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ally, one who disputes the authority or tenets of the Church of England; a nonconformist. Dissenters from the establishment of their several countries. Burke. Robert Brown is said to have the first formal dissenter. Shipley.

The spirit or principles of dissenters. Ed. Rev.

verture; a tender; an offer; -- usually in the plural. [He] made the like advances to the dissenters. Swift.

A chapel for dissenters. [Eng.]

In England, a place of worship used by dissenters from the Established Church; a meetinghouse.

For the most part; mostly. Those parts of the kingdom where the . . . estates of the dissenters chiefly lay. Swift.

conforms to the Church of England, or to the Established Church, as distinguished from a dissenter or nonconformist.

; esp., such an assembly held privately, as in times of persecution, by Nonconformists or Dissenters in England, or by Covenanters in Scotland; -- often used opprobriously, as if those assembled were heretics or schismatics. The first Christians could never have had recourse to nocturnal or clandestine conventicles til…

One who disassents; a dissenter. [Obs.] State Trials (1634).

y; -- in England, applied distinctively and disparagingly to the worshiping assemblies of Dissenters.

e used as a place of worship; a church; -- in England, applied only to a house so used by Dissenters.

shed church; especially, one who does not conform to the established church of England; a dissenter.

One of the separatists or dissenters from the established or Greek church in Russia. [Written also rascolnik.]

icular teacher in philosophy or religion; one who separates from an established church; a dissenter. I never knew that time in England when men of truest religion were not counted sectaries. Milton.

withdraws from a church to which he has belonged; a seceder from an established church; a dissenter; a nonconformist; a schismatic; a sectary. Heavy fines on divines who should preach in any meeting of separatist . Macaulay.

One of a large sect of Russian dissenters founded, about 1860, in the village of Osnova, near Odessa, by a peasant, Onishchenko, who had apparently been influenced by a German sect settled near there. They zealously practice Bible reading and reject priestly dominion and all external rites of worship. -- Stun"dism (#),…

se in which he maintained that a marriage between a member of the Church of England and a dissenter was a nullity. Macaulay.

A sect of dissenters from the ecclesiastical system of the Roman Catholic Church, who in the 13th century were driven by persecution to the valleys of Piedmont, where the sect survives. They profess substantially Protestant principles.

advocates of popular rights, of parliamentary power over the crown, and of toleration to Dissenters, were, after 1679, called Whigs. The terms Liberal and Radical have now generally superseded Whig in English politics. See the note under Tory.