A CHIMERICAL PROJECT

By 1800, members of Britain's House of Commons could confidently refer, with approval or dismay, to a “spirit of toleration.” What was this “spirit,” and why was it invoked either as the key to the nation's dazzling future – or as the source of its ultimate corruption and defeat? The spirit of toleration, as this chapter will discuss it, could be viewed as a series of legislative enactments extending from the Act of Toleration in 1689 to (and beyond) the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and 1829. These were, briefly put, legal measures that made it possible for adherents of different religious beliefs to worship freely, to participate in political, military, and educational institutions, and to assume a wide range of offices in civil government. Many of those legal provisions will be described somewhat later in this chapter. But the spirit of toleration needs to be understood in another way, too: as a new and controversial way of imagining the lineaments of British government.

Indeed, nothing less than the very survival of Britain's social body seemed to be at stake. Those who so vigorously opposed toleration could very effectively argue that the British nation – indeed, any nation – was a community by virtue of its religious communion. This was a unity dependent upon a uniformity of belief, and supported by sanctions designed to enforce that uniformity: what J.C.D. Clark and other historians refer to as Britain's “confessional state.”