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The ill-will and sectarian hatred were most prevalent at Alexandria, where the powerful Jewish community excited the attacks of the half-Hellenized natives. The campaign was fought mainly as a battle of books. The Hebrew Scriptures represented the early Egyptians in no favorable light.
Even the great national movement which Mr William O'Brien re-created in the United Irish League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute antithesis of all free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of liberty and fair play.
Just imagine the incense of devout praise ascending heavenward in such a thick smoke of sectarian contentions! All the denominations were more or less afflicted with this controversial malady; and I will venture to say that in Kentucky and Ohio and other new regions, the Presbyterians were often a fair match for their Methodist neighbors in these theological pugilistics.
The sectarian spirit, the fundamental trait of which is to confound unity with uniformity, to transform divergencies into separations, to refuse to admit into the bosom of the church the element of diversity and of liberty; to exact the signing of a theological formula, and the formal adhesion as a whole to a collection of dogmas and practices, without tolerating the slightest shade of difference the sectarian spirit, with its narrowness, with its traditions of men, with its exaggeration of little things, with its separate denominations, is certainly not worthy of admiration.
The practice, so common in the slave states, of the citizens congregating at the bars of hotels or cafés in the towns and cities to while away the time, renders attendance at such places the readiest means of ascertaining the state of the public mind on any engrossing subject, opinions being here freely discussed, not, however, without bias and anger; on the contrary, the practice is most sectarian, and frequently involves deadly feuds and personal encounters, these latter being of every-day occurrence.
There was, indeed, an attempt of some enemies of the Cornell University a hostility due either to supposed conflict of interests or sectarian jealousy to stigmatize the institution, but it failed instantly and utterly.
It was raised nearly five feet from the ground on wooden piles, and had two rooms. On the side wall hung brass basins and weapons, while on the floor, under a bench, lay watermelons and pumpkins. In the second room there was a big brick oven, a table, and sectarian icons. It was here that Beletski was quartered, with his camp-bed and his pack and trunks.
It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments. Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as representing the Church.
Heyday came into my head; this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees."
People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places. In the present time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.
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