Old Song.
Minute. ‘Minutes’ are now ‘minúte’ portions of time; they might once be ‘minúte’ portions of anything.
But whanne a pore widewe was comun, sche keste two mynutis, that is a ferthing.—Mark xii. 42. Wiclif.
Let us, with the poor widow of the Gospel, at least give two minutes.—Becon, The Nosegay, Preface.
An enquiry into the minutes of conscience is commonly the work of persons that live holily.—Bishop Taylor, Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, Preface.
And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished in the flame. These are but minutes, in respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples.—Id., Sermon on the Gunpowder Treason.
Miscreant. A settled conviction that to believe wrongly is the way to live wrongly has caused that in all languages words, which originally did but indicate the first, have gradually acquired a meaning of the second. There is no more illustrious example of this than ‘miscreant,’ which now charges him to whom it is applied not with religious error, but with extreme moral depravity; while yet, according to its etymology, it did but mean at the first misbeliever, and as such would have been as freely applied to the morally most blameless of these as to the vilest and the worst. In the quotation from Shakespeare York means to charge the Maid of Orleans, as a dealer in unlawful charms, with apostasy from the Christian faith, according to the low and unworthy estimate of her character, above which even Shakespeare himself has not risen.
We are not therefore ashamed of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, because miscreants in scorn have upbraided us that the highest of our wisdom is, Believe.—Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, b. v.
One sort you say be those that believe not in Christ, but deny Christ and his Scripture; as be the Turks, paynims, and such other miscreants.—Frith, Works, 1572, p. 62.
Curse, miscreant, when thou comest to the stake.