and it was certainly a much less definite test.  Priestley, for his part, however, regretted the change; the old subscription was in reality ceasing to be enforced, and he was afraid lest persecuting vigilance would set in again.  As a matter of fact, the Act of 1779, long obsolete, has never been repealed, but very few people are aware of its existence.  Priestley’s many controversies tended to excite a good deal of interest, some of it more than unfriendly, in the new movement.  In 1791, when a party of Unitarians dined at Birmingham in celebration of the French Revolution, serious riots broke out, and Priestley, who was then minister of the New Meeting there, was made a principal victim though he was not one of the diners.  His house and library were burned, and he barely escaped the violence of the mob.  Other residences were also destroyed, and the Old and New Meetings were burnt down.  Ultimately, in 1794, Priestley sought asylum in America from the ill-will that pursued him even in London.  Bishop Horsley, one of his sturdiest opponents in controversy, said, ’the patriarch of the sect is fled.’

It was earlier in the same year that the first organized Unitarian propaganda took shape in a Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.  District unions were soon formed, and in 1806 a Unitarian Fund was raised by means of which the first itinerant missionary of the body, Richard Wright (1764-1836), was sent literally from end to end of Great Britain.  In 1813, Unitarians were set free from legal penalties by the repeal, so far as they were concerned, of the exceptive clauses of the Toleration Act, this relief coming twenty years after Charles James Fox had tried to secure it for them.  The member who was successful was Mr. William Smith, who sat for Norwich, and whose granddaughter was Florence Nightingale.  In 1819 an Association was founded to protect and extend the Civil Rights of Unitarians.  It was by combining the three societies—­the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Fund, and Civil Rights Society, that the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was formed, as has been said, in 1825.

In order to understand fairly the scope and spirit of that earlier Unitarian period, thus at last organized in full legal recognition, though still suffering from the prejudice inevitably created by more than a century of legal condemnation, a few salient points should be kept in view.  First, the heterogeneous elements in the ‘body,’ if it could be called such, were a source of weakness in regard to united action.  Instead of belonging, as their American brethren did, to one ecclesiastical group, and that the dominant one, the English Unitarians included Dissenters of different tendencies and traditions, with a few recruits from the State Church.  The ‘Presbyterian’ congregations, as they were not very strictly called, were the backbone of the ‘body’; many of these, however, were very weak, and in the course of a few decades some were destined to follow those which had died out in the eighteenth century.  Converts not infrequently lent new force in the pulpit, but at the risk of substituting an eager missionary spirit for the usual staid decorum of the old families.  In these the ideals of breadth, simplicity, and moral excellence were stronger than the desire, natural in a convert, to win the world to one’s opinion.