"The seventeenth century saw non-conformist denominations spring up and eventually survive savage persecution to achieve the right to operate outside the official Church of England. Bristol, with a cathedral, seventeen parishes, six gathered churches and two Quaker meetings, was heavily involved in this struggle. It was a confusing period and one of the aims of this volume is to sort out, for the first time, just who was ministering where and when; placing and documenting some 150 names. But the other aim is to show, by excerpt, something of the content of religious ministry over this century. This draws much on sermons, then regarded as the major function of ministry, and a staple of publishers. From sermons and other devotional works a rather surprising but interesting conclusion emerges: that the non-conformists, except perhaps the Quakers, did not differ greatly on the central tenets of their faith. Rather it was disputes over organisation and hierarchy, the forms of worship, the provenance of ministry itself, and the relation to law and civil government, which were at issue; and which had the high church party condemning the dissenters as subversives bent on the overthrow of Church and State together. Thus the eighteenth century inherited not only nonconformity but the politics of Tory versus Whig."--Jacket

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