The Act of Toleration, Household Worship and Dissenting Piety: Oliver Heywood’s A Family Altar

Abstract

This article looks at Oliver Heywood’s published writing on household worship. Written after the Act of Toleration, Heywood’s A Family Altar concentrated on the internal household purposes of nonconformist prayer and worship, in contrast to the purposes it was used for prior to 1689 when household worship was very often the forum for public worship of congregations in a period when nonconformist services were banned by the authorities and their ministers imprisoned, as happened to Heywood. The article therefore examines the shifting boundary between the public and the domestic, or private, in nonconformist culture during the half century after 1660, and especially the impact of the Toleration Act. Although Heywood had public institutions, such as a chapel and a school, through which to conduct his public ministry, he continued to stress the importance of household worship to the public life of the church, alongside private prayer and chapel worship, regarding it as an essential contribution to national life. As Heywood set out in his book, the Act changed the focus of household worship towards building the future of the church through the formation of the young where previously it had been integral to sustaining the present life of the worshipping community.