Before the Reformation pious causes honouring God and his Church constituted a coherent and measurable class which was accepted by the Chancellor as setting the limits of legal charity. After the breach with Rome, however, piety and charity ceased to be synonymous. Gifts for popish purposes were avoided by the courts, and the valid charitable use was sharply distinguished from the void superstitious use. Though the distinction between the charity and the superstition was a real one, the conception of superstition was fluid and amorphous; ‘that which at one time is held for orthodox, may at another, be accounted superstitious’ Indeed, the fear that the religious use might infect by association other charitable uses, whose endowments the Crown could then appropriate, encouraged the draftsmen of the Charitable Uses Act, 1601, to exclude it from the list of good and godly uses over which the charity commissioners had jurisdiction.

The preamble to the Charitable Uses Act, 1601, did not attempt to mark out the limits of legal charity or condemn as non-charitable those uses which were outside its letter and equity. The object of that Act, like its predecessor of 1597, was simply to secure the proper application of the endowments of those charitable trusts which could alleviate poverty and relieve the parish of the financial responsibility of supporting the vagrant. The preamble contained a most comprehensive catalogue of secular charitable objects, which the Chancellor generously extended. There were other uses which were recognised to be charitable but which fell outside the letter and equity of the preamble.