Crossword-Solution: ACCIDIE 7 letters, 23 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

Fixed in the slime, they say, ‘Sullen were we in the sweet air that by the Sun is gladdened, bearing within ourselves the sluggish fume; now we are sullen in the black mire.’ This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak with entire words.”[1] [1] The sin here punished is that known to the Middle Ages as acedia, or accidie,—slackness in good works, and spiritual gloom and despondency.

The meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of “accidie.” He felt, like Ernest Dowson, “a little weary.” He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same time--how should he put it?--a little infinite.

For of this root spring certain branches: as ire, envy, accidie or sloth, avarice or covetousness (to common understanding), gluttony, and lechery: and each of these sins hath his branches and his twigs, as shall be declared in their chapters following.

When the object is good, but the love is lacking in due vigour, we have the sin of sloth, or, as our forefathers called it, “accidie.” This occupies a somewhat anomalous position.

Such was the deadly sin of _accidie_, the name of which is forgotten today, though the thing itself is with us still.