laiety

Updated: May 5, 2025

John B. Stratton, the Presiding Elder of the Prattsville District, New York Conference, within the bounds of which I then resided, and his immediate successor, Rev. Samuel D. Ferguson, down through all the ministry and laiety of my acquaintance, I was made the special subject of attack. But from what all others thought to be my duty, I shrank with a persistence that admitted of no compromise.

Wesson Gage Miller - Thirty Years in the Itinerancy

We can have no idea by the present generation, of the folly in such respects, of these early ages. But these follies were not confined to the laiety. Affectation of parade, and gaudy cloathing, were admitted among many of the clergy, who incurred the severest invectives of the poets on that account. The ploughman, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is full upon this point.

Thomas Clarkson - A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 1 : Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of Friends