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The old Cameronian patriarch, in his sectarian exaltation, seemed almost a luminary in the intellectual twilight of that secluded community, and it was possible there to understand how even a narrow religious fanaticism could become an ennobling element in the character of a community living in such a restricted and materializing atmosphere.
So much for the powers of the School Boards. Limited as they seem to be, it by no means follows that such Boards, if they are composed of intelligent and practical men, really more in earnest about education than about sectarian squabbles, may not exert a very great amount of influence.
From them the Quakers drew their most zealous champions; men who, in renouncing the "carnal weapons" of their old service, found employment for habitual combativeness in hot and wordy sectarian warfare. To this day the vocabulary of Quakerism abounds in the military phrases and figures which were in use in the Commonwealth's time.
She seems to be entirely free from the sectarian spirit; she can look at facts impartially, without reference to their bearing on favorite dogmas; nor does she claim such a full, precise and completely-rounded acquaintance with the mysteries of the spiritual world, whether from intuition or revelation, as not to believe that there may be more "things in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy."
Briefly, the priest was a barbarian upholder of the Gospel, a friend of the humble and woeful, a sectarian of that school which is capable alike of great virtues and great crimes. "Yes," concluded Prada, "he is now devoted to Cardinal Sanguinetti because he believes that the latter will prove the great pope of to-morrow, who is to make Rome the one capital of the nations.
What! all these prayers, these churches, these denominations, these sectarian wars which have shed oceans of human blood these unfortunate persecutions which have blackened the face of man the fear of hell and the devil which has blasted millions of lives all these for a Christ who may, after all, be only a picture! Neither is it true that this pictorial Jesus saved the world.
Furthermore, it is well to remember that our sectarian neighbors, having largely lost faith in what they once considered their distinctive mission, are naturally turning much of their energy to general educational, philanthropic and civilizing work.
"That kind of classification may be said to have received a fatal shock at the time of the great Revolution, when sectarian demarcations and doctrinal differences, already fallen into a good deal of disregard, were completely swept away and forgotten in the passionate impulse of brotherly love which brought men together for the founding of a nobler social order.
When we, in astonishment, ask ourselves what all this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectarian preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening.
The more numerous division of emigrants, which arrived first at Paris, assumed a superiority of rank and power; the second party asserted their independence. A third was formed by a sectarian, a self-erected prophet, who, while he attributed all power and rule to God, strove to get the real command of his comrades into his own hands.
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