casuist's Usage Examples:

He was consulted as an oracle on all questions of casuistry - as, for example, on the lawfulness of inoculation for the small-pox.

Scholasticism, while reviving philosophy as a handmaid to theology, had metamorphosed its method into one resembling that of its mistress; thus shackling the renascent intellectual 2 As the chief English casuists we may mention Perkins, Hall,.

The Anglican casuists are discussed in Whewell, Lectures on Moral Philosophy (London, 1862).

The casuist's duty was to apply the general precepts of the Church to particular cases.

"Thus caught between two fires the casuists developed a highly ingenious method, not unlike that of the Roman Stoics, for eviscerating the substance of a rule while leaving its shadow carefully intact.

Cicero shows that he was much interested in casuistical questions, as, for example, whether a good man who had received a coin which he knew to be bad was justified in passing it on to another.

In his casuistical works he was a diligent compiler, whose avowed design was to take a middle course between the two current extremes of severity and laxity.

The fourth and last school - the "laxists" - carried this principle a step farther, and held that a practice must be unobjectionable, if it could prove that any one "grave Doctor" had defended it; even if dancing on Sunday had hitherto lain under the ban of the church, a single casuist could legitimate it by one stroke of his pen.

The legal is the older group, and to it the name of casuist is often exclusively reserved, generally with the implication that its methods are too purely technical to commend themselves to mankind at large.

casuistry found no place, because there were no sacred books.

But the Protestant casuist never pretended to speak authoritatively; all he did was to give his reasons, and leave the decision to the conscience of his readers.