NONCONFORMISTS, those who refuse to join the established worship. Nonconformists are in England held to be of two sorts. First, those who absent themselves from divine worship in the established church through total irreligion, and attend the service of no other persuasion. Secondly, those who offend through what churchmen call a mistaken or perverse zeal. By the English laws enacted since the time of the Reformation, Papists and Protestant dissenters were considered as conformists of this class, and both were supposed to be equally schismatics, in not communicating with the national church; with this difference, that the Papists divided from it upon material though erroneous reasons, but many of the dissenters upon matters of indifference, or, in other words, for what was thought no reason at all. "Yet certainly," as Sir William Blackstone observes, "our ancestors were mistaken in their plans of compulsion and intolerance. The sin of schism, as such, is by no means the object of temporal coercion and punishment. If, through weakness of intellect, through misdirected piety, through perverseness and acerbity of temper, or, which is often the case, through a prospect of secular advantage in herding with a party, men quarrel with the ecclesiastical establishment, the civil magistrate has nothing to do with it, unless their tenets and practice are such as threaten ruin or disturbance to the state. He is bound, indeed, to protect the established church; and if this can be better effected by admitting none but its genuine members to offices of trust and emolument, he is certainly at liberty so to do, the disposal of offices being matter of favour and discretion. But this point being once secured, all persecution for diversity of opinions, however ridiculous or absurd they may be, is contrary to every principle of sound policy and civil freedom. The names and subordination of the clergy, the posture of devotion, the materials and colour of the minister's garment, the joining in a known or unknown form of prayer, and other matters of the same kind, must be left to the option of every man's private judgment." See TOLERATION.