[f. SUBSERVIENT: see -ENCE.]
1. The condition or quality of being serviceable, as a means to an end.
a. 1676. Hale, Prim. Orig. Man., 1. All this accommodation … and mutual subservience of the things in Nature.
1677. Gale, Crt. Gentiles, IV. 450. To order al means and affaires in subservience to his end and designe.
1793. Burke, Obs. Conduct Minority, Wks. 1842, I. 614. It was in subservience to the general plan of disabling us from taking any steps against France.
1805. Knox & Jebb, Corr., I. 224. All events on this earth are regulated and directed, in subservience to the interests of that spiritual … kingdom of the Messiah.
1884. F. Temple, Relat. Relig. & Sci., iv. (1885), 119. We should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their subservience to the purification of life.
† b. pl.
a. 1693. Urquhart’s Rabelais, III. l. 402. The uses and subserviences they were fit for.
1802. Paley, Nat. Theol., xii. The plan is attended, through all its varieties and deflections, by subserviences to special occasions and utilities.
2. A condition of subordination or subjection to another. Now rare exc. as implied in 3.
1701. G. Stanhope, Pious Breathings, V. xvii. (1720), 348. Grant that my sensual Affections may always continue in subservience to my reasonable mind.
a. 1704. T. Brown, Praise of Wealth, Wks. 1730, I. 86. A change of power to subservience is a proof of folly.
1836. Thirlwall, Greece, xxi. (1839), III. 173. They had secured the subservience of the whole island.
1902. W. Bright, Age Fathers (1903), I. xv. 288. The sermon, it is added, asserted the absolute ‘subservience’ of the Son to the Father.
3. Subservient behavior, attitude or conduct; servile subordination, submissiveness, obsequiousness.
1819. Scott, Ivanhoe, xxiv. She could not indeed imitate his excess of subservience, because she was a stranger to the meanness of mind … by which it was dictated.
1849. Grote, Greece, II. xxxviii. V. 23. A young Persian monarch, corrupted by universal subservience around him.
1873. Hamerton, Intell. Life, IX. iii. 314. Johnson … is grander in his neglect of fashion than Goldsmith in his ruinous subservience.
1902. W. L. Mathieson, Politics & Relig. Scot., I. x. 323. His [Spottiswoode’s] subservience to the King, from which the Church suffered so much, was due in part to the extreme weakness of his position.
