[f. FORMAL a. + -ISM. Not in Johnson, Todd, or Richardson.]
1. Strict or excessive adherence to prescribed forms; an instance or variety of this.
1840. in Smart.
1850. Kingsley, Alt. Locke, xiii. (1879), 151. Useless formalism! which lets through the reckless, the profligate, the ignorant, the hypocritical; and only excludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of the intellectual working-men.
1851. Mrs. Jameson, Leg. Madonna, Introduction (1857), p. xxv. In that general ‘fit of compunction,’ which we are told seized all Italy at this time [the thirteenth century], the passionate devotion for the benign Madonna mingled the poetry of pity with that of pain; and assuredly this state of feeling, with its mental and moral requirements, must have assisted in emancipating art from the rigid formalism of the degenerate Greek school.
1862. Merivale, Rom. Emp. (1865), III. xxii. 12. Though they embraced with superstitious awe the manifold ceremonies of the Etruscan cult, they never allowed themselves to be so completely enchained by their dogmatic formalisms as the people from whom they derived them.
1874. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England (1875), III. xviii. 273. One good result had followed the constitutional formalism of three reigns; the forms of government could not be altered.
2. The disposition to exalt what is formal or outward at the expense of what is spiritual; the practice of using forms of worship and of religious profession without real devotion or conviction.
1856. R. A. Vaughan, Mystics (1860), II. 219. Formalism does not lie in these outward things themselves—it consists in the spirit in which they are used.
1878. Morley, Carlyle, Crit. Misc. Ser. I. 201. The cant and formalism of any other degenerate form of active faith.
1883. Froude, Short Stud., Ser. IV. II. iv. 208. The family devotions were long, but there was no formalism, and everybody took a part in them.
