a. [f. prec. + -IC.] Characterized by formalism.
1856. Miss Winkworth, Life Tauler (1857), 107. The title of ‘Friends of God’ is one which meets us continually in the writings of those who are termed mystics in the fourteenth century, and is used in various connections. Sometimes it seems to denote those who were partakers of a spiritual in opposition to a formalistic piety; sometimes to denote the members of a particular body.
1875. Poste, Gaius, IV. Comm. (ed. 2), 516. Its shortcoming was not so much its formalism (the following system was equally formalistic) as (1) its want of safeguards against errors of form and (2) its want of power of expansion.
