test act

test act, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, any law that made a person’s eligibility for public office depend upon his profession of the established religion. In Scotland, the principle was adopted immediately after the Reformation, and an act of 1567 made profession of the reformed faith a condition of public office. Such a law was not at first necessary in England, where penal laws against those who failed to conform to the established church were so severe as automatically to exclude such persons from public life. In the more tolerant climate of the late 17th and 18th centuries, Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters were normally able to practice their religion unmolested; but the Anglican majority’s fear of subversion led to their being precluded from officeholding. The form that the test took in England was to make the receiving of Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England a condition precedent to the acceptance of office. It was first embodied in legislation in 1661 as a requisite for membership of a town corporation and was extended to cover all public offices by the Test Act of 1673. During the 18th century the tests were, on the whole, less strenuously applied; in Scotland, only those engaged in education were required to make profession, while in England some known Protestant dissenters openly practiced “occasional conformity.” Roman Catholics could not do that and, accordingly, were still excluded from office until an act of 1828 removed the test and the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 abolished other legal disabilities imposed on them. The test acts themselves were formally repealed in the 1860s and ’70s, and religious tests were abolished in the universities except in connection with degrees and professorships in divinity. Scottish tests were abolished in 1889.

In Ireland, the Anglican sacramental test was introduced in 1704, and English legislation on oaths of allegiance and religious declarations became valid there in 1782. All of these provisions were abolished in 1871.

Article VI of the Constitution of the United States prescribes that “no religious test shall ever be required as qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” A similar provision is written into the constitutions of most U.S. states.