Word Finder - piety

definition

Reverence and devotion to God.

example

Colleen's piety led her to make sacrifices that most people would not have made.

definition

Similar reverence to one's parents and family or to one's country.

definition

A devout act or thought.

definition

A belief that is accepted unthinkingly and with undue reverence.

His face wore a calm look of piety and resignation to the will of God.

The family was distinguished for piety, uprightness, and solidity of character.

In this capacity his sincere piety and amiable character gained him great influence.

Of good descent, his parents were known for generous piety.

The fifth book, De Justitia, maintains that true righteousness is not to be found apart from Christianity, and that it springs from piety which consists in the knowledge of God.

And rightly so, for it was the old Greek piety minted afresh.

In a profligate age William was distinguished by the purity of his married life, by temperate habits and by a sincere piety.

His preaching was a unique combination of rhetorical splendour and scholarly richness; his piety that of an ancient saint, semi-ascetic and unearthly in its selfdenial.

That his temperament at the same time was frigid and comparatively passionless cannot be denied; but neither ought this to be imputed to him as a fault; hostile criticisms upon the grief for a father's death, that " was soothed by the conscious satisfaction that I had discharged all the duties of filial piety," seem somewhat out of place.

In Celtic and English martyrologies (November 25) there is also commemorated St Catherine Audley (c. 1400), a recluse of Ledbury, Hereford, who was reputed for piety and clairvoyance.

Tiraboschi died at Modena on the 3rd of June 1794, leaving a high reputation for virtue, learning and piety.

He sought to mediate, though with no success, between the pope and the emperor; he descended to a whimsical piety, and took his courtiers by guile in distributing to them, at Christmas, clothing on which a cross had been secretly stitched.

He was renowned for his piety and justice.

And so they went to earn the rewards of their practical piety from the Law.

It had a wide influence in awakening popular piety, and the works that issued from it formed the textbooks of mystical and pietistic minds in the centuries that followed.

Those heresy-hunts show us the worst side of St Bernard, yet they are in a way just the obverse of his deep mystical piety.

Both of them, however, besides their philosophical writings, are the authors of works of religious edification and mystical piety.

In contrast to the majority of Italian cardinals of his day, Cajetan was a man of austere piety and fervent zeal; and if, from the standpoint of the Dominican idea of the supreme necessity of maintaining ecclesiastical discipline, he defended the extremist claims of the papacy, he also proclaimed that the pope should be "the mirror of God on earth."

Their filial piety and respect for the aged have been mentioned, and benevolence and charity are conspicuous in their character.

Every one knows that one at least of these older books, The German Theology, was a great favourite of Luther's; but there are many more in Hasak's collection which breathe the same spirit of piety and spiritual emulation.

There was in the whole family a tendency to ecstatic emotion and enthusiastic piety, and it is worth noting that Cappadocia had already given to the Church men like Firmilian and Gregory Thaumaturgus.

Crowther died of paralysis on the 31st of December 1891, having displayed as a missionary for many years untiring industry, great practical wisdom, and deep piety.

As palatine of Cracow he held one of the highest and most lucrative dignities in the state, and was equally famous for his valour, piety and liberality.

Typical examples of "piety" are Aeneas and Antoninus Pius, who founded games called Eusebeia at Puteoli in honour of Hadrian.

His family were sherifs or descendants of Mahomet, and his father, Mahi-ed-Din, was celebrated throughout North Africa for his piety and charity.

The very sincerity of her piety and strength of her religious convictions led her more than once, however, into great errors of state policy, and into more than one act which offends the moral sense of a more refined age; her efforts for the introduction of the Inquisition into Castile, and for the proscription of the Jews, are outstanding evidences of what can only be called her bigotry.

A man of rare intelligence, a fearless horseman and an eloquent orator, Abd-el-Kader had acquired a great reputation by his Abd piety.

He died on the 12th of January 690, leaving a high reputation for piety and culture.

All this was a reaction from St Benedict's reconstruction of the monastic life - a reaction which in the matter of austerities .nd individualistic piety has made itself increasingly felt in the later manifestations of the monastic ideal in the West.

Henry, a man of deep, sincere and even rigorous piety, regarded these evils with sorrow; he associated himself definitely with the movement for reform which proceeded from Cluny, and commanded his prelates to put an end to simony and other abuses.

The account is probably exaggerated; but even in Pankhis record the piety of the king, especially towards Ammon, is very marked.

The Theban supremacy was gone and the Delta was now the wealthy and progressive part of Egypt; piety increased amongst the masses, unenterprising and unwarlike, but proud of their illustrious antiquity.

That men travelled for purposes of prayer implies acceptance of the heathen theory of sanctuaries which it is an act of piety to visit.

There he laid the foundation of the modest piety by which his whole life was distinguished.

During her second exile, from 1848 to the end of her life, she lived at Claremont, where her charity and piety endeared her to the many English friends of the Orleans family.

A theology consisting of a few vague generalities was sufficient to sustain the piety of the best of the deists; but it had not the concreteness or intensity necessary to take a firm hold on those whom it emancipated from the old beliefs.

He dwelt strongly on the importance of men looking away from the externals of the sacrament to the spirit of love and piety.

While he did not reject any approved learning, he abhorred any intellectual culture that destroyed or lessened piety.

These, in proportion as they revived a primitive type of piety, tended to recover also some of its forms of organization.

Congregationalists, on the other hand, whether Independents or Baptists, remained on the whole Trinitarians, largely perhaps in virtue of their very polity, with its intimate relation between the piety of the people and that of the ministry.

But while literary in form and conception, its appeal is in spirit so personal a testimony to what the Gospel has done for the writer and his fellow Christians, that it is akin to the piety of the Apostolic Fathers as a group. It is true that it has marked affinities, e.g.

Hence a new sort of legalism, known to recent writers as Moralism, underlies much of the piety of the Apostolic Fathers, though Ignatius is quite free from it, while Polycarp and "Barnabas" are less under its influence than are the Didache, Clement, the Homilist and Hermas.

To these powerful connexions as much as to his piety and ability, he owed the immense influence he possessed.

Its beginning may be traced as early as the iith century (Pietro Damiani, q.v.), and in the 12th century the most influential exponent of this new piety was Bernard (q.v.) of Clairvaux, who taught men to find God by leading them to Christ.

Under the influence of these ideas, in part purely Christian and in part neo-platonic, piety gained in warmth and depth and became more personal; and though at first it flourished in the monasteries, and in those of the mendicant orders especially, it penetrated far beyond them and influenced the laity everywhere.

The new piety did not set itself in opposition either to the hierarchy or to the institutions of the Church, such as the sacraments and the discipline of penance, nor did it reject those foreign elements (asceticism, worship of saints and the like) which had passed of old time into Christianity from the ancient world.

The terrible tragedy which was consummated on the 23rd of May 1498 before the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, casts a lurid light upon the irreconcilable opposition in which the wearers of the papal dignity stood to medieval piety; for Girolamo Savonarola was in every fibre a loyal son of the medieval Church.

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.

His career was distinguished by uprightness, by piety, by a devotion to duty, by courage and consistency.

Owing its real origin, as a distinct foundation of reformed Benedictines, in the year 1098, to Stephen Harding (a native of Dorsetshire, educated in the monastery of Sherborne), and deriving its name from Citeaux (Cistercium), a desolate and almost inaccessible forest solitude, on the borders of Champagne and Burgundy, the rapid growth and wide celebrity of the order are undoubtedly to be attributed to the enthusiastic piety of St Bernard, abbot of the first of the monastic colonies, subsequently sent forth in such quick succession by the first Cistercian houses, the far-famed abbey of Clairvaux (de Clara Valle), A.D.