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To withdraw from fellowship, communion, or association; to separate one's self by a solemn act; to draw off; to retire; especially, to withdraw from a political or religious body.

One who secedes.

One who seceded from the Burghers (1747), deeming it improper to take the Burgess oath.

A member of that party, among the Scotch seceders, which asserted the lawfulness of the burgess oath (in which burgesses profess "the true religion professed within the realm"), the opposite party being called antiburghers.

A sect which seceded from the Franciscan Order, chiefly in Italy and Sicily, in 1294, repudiating the pope as an apostate, maintaining the duty of celibacy and poverty, and discountenancing oaths. Called also Fratricellians and Fraticelli.

which, because of a change of views respecting the divinity of Christ and the Atonement, seceded from the conservative portion of the Society of Friends in the United States, in 1827.

One of the Primitive Methodists, who seceded from the Wesleyan Methodists on the ground of their deficiency in fervor and zeal; -- so called in contempt.

Nationale des Beaux-Arts (National Society of Fine Arts), a body of artists who, in 1890, seceded from the Société des Artistes Français (Society of French Artists).

The withdrawal of a State from the national Union. Secession Church (in Scotland). See Seceder.

eparates himself; especially, one who withdraws from a church to which he has belonged; a seceder from an established church; a dissenter; a nonconformist; a schismatic; a sectary. Heavy fines on divines who should preach in any meeting of separatist . Macaulay.