Toleration

In a strict or legal sense, seems to mean that permission to exist, which, in a state where one form of religion is established and upheld by law, may, from motives of state policy, be accorded to other forms of belief and worship. This is quite different from that equality of right which, throughout the United States, all sects enjoy. Toleration act.

The Stat. 1 Wm. & M. St. I, ch. 18, passed in 1688-89.

By from the church of England, except Papists, and persons denying the Trinity, were allowed freely to assemble for religious worship according to their own forms, and in places of meeting duly certified, on condition of their taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and making a declaration against transubstantiation, and (in the case of dissenting ministers) subscribing also to the Thirty-nine Articles. By subsequent statutes, the principle of the act has been extended.