The caste system, always calculated to favour unity of religious practice within its social groups, must naturally have contributed to the advance of sectarianism.
Rather, they deliberately foment sectarianism, a traditional weapon of colonizers.
He gained from the struggle a more catholic view of human happiness, at delight in the poetry of nature and the affections as well as the poetry of heroic unselfishness, a disposition to study more sympathetically the point of view of opponents, a more courteous style of polemic, a hatred of sectarianism, an ambition,, no less noble and disinterested, but moderated to practical' possibilities.
In Gnosticism as in the other mystic religions we find the same contrast of the initiated and the uninitiated, the same loose organization, the same kind of petty sectarianism and mystery-mongering.
Personally a devout Catholic and opposed in principle to the spread of sectarianism in Poland, Sigismund was nevertheless too wise and just to permit the persecution of non-Catholics;' and in Lithuania, where a fanatical Catholic minority of magnates dominated the senate, he resolutely upheld the rights of his Orthodox subjects.