Editing Puritans (section)

=== Great Ejection and Dissenters ===
{{further|History of the Puritans from 1649}}
At the time of the [[English Restoration]] in 1660, the [[Savoy Conference]] was called to determine a new religious settlement for England and Wales. Under the ''[[Act of Uniformity 1662]]'', the Church of England was restored to its pre-[[English Civil War|Civil War]] constitution with only minor changes, and the Puritans found themselves sidelined. A traditional estimate of historian [[Edmund Calamy (historian)|Edmund Calamy]] is that around 2,400 Puritan clergy left the Church in the "[[Great Ejection]]" of 1662.<ref name = Calamy>{{Cite DNB|wstitle=Calamy, Edmund (1671-1732)|display=Calamy, Edmund (1671–1732) |volume=51 |pages=63–65}}</ref> At this point, the term "[[English Dissenters|Dissenter]]" came to include "Puritan", but more accurately described those (clergy or lay) who "dissented" from the [[Book of Common Prayer (1662)|1662 ''Book of Common Prayer'']].{{Sfn|Leighton|2004|p=196}}

The Dissenters divided themselves from all other Christians in the Church of England and established their own Nonconformist congregations in the 1660s and 1670s. An estimated 1,800 of the ejected clergy continued in some fashion as ministers of religion, according to [[Richard Baxter]].<ref name = Calamy/> The government initially attempted to suppress these schismatic organisations by using the [[Clarendon Code]]. There followed a period in which schemes of "comprehension" were proposed, under which Presbyterians could be brought back into the Church of England, but nothing resulted from them. The [[Whig (British political faction)|Whigs]] opposed the court religious policies and argued that the Dissenters should be allowed to worship separately from the established Church. This position ultimately prevailed when the [[Act of Toleration 1689|''Toleration Act'']] was passed in the wake of the [[Glorious Revolution]] in 1689. This permitted the licensing of Dissenting ministers and the building of chapels. The term "[[Nonconformist (Protestantism)|Nonconformist]]" generally replaced the term "Dissenter" from the middle of the 18th century.