that the ultimate purpose of freethinkers was to escape from moral restraints, and he had an unreasoning antipathy to Scotch Presbyterians and English Dissenters.

The utter exclusion of Whigs as well as Dissenters from office, the remodelling of the army, the imposition of the most rigid restraints on the heir to the throne - such were the measures which, by recommending, Swift tacitly admitted to be necessary to the triumph of his party.

He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the dissenters.

The predominance of the Church of England was the prime article of their political creed; they dreaded the Roman Catholics; they hated and despised the dissenters.

The dissenters had shown no signs of engaging in plots or conspiracies.

They were known to be only a comparatively small minority of the population, and though they had been cruelly persecuted, they had suffered without a thought of resistance- Dread of the dissenters, therefore, had become a mere chimaera, which only those could entertain whose minds were influenced by prejudice.

Hence the leading principle of the Whigs, as the predominant party was now called, was in the state to seek for the highest national authority in parliament rather than in the king, and in the church to adopt the rational theology of Chillingworth and Hales, whilst looking to the dissenters as allies against the Roman Catholics, who were the enemies of both.

The violence of the Tories was directed against rebellion and disorder, and only against dissenters so far as they were believed to be the fomenters of disorder.

Dissenters had, in the main, stood shoulder to shoulder with churchmen in rejecting the suspicious benefits of James, and both gratitude and policy forbade the thought of replacing them under the heavy yoke which had been imposed on them at the Restoration.

The idea prevalent with the more liberal minds amongst the clergy was that of comprehensionthat is to say, of so modifying the prayers and ceremonies of the church as to enable the dissenters cheerfully to enter in.

One measure remained to place the dissenters in the position of full membership of the state.

Many dissenters had evaded the Test Act by partaking of the communion in a church, though they subsequently attended their own chapels.

ConTo it was added the Schism Act (1714), forbidding formity dissenters to keep schoolsor engage in tuition.

They had on their side the royal power, the greater part of the aristocracy, the dissenters and the Accession higher trading and commercial classes.