Def.

III] Definition oj Status

or should attach themselves. Thus, he who from the Sacred Scriptures
alone gathers together the separate parts of the duty of priests, does
not by any means deny that these same priests are bound to perform
also those duties which are required by the ecclesiastical constitutions
of individual states. So we also, who are devoting ourselves here
merely to those duties of man, the necessity for which can be gathered
from the light of reason, do not by any manner of means insist that
the status of men ever has been, or ever ought to be, such that those
obligations alone belong to it.
12. Status of time is that which involves respect to the question
when, or to time considered in a moral light, and it can be divided
into (I) juniority and seniority. Both of these expressions are used
either in respect to duration in human life, and are called age, whose
grades are infancy, childhood, boyhood, youth, man's estate, old age,
and decrepitude; or in respect to duration in some adventitious status,
as that of raw recruits, of veterans, of the honourably discharged at the
expiration of service, &c. In the former class can be included, perhaps,
even primogeniture, a status in which one has no elder brothers by the
same parent.
Status of time can also be divided into (2) majority, a status in
which a man is reckoned as being able to attend to his own affairs in his
own way; and minority, in which one has need of a tutor or guardian.
The limits of this status vary among different peoples.