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    troduced into the upper house by Lord Sidmouth . ^ Should a list of all the places which have been registered since the year 1760 for divine worship among Protestant Dissenters , be made out and laid before

    Parliament and the public ^ it would lead to- a most egregious mistake as to the actual number of dissenting societies , and a most enormous miscalculation of the

    number of dissenters . You may , Sir , form some judgment of this from the following facts . Long since the year 1760 there have been seven houses or places of worship ^ registered ( in succession ) in this town , by the Method

    ists , in what is * called the Wesleyan connection , under the denomination of prot&stant dissenters , and they had also several other places registered in the neighbourhood , and yet they compose only one society or congregation , which now statedly worships in a neat chapel in this parish , which is supplied by itinerant preachers from Yarmouth . At Framlingham and within four

    miles of it not less than eleven places have been registered by them for divine worship , when in fact only one of them is now used for that purpose .

    The list , then , from the registers would in this case yield an t-xcoss of ten places of worship , in which it would be concluded ten distinct congregations met for instruction under iheir appropriate teachers . How wide this from

    the truth ! Within a few years , jthe former minister of the nearest dissenting congregation to Framlingham had jet far more considerable number j > f places registered for preaching

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    Lly memory helps me to near twenty . The sum total , I am persuaded , is much larger , nearer perhaps double that number , and yet there is still only one congregation , assembling in the old place of worshi p ^ and enjoying the instruction , of one minister . In most

    of the new registered places there is not now even occasional service performed , and I have reason to think that the congregation statedly meeting in the original house , is not more respectable nor at all more numerous than it was 50

    years back . This case then would lead into an error of at least double the magnitude to the former , and from the two you , Sir , will see most plainly that no true judgment can be formed of the number

    of dissenting societies , nor of the number or increase of dissenters , from viewing a list of the places registered by them since 176 C The dissenters of the present day appear to me to be reviving a practice of their persecuted

    ancestors ; and were the number of houses registered by ^ th em ab in itio to be ordered to be produced , it would occasion a still greater error and excess in calculation .

    Societies of dissenters in the country usually congregate from neighbouring places for several miles round . We used to

    compute that ours at Framlingham was composed of persons from l 6 or 18 different parishes ., some travelling 8 or g miles on a Lord ' s day to worship here *

    In old times , when a dissenting minister visited any of his flock at a distance , and friends in the vicinity were invited to meet him , it was customary never to part without engaging in some devo-

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    396 Toleration Act *

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1810, page 396, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2407/page/20/