ABSTRACT
As We Have seen, it is hard to find anyone with a good word to say for the dissenters of the early eighteenth century. Even their fellow-sectaries, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, customarily appeal over their heads to their seventeenth-century predecessors. A curious instance of this is the blue-stocking historian Lucy Aikin in 1828, writing across the Atlantic to her fellow-Unitarian, William Ellery Channing:
As for ... the Calvinistic dissenters, they had the misfortune of living in one of those middle states between direct persecution and perfect religious liberty, which sours the temper by continual petty vexations, without affording scope for great efforts or great sacrifices – which drives men to find a perverse pleasure in hating and being hated, and to seek indemnification for the contempt of the world in a double portion of spiritual pride and self-importance. ‘We can prove ourselves saints’, ‘being Christ's little flock everywhere spoken against’, is the plea put into the mouth of this set by Green, a poet, who was born and bred among them.
