of changing moods
is given in the fact that in 1770 an Act was passed permitting the
Dissenting ministers to preach provided that they made a declaration of
belief in the Scriptures as containing the revealed will of God. This
was considered by many a welcome relief from the requirement of the
Toleration Act that the minister must subscribe to the doctrinal
articles of the established Church, 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fact, the Act of 1779, long obsolete, has never been repealed, but very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 Bri