The Occasional Conformity Act (also known as the Toleration Act 1711) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain (statute number 10 Anne c. 6), the long title of which is "An Act for preserving the Protestant Religion" which passed on 20 December 1711.
Its purpose was to prevent Nonconformists and Roman Catholics from taking "occasional" communion in the Church of England in order to become eligible for public office under the Corporation Act and the Test Act. Under these acts only members of the Church of England were allowed to hold any office of public trust. Previous Occasional Conformity bills had been debated in 1702 and 1704. The 1711 Act was repealed in 1719.
Famous quotes containing the words occasional, conformity and/or act:
“Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
Now there is no question even of that, but only
Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,
With an occasional dream, a vision ...”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)