Word: Romism Part of Speech: name Etymology: From Rome + -ism. 1. Synonym of Roman Catholicism. Labels: archaic, derogatory, usually Example: Many Georgians rarely went through a church porch between their christening and burial. Yet practically everyone, in his own fashion, had faith. Much of it was a fig leaf of Christianity covering a body of inherited magic and superstition, little more than Nature worship (the polite, doctrinally correct form of this was known as 'natural religion'). But everyone had his own vision of a Creator, of a 'place' in Heaven, and convictions of Good and Evil, reward and punishment. Though many were careless about performing their devotions, Dr Johnson was right to say 'there are in reality very few infidels'. Deism — belief in a non-personal Deity, lacking Christianity's historical Incarnation — made headway among intellectuals early in the century, sickened by sectarian fanatics, Popery and clericalism. But once Christians allowed their sword of persecution to sleep in their hands, the particular attractiveness of Deism and free-thought waned. The most prickly intellectual challenges to the foundations of belief were to come not from atheists but from heretics on the inside. The most notorious Georgian materialist was not some flash philosophe but the Bible fundamentalist and millennialist Joseph Priestley. Debate within theology remained heated, Anglican theology oscillating between rationalism and obscurantism, Dissenters divided over free-grace and Calvinist predestination. The reason for this was that it was difficult to adjust literalist dogma to the new material prosperity, science and freedom of inquiry. Religious divides went deep — this is evident from the reams of sermons and theological polemics published and avidly read — and only bashing the old bogey of Romism ('No Popery!') could unite Protestants. Example: Today we find an increasing tension and gap between formalized institutional religion and less formalized, less regularized (though practice-friendly) spirituality. It is worth remembering the heritage of today's dissent, beginning with early modern texts and culture. The tension, battle, and bloodshed between Catholicism and Protestantism was apparent and influential on the Continent and in Britain in the mid-sixteenth century. Catholics experienced persecution and exile during Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's reigns. During Mary's reign in between, it was the Protestants' turn. In exile, English Protestants learned from fellow persecuted protesters on the Continent. Their shared experience became part of their deep memory and a driving force for the next hundred years. Texts like John Foxe's Book of [Protestant] Martyrs kept the flame burning brightly with vivid stories, and John Bale's Image of Both Churches, while polemical and exaggerated, portrayed the Catholic, or Baptist, Roman Church as "false," a spouse of Antichrist, and the Protestant as "true," Christ's simple, plain spouse. As noted earlier, in the next century, William Dell's Uniformity Examined (1645), with its religious-political interest in the tension between Protestantism and Catholicism (then referred to as Papism or Romism), addressed the tension between the inner world of spirituality and the external world of religion. He distinguished unity—scripturally founded and endorsed through the practice of the true Churches of Christ—from uniformity, also tested scripturally, patristically, and historically. 2. Synonym of curialism: the supremacy of the Roman Curia. Labels: archaic, derogatory, usually