Word Finder - laymen

definition

Layperson, someone who is not an ordained cleric or member of the clergy.

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(by extension) Someone who is not a professional in a given field.

example

Carmen is not a professional anthropologist, but strictly a layman.

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A common person.

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A person who is untrained or lacks knowledge of a subject.

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A generally ignorant person.

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Lay-sister or lay-brother, person received into a convent of monks, following the vows, but not being member of the order.

In a variety of ways it does a great deal of social service similar to that of gilds of help. Its administration has always been in the hands of laymen, and it works through local "conferences" or branches, the general council having been suspended because it declined to accept a cardinal as its official head.

As followers rapidly increased they were compelled to hold their own Sunday services, and this naturally led them to appoint as preachers godly laymen possessing the gift of exhortation.

They are laymen in that they have no right to teach or to dispense the sacraments, and on this account they fill an office in the Presbyterian Church inferior in rank and power to that of the pastors.

To share with the minister such general oversight is not regarded by intelligent and influential laymen as an incongruous or unworthy office; but to identify the duties of the eldership, even in theory, with those of the minister is a sure way of deterring from accepting office many whose counsel and influence in the eldership would be invaluable.'

The Laws of 1882 and 1886 laicized the schools of this class, the former suppressing religious instruction, the latter providing that only laymen should be eligible for masterships.

All the members of the suppressed communities received full exercise of all the ordinary political and civil rights of laymen; and annuities were granted to all those who had taken permanent religious vows prior to the 18th of January 1864.

Laymen may read the book of nature, and Man himself is the most important " leaf " in it.

The fifth canon provides that those, whether clerics or laymen, who are cut off from communion in any particular province are not to be admitted thereto elsewhere.

But the secular arm, from the time of Nicaea I., was in the habit of aiding spiritual decrees, as by banishing deposed bishops, and gradually by other ways, even with laymen.

The fifth canon of the council of Macon, in 584, forbids clergy to dress like laymen and imposes a penalty of thirty days' imprisonment on bread and water; but this may be merely penitential.

But jurisdiction which was not necessarily incident to the office of the official principal, that is to say voluntary jurisdiction, such as the granting of licences and institution to benefices, and criminal jurisdiction over clerks (and probably over laymen), the bishop could reserve to himself.

In regard to " clerks," there was (1) all the criminal jurisdiction which existed over laymen, and (2) criminal jurisdiction in regard to professional misconduct.

It has cognizance of scandalous offences by laymen and punishes them by deprivation of religious privileges.

These scholars (most of them members of the Buddhist Order, but many of them laymen) not only copied and recopied the Indian Pali books, but wrote a very large number themselves.

The government of the academy is vested in a board of six trustees, regarding whom the founder provided that a majority should be laymen and not inhabitants of Exeter.

Laymen also belonged to it, like Hermann of Fritzlar and Rulman Merswin, the rich banker of Strassburg (author of a mystical work, Buck der neon Felsen, on the nine rocks or upwards steps of contemplation).

In the East, especially in Asia Minor, it was still no unusual thing for laymen, with permission of the bishop, to address the people in the church.

The majority, however, were laymen, of all kinds and degrees - nobles, artisans, scholars, students, labouring men.

Of the laymen, the educated copied manuscripts, the others worked at various handicrafts or at agriculture.

In the same way the Crusades themselves may be regarded as a stage in the clerical reformation of the fighting laymen.

Conference - the supreme assembly - was a very jealously guarded preserve, being attainable only to preachers who had travelled 18 and superintended 12 years, and to laymen who had been members 12 and officials io years.

Its principal courts are constituted of an equal number of ministers and laymen.

In the preface it is stated that Howel, "seeing the laws and customs of the country violated with impunity, summoned the archbishop of Menevia, other bishops and the chief of the clergy, the nobles of Wales, and six persons (four laymen and two clerks) from each comot, to meet at a place called Y Ty Gwyn ar Da y, or the white house on the river Tav, repaired thither in person, selected from the whole assembly twelve of the most experienced persons, added to their number a clerk or doctor of laws, named Bllgywryd, and to these thirteen confided the task of examining, retaining, expounding and abrogating.

He hoped, by organizing a fraternity of armed laymen as pioneers, to restore fertility to the Sahara; but this community did not succeed, and was dissolved before his death.

Their respective followers, and more especially cultured laymen, lacking the capacity for original work, seeking for a solution in some kind of compromise, and possibly failing to grasp the essentials of the controversy, take refuge in a combination of those elements in the opposing systems which seem to afford a sound practical theory.

The fact is that the Montanists represented the conservatism of their day, and even now the Roman Church admits the right of laymen to baptize when a priest cannot be had.

It is known that laymen were required to wear special garments, and the priests (who wore dark-red or purple) were sometimes called upon to change their garments in the course of a ceremony.

He was largely instrumental in the inauguration of the House of Laymen in the province of Canterbury (1886); he made diligent inquiries as to the internal order of the sisterhoods of which he was visitor; from 1884 onwards he gave regular Bible readings for ladies in Lambeth Palace chapel.

Invited to Tuscany by the Countess Matilda, he convoked a council at Piacenza in March 1095, attended by so vast a number of prelates and laymen that its sessions were held in the open air, and addressed by ambassadors of Alexis, the Byzantine emperor, who sought aid against the Mussulmans.

In 1371 a clerical ministry was driven from office, and replaced by laymen, who proved, however, less effective administrators than their predecessors.

The fees of the Curia were raised for the numberless favours, dispensations, absolutions, and exemptions of all kinds which were sought by clerics and laymen.

The pope's representative, Cardinal Cajetan, made it clear that the only safety lay in the collection of a tenth from the clergy and a twentieth from laymen; but the diet appointed a committee to consider the matter and explain why they proposed to refuse the pope's demands.

The diet refused to accede to the pope's demand that the edict of Worms should be enforced, and recommended that a Christian council should be summoned in January, to include not only ecclesiastics but laymen, who should be permitted freely to express their opinions.

The bishop, or count, on whose lands the peace was violated was vested with judicial power, and was directed, in case he was himself unable to execute sentence, to summon to his assistance the laymen and even the clerics of the diocese, all of whom were required to take a solemn oath to observe and enforce the peace.

Then, during Mary's reign, secret congregations met under the leadership of Protestant clergy, and, when these were lacking, even of laymen.

At the very first, in New England, the theory was held that a minister, on ceasing to be the pastor of a particular church, falls into the rank of laymen.

Its representative assembly consisting of 35 clergymen and 42 laymen is called a synod (Synode).

A provincial training college was established in 1903 for the purpose of instructing priests and laymen in the work of teaching, and has turned out many qualified teachers whose subsequent work has proved satisfactory.

The Consistory rules the Established Protestant Church, and is now composed of 31 members, 25 being laymen and 6 (formerly 15) clerics, while the "venerable company of pastors" (pastors actually holding cures) has greatly lost its former importance and can now only submit proposals to the Consistory.

The PseudoIsidorian idea being that all lay control over things ecclesiastical is wrong, all transferences by laymen of ecclesiastical offices or benefices, even though no money changed hands in the process, were now classed as simony (Humbert, Adversus Simoniacos, 1057-1058).

The bases of priestly power under this system are the unity of the altar, its inaccessibility to laymen and to the inferior ministers of the sanctuary, and the specific atoning functions of the blood of priestly sacrifices.

Nevertheless, the concentration of all ritual at a single point, and the practical exclusion of laymen from active participation in it - for the old sacrificial feast had now shrunk into entire insignificance in comparison with the stated priestly holocausts and atoning rites2 - lent powerful assistance to the growth of a new and higher type of personal religion, the religion which found its social expression not in material acts of oblation, but in the language of the Psalms. In the best times of the old kingdom the priests had shared the place of the prophets as the religious leaders of the nation; under the second Temple they represented the unprogressive traditional side of religion, and the leaders of thought were the psalmists and the scribes, who spoke much more directly to the piety of the nation.

Rowland, Williams and John Powell - afterwards of Llanmartin - (clergymen), Harris, John Humphreys and John Cennick (laymen) were present.

In 1905 Mr David Davies of Llandinam - one of the leading laymen in the Connexion - offered a large building at Aberystwyth as a gift to the denomination for the purpose of uniting North and South in one theological college; but in the event of either association declining the proposal, the other was permitted to take possession, giving the association that should decline the option of joining at a later time.

The committee of management consists of thirty-six laymen, six of them being foreigners resident in or near.

He, his immediate follower, Gilbert Tennent (1703-1764), other clergymen, such as James Davenport, and many untrained laymen who took up the work, agreed in the emotional and dramatic character of their preaching, in rousing their hearers to a high pitch of excitement, often amounting to frenzy, in the undue stress they put upon "bodily effects" (the physical manifestations of an abnormal psychic state) as proofs of conversion, and in their unrestrained attacks upon the many clergymen who did not join them and whom they called "dead men," unconverted, unregenerate and careless of the spiritual condition of their parishes.

Officers and soldiers could be tried only by courts-martial, the clergy (including numbers of persons in minor orders, who were practically laymen) only by ecclesiastical courts.

Father Braun, however, makes it quite clear that this was not the case, and gives proof that this decoration was not even originally conceived as a cross at all, citing early instances of its having been worn by laymen and even by non-Christians (p. 210).

On the 4th of May eighteen laymen met at Hull and expressed their conviction that the useful ness of Methodism would be promoted by its continued connexion with the Church of England.

In 1878, laymen were introduced into the Wesleyan conference.