Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, b. xi.
These troops should soon pull down the church of Jove.
Marlowe, First Book of Lucan.
| Civil, | } |
| Civility, | |
| Civilian. |
The tendency which there is in the meaning of words to run to the surface, till they lose and leave behind all their deeper significance, is well exemplified in ‘civil’ and ‘civility’—words of how deep an import once, how slight and shallow now. A civil man now is one observant of slight external courtesies in the intercourse of society; a civil man once was one who fulfilled all the duties and obligations flowing from his position as a ‘civis,’ and his relations to the other members of that ‘civitas’ to which he belonged, and ‘civility’ the condition in which those were recognized and observed. The gradual departure of all deeper significance from ‘civility’ has obliged the creation of another word, ‘civilization,’ which only came up toward the conclusion of the last century. Johnson does not know it in his Dictionary, except as a technical legal term to express the turning of a criminal process into a civil one; and, according to Boswell, altogether disallowed it in the sense which it has now acquired. A ‘civilian’ in the language of the Puritan divines was one who, despising the righteousness of Christ, did yet follow after a certain civil righteousness, a ‘justitia civilis’ of his own.
That wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French.—Milton, Areopagitica.
As for the Scythian wandering Nomades, temples sorted not with their condition, as wanting both civility and settledness.—Fuller, The Holy State, b. iii. c. 24.
Then were the Roman fashions imitated and the gown; after a while the incitements also and materials of vice and voluptuous life, proud buildings, baths, and the elegance of banquetings; which the foolisher sort called civility, but was indeed a secret art to prepare them for bondage.—Milton, History of England, b. ii.
Let us remember also that civility and fair customs were but in a narrow circle till the Greeks and Romans beat the world into better manners.—Bishop Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, b. ii. c. 1, § 19.
The last step in this [spiritual] death is the death of civility. Civil men come nearer the saints of God than others, they come within a step or two of heaven, and yet are shut out.—Preston, Of Spiritual Death and Life, 1636, p. 59.