Test Act
Test Act#1678 Act
Date in force: 1673The Test Acts were a series of English penal laws that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Roman Catholics and Nonconformists. The principle was that none but persons professing the Established Church were eligible for public employment, and the severe penalties pronounced against recusants, whether Catholic or Nonconformist, were affirmations of this principle. In practice nonconformists were often exempted from some of these laws through the regular passage of Acts of Indemnity.
Read more about Test Act: Corporation Act, 1673 Act, 1678 Act, Repeal
Famous quotes containing the words test and/or act:
“The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”
—Elizabeth Drew (1887–1965)
“I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)