Word Finder - churchmen

definition

A churchwarden.

definition

A person (originally a man) of authority in a religious organization; a cleric.

definition

A member or adherent of an established church, especially the Church of England.

Two Dutch friends, Constantijn Huygens (von Zuylichem), father of the more celebrated Huygens, and Hoogheland, figure amongst the correspondents, not to mention various savants, professors and churchmen (particularly Jesuits).

The fact that the kings were often absent from England, and that the justiciarship was held by great nobles or churchmen, made this office of an importance which at times threatened to overshadow that of the Crown.

We will not open to churchmen a door for a new mastership over government and subjects, wife and child."From 1618 a modified Presbyterian polity predominated.

Secular education has been vigorously opposed by strict churchmen, and efforts have been made to maintain separate schools under church control.

The churchmen headed by Stanislaus Szczepanowski, bishop of Cracow, took the side of the nobles, whose grievances seem to have been real.

But he was 10th to execute judgments upon English Puritans, and modern high churchmen complain of his infirmity of purpose, his opportunism and his failure to give Parker adequate assistance in rebuilding the shattered fabric of the English Church.

But Adhemar had died in August 1098 (whence, in large part, the confusion and bickerings which followed in the end of 1098 and the beginning of 1099) nor were there any churchmen left of sufficient dignity or weight to secure the triumph of the ecclesiastical cause.

He devoted himself to ascetic practices, confined himself to the society of churchmen, and resigned the chancellorship in spite of a papal dispensation (procured by the king) which authorized him to hold that office concurrently with the primacy.

By 1520 philanthropic churchmen directed their attention to the miserable conditions of the natives; but remedial legislation was largely nullified by the rapacity of subordinate officials, and before the end of the 16th century the natives disappeared as a distinct race.

Lerinum (Lerins, off Cannes) had been made by Honoratus, afterwards bishop of Arles, the seat of a monastic community which produced a number of eminent churchmen, among them Hilary of Arles.

S., where (in a former mansion) some of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot defied search for eight days (1605); and Westwood, a fine hall of Elizabethan and Carolean date on the site of a Benedictine nunnery, a mile west of Droitwich, which offered a retreat to many Royalist cavaliers and churchmen during the Commonwealth.

The abbe's central position, that our Lord himself held the proximateness of His second coming, involves the loss by churchmen of the prestige of directly divine power, since Church and Sacraments, though still the true fruits and vehicles of his life, death and spirit, cannot thus be immediately founded by the earthly Jesus himself.

The moral character of churchmen in Brazil has been severely criticized by many observers, and the ease with which disestablishment was effected is probably largely due to their failings.

The immediate results of disestablishment were civil marriage, the civil registry of births and deaths, and the secularization of cemeteries; but the church retains its influence over all loyal churchmen through the confessional, the last rites of the church, and their sentiment against the profanation of holy ground.

Moreover, an act of the Natal parliament passed in 1909 placed the temporalities into commission in the persons of the bishop and other trustees of the Natal diocese of the Provincial Church; reservations being made in favour of four congregations at that time unwilling to unite with the main body of churchmen.'

To Bernard of Clairvaux and many other churchmen the application of dialectic to the things of faith appears as dangerous as it is impious.

And even the proposal to apply the unaided reason to solve questions which had divided the fathers must have been resented by the more rigid churchmen as the rash intrusion of an over-confident Rationalism.

So long as the Neoplatonic influence remained strong, attempts were still made to demonstrate the doctrine of the Trinity, chiefly in a mystical sense as in Erigena, but also by orthodox churchmen like Anselm.

It did not, however, obtain ecclesiastical currency - the old versions holding their ground, just as English churchmen still read the Psalms in the version of the " Great Bible " printed in their Prayer Book.

With their approval a bishop was again consecrated, after six years' interval (1881-1887), for the Anglican congregations in Jerusalem and the East; and the features which had made the plan objectionable to many English churchmen were now abolished.

To put an end to this absenteeism, and to bring back the papacy to Italy was the cherished and anxious wish of all good Italians, and especially of all Italian churchmen.

After publishing The Mock Mourners, intended to satirize and rebuke the outbreak of Jacobite joy at the king's death, he turned his attention once more to ecclesiastical subjects, and, in an evil hour for himself, wrote the anonymous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement in the most forcible terms of the extreme "high-flying" position, which some high churchmen were unwary enough to endorse, without any suspicion of the writer's ironical intention.

While most of the "Broad Churchmen" were influenced by ethical and emotional considerations in their repudiation of the dogma of everlasting torment, he was swayed by purely intellectual and theological arguments, and in questions of a more general liberty he often opposed the proposed Liberal theologians, though he as often took their side if he saw them hard pressed.

In negotiations between Anglican and Russian churchmen the confession of Dositheus l usually comes to the front.

The method of Ticonius was dominant in the Church down to the middle ages, amongst his followers being such notable churchmen as Augustine, Primasius, Cassiodorus, Bede, Anselm.

The revival of pre-Reformation ritual by many of the High Church clergy led to the designation "ritualist" being applied to them in a somewhat contemptuous sense; and "High Churchman" and "Ritualist" have often been wrongly treated as convertible terms. Actually many High Churchmen are not Ritualists, though they tend to become so.

Contemporaries praise his justice and his virtue, and his reign was regarded, especially by Saxons and churchmen, as a golden age for Germany.

The position was simplified when, in 1220, Albert van Cuyck, the last of the hereditary burgraves, sold his rights to the bishop. These ecclesiastical princes were churchmen in little but name, and their desire to be absolute rulers found itself confronted by the determination of the burghers to secure greater independence.

The name Basil also belongs to several other distinguished churchmen.

Where moderns would speak of the " doctrine " of this or that, Lutherans especially, but also churchmen of other communions, wrote upon this or that " article."

Thomas Turton, the regius professor of divinity (afterwards dean of Westminster and bishop of Ely), had written a pamphlet objecting to the admission, on the ground of the apprehended unsettlement of the religious opinions of young churchmen.

Even after this certain High Churchmen held that a Lutheran was a" dissenter,"and that the prince should be asked to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.

In the course of his labours as editor of this volume he was struck by the unity which was presented by Christian hymnody, "binding together by the force of a common attraction, more powerful than all causes of difference, times ancient and modern, nations of various race and language, Churchmen and Nonconformists, Churches reformed and unreformed" (Preface).

By many churchmen, too, the name of "Protestant" is accepted in what they take to be the old sense as implying repudiation of the claims of Rome, but as not necessarily involving a denial of "Catholic" doctrine or any confusion of the Church of England with non-episcopal churches at home or abroad.

He held fast to the great idea of the catholicity of the English Church, to that conception of it which regards it as a branch of the whole Christian church, and emphasizes its historical continuity and identity from the time of the apostles, but here again his policy was at fault; for his despotic administration not only excited and exaggerated the tendencies to separatism and independentism which finally prevailed, but excluded large bodies of faithful churchmen from communion with their church and from their country.

This can best be shown by a few quotations from eminent and orthodox churchmen during those centuries.

Among his longer works are Christian Leaders of the Eighteenth Century (1869), Expository Thoughts on the Gospels (7 vols., 1856-69), Principles for Churchmen (1884).

His great literary power, his reputation for benevolence, and his known toleration and dislike of doctrinal disputes caused him to be much more favourably regarded than most churchmen by the philosophes of the 18th century.

Henry Stuart likewise held sinecure benefices in France, Spain and Spanish America, so that he became one of the wealthiest churchmen of the period, his annual revenue being said to amount to £30,000 sterling.

Liberal churchmen in Italy, while rejecting Mazzini's dream of a republic, had evolved projects for attaining national unity while preserving the temporal power.

For a time the Roman propaganda in England, which drew to itself High Churchmen like Newman and Manning, was viewed with apprehension; but though the Roman Catholic Church has grown greatly in influence in the country, the number of its adherents, in proportion to the growth of population, has not very greatly increased.

When he came to Dundee the churchmen were accustomed owing to their small numbers to worship in a room over a bank.

Orthodox Jews refused to teach those who were not of their faith, and on the other hand many churchmen conscientiously believed in the duty of entirely suppressing Jewish learning.

He died in London on the 8th of December 1691, and his funeral was attended by churchmen as well as dissenters.

The consent of several of the electors having been purchased by concessions, Frederick signed with Pope Nicholas V., the successor of Eugenius, in February 1448 the concordat of Vienna, an arrangement which bound the German Church afresh to Rome and perpetuated the very evils from which earnest churchmen had been seeking deliverance.

There are also a large number of lives of saints and churchmen, in which the legendary element is still more conspicuous.

Even when English churchmen passed beyond the seas, they carried with them their creed, but not their ecclesiastical organization.

Prejudice and real or imaginary legal obstacles stood in the way of the erection of episcopal sees in the colonies; and though in the 17th century Archbishop Laud had attempted to obtain a bishop for Virginia, up to the time of the American revolution the churchmen of the colonies had to make the best of the legal fiction that their spiritual needs were looked after by the bishop of London, who occasionally sent commissaries to visit them and ordained candidates for the ministry sent to England for the purpose.

The change which has made it possible for Anglican churchmen to claim that their communion ranks with those of Rome and the Orthodox East as one of the three great historical divisions of the Catholic Church, was due, in the first instance, to the American revolution.

A widespread feeling of indignation spread not only among High Churchmen, but among many who cared little or nothing for the ritual practices involved; and it seemed impossible to foretell what the outcome would be.