RELIGION IN BRITAIN

British Ways to Heaven

England, converted to Christianity at the beginning of the 7^th century, was a Catholic country until the 16^th. The Kings favoured the church which brought with her a hierarchy, a sense of organization, an experience lacking to the old pagan religion. Then for a variety of reasons some of them connected with the matrimonial instability of Henry VIII, it ceased to acknowledge the authority of the Pope and recognized the King as head of the English Catholic Church. About the same tome Scotland, then an independent kingdom, turned Calvinist under the guidance of John Knox. But whereas the Presbyterian Church, logical and authoritarian, easily kept the Scots within its fold, the Church of England, standing midway between Rome and Geneva, was unable to maintain the religious unity of the nation. On its right, the Roman Catholics wanted no change at all; on its left, the Puritans clamoured for total reformation; new schisms produced an important body of Protestant dissenters, later called Nonconformists. The struggle between Liberal Nonconformity and Conservative Anglicanism has been one of the main factors in the development of the British politics.

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THE MODERN BRITISH ECONOMY AND INDUSTRY	\|	The Church of England

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