Crossword-Solution: MILITATED 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

She speedily comprehended all his merits; the persuasion of his regard for Elinor perhaps assisted her penetration; but she really felt assured of his worth: and even that quietness of manner, which militated against all her established ideas of what a young man’s address ought to be, was no longer uninteresting when she knew his heart to be warm and his temper affectionate.

The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most available--on the stage.

This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world.

Hawthorne's preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly.

Every motive of authority and fashion, of interest and reason, now militated on the side of Christianity; but two or three generations elapsed, before their victorious influence was universally felt.