English Old Dissent — Presbyterians and Congregationalists

On St Bartholomew's Day 1662 about two thousand ministers who could not accept the restored Prayer Book and episcopal ordination were put out of the Church of England, and English Presbyterianism and Congregationalism became permanently separate traditions rather than parties inside one church. Barred from the universities, they built their own: the dissenting academies, which taught mathematics, science and modern languages when Oxford and Cambridge largely did not, and educated a striking share of the country's scientists, manufacturers and reformers. Their other great contribution was sung. Isaac Watts, a Congregational minister, broke the convention that only the Psalms could be sung in worship and wrote hymns instead, which is why English-speaking Christians sing 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross' and 'Joy to the World'. The tradition also had a fault line: at Salters' Hall in London in 1719 a majority of Dissenting ministers declined to require subscription to a trinitarian formula, and over the following century many English Presbyterian congregations moved toward Arian and then Unitarian belief, while the Congregationalists stayed orthodox and were reinvigorated by the revival.