ABSTRACT
Apart from the establishment itself, only one of the old Nonconformist grievances remained after the abolition of university religious tests in 1871. Like his seventeenth-century predecessor, Tillotson, to whose policies for befriending the Nonconformists he harked back, Archbishop Tait had been born and brought up in a non-Anglican Protestant household, and unlike most converts he looked on his religious heritage with thankfulness and veneration. Accordingly, in an age notorious for its vituperative denominational warfare, Archbishop Tait was distinguished by his cultivation of good relations with English Nonconformists. Relief of the Nonconformists' grievance over burials was a policy exactly in line with Archbishop Tait's general attitude toward Dissent. He adopted the policy in a conservative spirit, to preserve the establishment by removing a festering source of Nonconformist ill-feeling towards the Church. Yet the outcry over the revisers' communion provided only a faint foretaste of the opposition he would encounter from his clergy.
