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Nonconformity   Listen
noun
Nonconformity  n.  Neglect or failure of conformity; especially, in England, the neglect or refusal to unite with the established church in its rites and modes of worship.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nonconformity" Quotes from Famous Books



... empowered by the parliament to add any new ceremonies which she thought proper: and though she was sparing in the exercise of this prerogative, she continued rigid in exacting an observance of the established laws, and in punishing all nonconformity. The zealots, therefore, who harbored a secret antipathy to the Episcopal order, and to the whole liturgy, were obliged, in a great measure, to conceal these sentiments, which would have been regarded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... in the army of the Lord should, therefore, signify the spirit and mind that is in him. If the spirit is that of nonconformity to the world, so should the dress or uniform be. If the spirit is that of meekness, humility, kindness, goodness, purity, peace and love, the dress of both sexes, each in its appropriate form, should correspond to these ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... sure, would have reduced his opponent to impotent silence. Sometimes the partings are stormy. The question of the introduction of the complementary colours into the frames of the pictures is always a matter of strife, and results in much nonconformity. Several are strongly in favour of carrying the complementary colours into the picture-frames. "If you admit," says one, "that to paint a blue roof with an orange sky shining on it you must introduce the complementary colour ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... the speakers seem to have felt that all other issues were thrust aside in the minds of their followers just now, and that a grave and soul-shaking question possessed them. As a result we have, I suppose, the finest efforts of Nonconformity to meet that question and save the ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... as to "tufts"—that vile distinction which independent M.P.s are so indignant at—why, if a dissenting nobleman—even the seventh son of an Irish peer—were to be had for love or money, what a price he would fetch in such an Utopia of nonconformity! Nay, if they could get even a Nova Scotia baronet—a Sir Anybody Anything—we know pretty well what a fuss they would make about him. There is no such fawner on the aristocracy, if he has but a chance of getting any thing out of them, as a parvenu by birth, a liberal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... done more to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale of the Establishment,—Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more. With the ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... to the wistful liberalism of Earth label us conformists if they will. I say to you that until Mars is won for humanity, we cannot afford the luxury of nonconformity. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... a barn.—The beginning of Nonconformity in Wales. In the Author's time there were already many adherents to the various dissenting bodies in North Wales. Walter Cradoc, Morgan Llwyd and others had been preaching the Gospel many years previously throughout the length and breadth of ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... against them were less rigorously administered. The Newton settlers were joined by Quakers from Long Island, where, under the English law as administered by the New York governors, they had also been fined and imprisoned, though with less severity than at home, for nonconformity to the Church of England. On arriving, the West Jersey settlers suffered some hardships during the year that must elapse before a crop could be raised and a log cabin or house built. During that period they usually lived, in the Indian manner, in wigwams of poles covered ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... developments. The changed position of the Anglican church is sufficiently significant. In the time of Laud, the bishops in alliance with the Crown endeavoured to enforce the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts upon the nation at large, and to suppress all nonconformity by law. Every subject of the king is also amenable to church discipline. By the Revolution any attempt to enforce such discipline had become hopeless. The existence of nonconformist churches has to be recognised as a fact, though perhaps ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... cloake for a short one (long cloakes being now quite out); but he being gone to church, I could not get one. I heard Dr. Spurstow preach before the King a poor dry sermon; [William Spurstow D.D. Vicar of Hackney and Master of Katherine Hall, Cambridge, both which pieces of preferment he lost for nonconformity, 1662.] but a very good anthem of Captn. Cooke's afterwards. To my Lord's and dined with him; he all dinner-time talking French to me, and telling me the story how the Duke of York hath got my Lord Chancellor's daughter with child, and that she do lay it ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... his Jewish pride he overrated and even misunderstood Christianity. He all but overlooked the narrow connection between Christianity and Democracy. He did not see that in fighting Liberalism and Nonconformity all his life, he was really fighting Christianity, the Protestant Form of which is at the root of British Liberalism and Individualism to this very day. And when later in his life Disraeli complained that the disturbance in the mind of nations has been occasioned by "the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... however "well-known in Great Britain and America" (the publisher again is my authority), need be ashamed to own up to Tributaries, which is quite one of the best written novels of the year. It is the story of a modern demagogue, a young apostle of political nonconformity, part charlatan, part zealot, who comes to town from a provincial chapel, and ends up a glorious failure as a soured and unpopular Cabinet Minister. There is an unusual quality in the characterisation and humour of this story of Maurice ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various

... preliminary discussion, both among Lords and Commons, showed a general disposition to re-establish religion in the condition in which Henry left it—provided, that is to say, no penalties were to attach to nonconformity; and the Houses were ready also to take the step so much deprecated by Pole, and pass a measure legitimatising the queen, provided no mention was to be made of the papal dispensation. Some difference of opinion on the last point had shown ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... grandfather's grandfather (Sir William Scott of Harden) was lieutenant-colonel. This regiment was very active at the destruction of Montrose's Highland army at Philiphaugh. In Charles the Second's time the old knight suffered as much through the nonconformity of his wife as Cuddie through that of his mother. My father's grandmother, who lived to the uncommon age of ninety-eight years, perfectly remembered being carried, when a child, to the field-preachings, where the clergyman thundered from the top of a rock, and the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... of religious worship was ordained by law in England, and the queen was bent on enforcing it. A Court of High Commission was established to punish heresy and nonconformity. This policy early brought on a conflict, not only with the Roman Catholics, but also with the large and growing class of Protestants who were called "Puritans." These wished to carry the Reformation farther than it had been carried by the Tudors in England, and to make the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... of Unitarianism in Preston, as elsewhere, is mixed up with the early strivings and operations of emancipated Nonconformity. We can find no record of Nonconformists in Preston until the early part of the 18th century. At that period a chapel was erected at Walton-le-Dale, mainly, if not entirely, by Sir Henry de Hoghton—fifth baronet, and formerly member of parliament for ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... I should like to cut it in two—it would be better for being shorter—and it might be clearer also. There is, in fact, some dullness and perplexity—a few passages which are, to my impression, contradictory of the general purpose—something which is not generous, about nonconformity—and what I cannot help considering a superfluous tenderness for Puseyism. Moreover she is certainly wrong in imagining that the ante-Nicene fathers did not as a body teach regeneration by baptism—even Gregory Nazianzen, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... impulse to nonconformity had not prevented her forehead from being drawn in their common sympathy; but it was a sympathy that saw no practical way out and existed tamely as a high window and not as a ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale

... Dissenters." And practically perhaps, in the actual condition of Europe, the question now in agitation might be permitted to rest there. But, in fairness to the Protestant feeling, it should never be forgotten that the Roman Catholic system presents a feature absent from every other variety of nonconformity. It is not a religion only, but a polity; and this in a very peculiar sense. Other systems also—as the Presbyterian—include among their doctrines an opinion in favor of some particular church government; which opinion, however, professing to be derived ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... England, and it was just about the time when these elections took place that Carson was described at a large gathering of Nonconformists in London as "the best embodiment at this moment of the ancient spirit of Nonconformity."[53] ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... largest and most rapidly developing faction of nonconformity, for it has ramified from Odessa—its starting point—throughout Tsarland, save in the extreme north and north-east. This faith can be traced directly to the influence of certain Lutherans who emigrated from Wuertemberg and settled in the fruitful "tchenoziom," or black earth lands, some ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... Uranus, in which it is greater still, has certainly four, and more if Herschel was right. Saturn, in which it is the greatest, being nearly one-sixth of gravity, has, including his rings, eleven attendants. The only instance in which there is nonconformity with observation, is that of Venus. Here it appears that the centrifugal force is relatively greater than in the Earth; and, according to the hypothesis, Venus ought to have a satellite. Respecting this anomaly several remarks ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... mean nonconformity in her days, and in fact everyone who was earnest and scrupulous was apt to be termed a Puritan. Goodwife Kenton was one of those pious and simple souls who drink in whatever is good in their surroundings; and though ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to leadership came early. As a boy in school he led his mates in rebellion against the drastic dictates of a Church which prescribed liberty of religious thoughts and speech. He became the Apostle of Nonconformity and for it waged some of ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... Year—the only thing he ever took from the High Churchmen—which he had made for himself, and which he and Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a bigot at all. He would have had the Church make peace with the Dissenters; he was all for upsetting tests so far as Nonconformity was concerned. But he drew the most rigid line between belief and unbelief. He would not have dined at the same table with a Unitarian if he could have helped it. I remember a furious article of his in the Record against admitting Unitarians to the Universities or allowing ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is the great difference between some recent developments of Nonconformity and the great Puritanism of the seventeenth century. It was the whole point of the Puritans that they cared nothing for decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... process may be looked at from the other side; and that in proportion as we become liker Jesus Christ, we shall become more unlike the old type to which we were previously conformed. And so, says Paul, 'Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed.' He does not mean to say that the nonconformity precedes the transformation. They are two sides of one process; both arising from the renewing of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... be attributed partly to the spread of Nonconformity; but I believe that during the Protectorate, the registration of births was substituted for that of baptisms, and therefore the state of religious feeling which then prevailed bears less directly on the question. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various

... appreciating admirers will remain adherents to its principles, it will pass out of existence as an independent form of Art, and the elements of good in it will mingle with the Art of the nation, as a leaven of nonconformity and radicalism, breeding agitations enough to keep stagnation away and to secure a steady and irresistible progress. Its truest devotees will remain in principle what they are, losing gradually the external characteristics of the school as it is now known,—while ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... claiming that he had "the larger vision" (as he certainly had the larger diameter), there was a certain dignity of pathos in his exit, a late amende by an otherwise remorseless puppet-maker. Mr. SYDNEY PAXTON as a pillar of Nonconformity offered a clever study in the unctuous-grotesque; Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD sketched a portrait of a nut-consuming impenitent disarmamentist. The author is the first, so far as I know, to give public emphasis to the queer fact of natural history ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various

... made about the ceremonies, though not for the sole will of the law-makers, nor yet for any utility of the laws themselves, yet for this reason, that scandal and contempt would follow in case we do otherwise. Ans. We know that human laws do bind in the case of scandal or contempt. But that nonconformity is neither scandal nor contempt, Parker hath made it most evident.(123) For, as touching contempt, he showeth out of fathers, councils, canon law, schoolmen, and modern divines, that non obedire is not ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... some necessary remarks on the subject of Nonconformity, its influence on individualities and its direct relationship to Romance. In the churches of England or of Rome,—though he sometimes looked wistfully towards the latter,—Theophilus Londonderry, with his disabilities of worldly condition, would have found ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... of years, preachers and hearers should, by insensible degrees, have become first Arians, then, perhaps, Socinians. I know that this explanation has been treated with disdain by people profoundly ignorant of the history of English nonconformity. I see that my right honourable friend near me (Mr Fox Maule.) does not assent to it. Will he permit me to refer him to an analogous case with which he cannot but be well acquainted? No person in the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... of this rare combination was his union of courage with patience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance is always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult art of conciliating ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... sympathising friends. If he returned to his own country before the expiration of his term of exile, he was liable to capital punishment. A new and most unreasonable test was imposed on divines who had been deprived of their benefices for nonconformity; and all who refused to take that test were prohibited from coming within five miles of any town which was governed by a corporation, of any town which was represented in Parliament, or of any town where they had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Mary Grace's supposed extremity, to the Burmingtons' shop-door, and shouted: 'Peace be to this house,' intending to offer his ministrations, but that Ann, who was in one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from the doorstep and down the garden, in her passionate nonconformity. Mary Grace, however, recovered, and soon became, not merely Miss Marks' inseparable friend, but my Father's spiritual factotum. He found it irksome to visit the 'saints' from house to house, and Mary Grace Burmington gladly assumed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... "New England has perhaps never quite appreciated its great obligations to Archbishop Laud. It was his overmastering hate of nonconformity, it was the vigilance and vigor and consecrated cruelty with which he scoured his own diocese and afterward all England, and hunted down and hunted out the ministers who were committing the unpardonable sin of dissent, that conferred ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... alteration could be made in regard to the rights and duties of the clergy except by parliamentary authority. The church might therefore be regarded as simply the religious department of the state. Since 1688, however, the theory and the practice of toleration had introduced difficulties. Nonconformity was not by itself punishable though it exposed a man to certain disqualifications. The state, therefore, recognised that many of its members might legally belong to other churches, although it had, as Warburton argued, formed an 'alliance' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... divisions of Christendom are nowhere more evident than in its foreign missions to an intellectual people like the Japanese. The Greek, the Roman, the Anglican churches, the endless 'splits' of Nonconformity, must and do present to the Japanese mind a bewildering selection of possibilities ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... is not only, nor mainly, in reference to opinion that I would urge upon you this nonconformity with prevalent practices as the measure of most that is noble in us. I dare not talk to you as if I knew much about the details of Manchester commercial life, but I can say this much, that it is no excuse for shady practices in your trade to say, 'It is the custom of the trade, and everybody ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... also a type of churchman whose finer sensibilities are sorely tried by the secular occupations of nonconformity in general. If once or twice in their lives they should stray amongst Congregationalists, Baptists, or Methodists, they come away disgusted at the brutal directness with which social evils are exposed in the light of the word of the Lord. They complain of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby



Words linked to "Nonconformity" :   failure, heresy, nonobservance, heterodoxy, unorthodoxy, disagreement



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