] while the native Roman Catholics,
comprising over four-fifths of the population, were not only seriously
hindered from exercising their own religion, not only deprived of their
political rights, not only made subservient to the economic interests
of the Protestants, but actually forced to pay the tithe to support
English bishops and curates, who too often lived in England, since
their parishioners were all Roman Catholics.
[Sidenote: Protestant Sects in England: Baptists]
The Dissenters from the Anglican Church embraced many different creeds.
We have already spoken of the Calvinistic Presbyterians and
Separatists. Besides these, several new sects had appeared. The Baptist
Church was a seventeenth-century off-shoot of Separatism. To
Calvinistic theology and Congregational Church government, the Baptists
had added a belief in adult baptism, immersion, and religious liberty.
[Sidenote: Unitarians]
A group of persons who denied the divinity of Christ, thereby departing
widely from usual Protestantism as well as from traditional
Catholicism, came into some prominence in the eighteenth century
through secessions from the Anglican Church and through the preaching
of the scientist Joseph Priestley, and gradually assumed the name of
Unitarians.
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