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of the church, a superior of a convent, a confessor (called also father confessor), or a priest; also, the eldest member of a profession, or of a legislative assembly, etc. Bless you, good father friar ! Shak.

A moral failing; a defect or dereliction from duty; a deviation from propriety; an offense less serious than a crime.

A priest devoted to the service of a particular god, from whom he received a distinguishing epithet. The most honored were those of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, called respectively Flamen Dialis, Flamen Martialis, and Flamen Quirinalis. Affrights the flamens at their service quaint. Milton.

A Buddhist priest. See Fo.

; to avoid; to abstain from; to give up; as, to forbear the use of a word of doubdtful propriety. But let me that plunder forbear. Shenstone. The King In open battle or the tilting field Forbore his own advantage. Tennyson.

One who enjoys the profits, income, or increase of anything. Kings are not proprietors nor fructuaries. Prynne.

nery. [Archaic] Guess the gallantry of our church by this . . . when the desk whereon the priest read was inlaid with plates of silver. Fuller.

had gathered them Her beauty and her chivalry. Byron. When he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together. Matt. ii. 4.

A priest or deacon who reads the gospel at the altar during the communion service. The Archbishop of York was the celebrant, the epistoler being the dean, and the gospeler the Bishop of Sydney. Pall Mall Gazette.

An African talisman or Gri'gri' charm. A greegree man, an African magician or fetich priest.

ilver lace, placed on the bishop's lap while he sits in celebrating mass, or in ordaining priests.

in water; as, gum arabic; gum tragacanth; the gum of the cherry tree. Also, with less propriety, exudations that are not soluble in water; as, gum copal and gum sandarac, which are really resins.

Government by a priesthood; hierarchy.

haul. See Haul. Chaucer. Easier both to freight, and to hale ashore. Milton. As some dark priest hales the reluctant victim. Shelley.

Suitable or fit in action; marked with propriety and ease; graceful; becoming; appropriate; as, a handsome style, etc. Easiness and handsome address in writing. Felton.

A proprietor or landholder in a parish. [Scot.]

church by patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and, in an inferior degree, by priests. Shipley.

Consecrated to sacred uses; sacerdotal; pertaining to priests. Hieratic character, a mode of ancient Egyptian writing; a modified form of hieroglyphics, tending toward a cursive hand and formerly supposed to be the sacerdotal character, as the demotic was supposed to be that of the people. It was a false notion of the…

, Mexicans, etc. Specifically, in the plural, the picture writing of the ancient Egyptian priests. It is made up of three, or, as some say, four classes of characters: first, the hieroglyphic proper, or figurative, in which the representation of the object conveys the idea of the object itself; second, the ideographic,…

A priest who becomes a martyr.