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.

Again, it must be borne in mind that then, as generally, there were men