prelatyn.

1641 J. Milton (title) The reason of church-government urg'd against prelaty.

1644 J. Milton Areopagitica 25 That those evills of Prelaty..will now light wholly upon learning.

a1864 W. S. Landor Poems (1892) II. xli. 236 One was doom'd By Despotism and Prelaty to pine In the damp dungeon, and to die for Law, Rackt by slow tortures ere he reacht the grave.

1881 Mod. Rev. Jan. 121 May we not call Milton the prophet of the nation at this critical hour, as he had been when prelaty was under judgment, and was to be, though fruitlessly, on the eve of the Restoration?

1935 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. 29 306 John and Thomas Goodwin were clergymen violently opposed to prelaty and presbytery alike, and the former a champion of the completest relgious liberty.

2005 Spectator (Nexis) 8 Jan. 20 Deeks's position as the Church's first General Secretary is an innovation in Methodist history, and one that in the past would doubtless have been ruled out as smacking too much of prelaty.

1641 J. Milton Reason Church-govt. 12 Laborious teaching is the most honourable Prelaty that one Minister can have above another in the Gospell.

1641 J. Milton Reason Church-govt. 43 Neither shal I..trifle with one that will tell me of quiddities and formalities, whether Prelaty or Prelateity in abstract notion be this or that.

1642 J. Hales Tract conc. Schisme 12 The first I mentioned was the Prelaties of Bishops in one Sea.