Liberation Society

[2] While no religious movement was able to grow its audience in proportion to the increase in population over the remainder of the century, it seems that the Nonconformists were more actively observant than their Church of England counterparts towards its end.

This cohesion, which increased with the left-ward movement of the Wesleyans as the century progressed, meant that they could play a major role in determining political outcomes, both as an influential block of opinion within the Liberal Party and more generally in the country as a whole.

[3] Among the theoretical objections to a church-state relationship was the possibility of conflicted loyalties in situations where the desire of the state differed from the conviction of the religion, potentially leading to extreme cases such as martyrdom.

[4] More specifically, while repeal of measures such as the Test Acts had done much to give Nonconformists freedom of worship they still felt the weight of what they considered to be inappropriate and discriminatory practices.

[4] Some people, such as Richard Masheder, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge,[9] noted that the movement had the potential to effect change well beyond religious affairs because of the symbiotic relationship between the Established Church and the upper levels of society, whereby each buttressed the position of the other.

[10] There was indeed a wave of support for a more democratic society at that time and Miall repeatedly attacked the mutuality of the relationship between church and the social elite, believing it to be a force for snobbery and a barrier to progress.

He said The upper ten thousand with very few exceptions regard connection with the authorised ecclesiastical institution of the kingdom as inseparable from their elevated position ... To belong to the church is to side with respectability; to dissent from it is to cast in your lot with the vulgar.

Miles Taylor says of those elected in 1852 - who included James Bell, William Biggs, Lawrence Heyworth and Apsley Pellatt - that they "were either almost completely silent, or became tongue-tied in the House of Commons when it came to taking the lead in church reform".

Elisabeth Jay says that Miall's use of secular methods in pursuit of religious change "was perhaps the seed of failure for his great ambition, for the younger men whom he had stirred came to see social and political reform as ends in themselves.