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§3. The Literature of Dissent from Defoe to Watts. XVI. The Literature of Dissent. Vol. 10. The Age of Johnson. ... (616 words) |
 | The tory reactionaries of Anne’s reign seized with avidity the weapon he had forged, and, coupling the subject of dissenting academies with the subject of occasional conformity, delivered a furious onslaught on the whole front of dissent. |
| The scurrilous and rabid attack on dissent generally, and on dissenting academies in particular, which was opened by Sacheverell and Samuel Wesley, was met, on the one hand, by Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) 6 and, on the other hand, by Samuel Palmer’s Vindication (1705). |
| The Hanoverian succession broke the storm; and, with the reversal of the Schism act and the Occasional Conformity act, the religious existence and civil freedom of dissent were safe. |
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