Word Finder - sects

definition

An offshoot of a larger religion; a group sharing particular (often unorthodox) political and/or religious beliefs.

example

A religious sect.

definition

A group following a specific ideal or a leader.

definition

A cutting; a scion.

Nor is much importance to be attached to the influence of the philosophical sects on medicine except as regards the school of Pythagoras.

Faustus Sozzini, a native of Sienna (1539-1603), much influenced by his uncle Lelio Sozzini, after a wandering, questioning life, found his way to Poland, where he succeeded in uniting the various Anabaptist sects into a species of church, the doctrines of which are set forth in the Confession of Rakow (near Minsk), published in Polish in 1605 and speedily in German and Latin.

Polycarp lived to see the rise of the Marcionite and Valentinian sects and vigorously opposed them.

Hence there is confusion on every side; it is difficult to distinguish between various sects and to determine their exact opinions or the circumstances under which they came into being.

It differs from the normal type in many respects, as it includes residences for various sects, so that portions of it, with the several storeys externally, resemble an immense mansion or warehouse, and this would seem to have led to an important change inside, as instead of a cloister of two or more aisles there are four immense halls all covered with pointed barrel vaults.

From most of the other Gnostic sects, with the exception perhaps of the JewishChristian Gnosticism, he is distinguished by the fact that with him the figure of the fallen female god (Sophia Achamoth), and, in general, the idea of a fall within the godhead is entirely wanting.

There have from time to time been various sects or schools of thought that have advocated narrower views.

In many cases it is obvious that the political antipathy of the natives to the Arabs has found expression in the formation of such sects.

He delivered episcopal charges to the clergy of Connecticut and New York entitled The Churchman (5859) and The High Churchman Vindicated (1826), in which he accepted the name "high churchman," and stated and explained his principles "in distinction from the corruptions of the Church of Rome and from the Errors of Certain Protestant Sects."

Among certain Gnostic sects Amen became the name of an angel, and in post-biblical Jewish works exaggerated statements are multiplied as to the right method and the bliss of pronouncing it.

Among the smaller religious sects the Moravian Brethren, whose chief seat is at Herrnhut, are perhaps the most interesting.

In the religious world the Seventh-Day Adventists (who are connected with many sanatoria and the manufacture of food specialities) and some Bible Christians, the worshippers of Vishnu and the Swami Narang and Vishnoi sects, amongst others, preach abstinence from flesh food.

In the latter sense it was chiefly used by the Gnostic sects to denote those eternal beings or manifestations which emanated from the one incomprehensible and ineffable God.

Considered from the standpoint of the world outside, the Roman Church is, no less than the Protestant communities, merely one of the sects into which Western Christendom has been divided - the most important and widespread, it is true, but playing in the general life and thought of the world a part immeasurably less important than that filled by the Church before the Reformation, and one in no sense justifying her claim to be considered as the sole inheritor of the tradition of the pre-Reformation Church.

From this theory, powerful in Great Britain and her colonies, supreme in the United States of America, has resulted an enormous multiplication of sects.

The introduction to the whole work, treating of the value of philosophy and of philosophical sects, is lost, with the exception of the concluding portion; the second book is little more than a fragment, and the third and fourth have been amalgamated by altering the original sections.

Presently reformers of every shade of opinion, even those who were tolerated nowhere else, poured into Poland, which speedily became the battle-ground of all the sects of Europe.

At the diet of 1555 they boldly demanded a national synod, absolute toleration, and the equalization of all the sects except the Antitrinitarians.

The Anti-trinitarian proved to be the chief dissolvent, and from 1560 onwards the relations between the two principal Protestant sects, the Lutherans and the Calvinists, were fratricidal rather than fraternal.

Besides extirpating the various sects of Protestants, they also busied themselves with destroying the Greek Church in Lithuania.

There are about S9 religious sects, of which the members of the Roman Catholic Church, which was prominent in the early history of Maryland, are far the most numerous, having in 1906 166,941 members out of 473,257 communicants of all denominations; in the same year there were 137,156 Methodists, 34,965 Protestant Episcopalians, 32,246 Lutherans, 30,928 Baptists, 17,895 Presbyterians and 13,442 members of the Reformed Church in the United States.

To this end he promised religious toleration from the beginning and directed his officers accordingly; this led to the famous toleration act passed by the assembly in 1649, which, however, extended its protection only to sects of Trinitarian Christianity.

Among several Protestant sects, both in Great Britain and America, abstemii on a somewhat different principle have appeared in modern times.

Epiphanius still had the opportunity of making personal acquaintance with Gnostic sects.

It was derived directly from the times of primitive Christianity; from the Saviour himself and his disciples and friends, with whom they claimed to be connected by a secret tradition, or else from later prophets, of whom many sects boasted.

Above all we can see from the original sources of the Mandaean religion, which also represents a branch of Gnosticism, how great a part the sacraments played in the Gnostic sects (Brandt, Mandciische Religion, p. 96 seq.).

Finally, sacred formulas, names and symbols are of the highest importance among the Gnostic sects.

All these efforts at reconciliation show how clearly the problem of evil was realized in these Gnostic and half-Gnostic sects, and how deeply they meditated on the subject; it was not altogether without reason that in the ranks of its opponents Gnosticism was judged to have arisen out of the question, 7r60ev TO KaK6P; This dualism had not its origin in Hellenic soil, neither is it related to that dualism which to a certain extent existed also in late Greek religion.

It is far more probable that the combination which we meet with in Gnosticism is older than Christianity, and was found already in existence by Christianity and its sects.

We must also reject the theory that this degradation of the planetary deities into daemons is due to the influence of Hebrew monotheism, for almost all the Gnostic sects take up a definitely hostile attitude towards the Jewish religion, and almost always the highest divinity among the Seven is actually the creator-God of the, Old Testament.

And this decision is not affected by the fact that in certain Gnostic sects figured historical personages such as Simon Magus and Menander.

The Gnostic ideas of salvation were in the later schools and sects transferred to these persons whom we must consider as rather obscure charlatans and miracle-mongers, just as in other cases they were transferred to the person of Christ.

Thus there came into the fluctuating mass a strong movement and formative impulse, and the individual systems and sects sprang up like mushrooms from this soil.

The conception of a resurrection of the body, of a further existence for the body after death, was unattainable by almost all of the Gnostics, with the possible exception of a few Gnostic sects dominated by Judaeo-Christian tendencies.

Gnosticism itself is a free, naturally-growing religion, the religion of isolated minds, of separate little circles and minute sects.

This sketch may be completed by a short review of the various separate sects and their probable connexion with each other.

As a point of departure for the history of the development of Gnosticism may be taken the numerous little sects which were apparently first included under the name of " Gnostics " in the narrower sense.

On the one hand we have sects with a strongly ascetic tendency, on the other we find some characterized by unbridled libertinism; in some the most abandoned prostitution has come to be the most sacred mystery; in others again appears the worship of serpents, which here appears to be connected in various and often very loose ways with the other ideas of these Gnostics - hence the names of the " Ophites," " Naasseni."

A particular branch of the " Gnostic " sects is represented by those systems in which the figure of Sophia sinking down into matter already appears.

With the Naasseni, moreover, are related also the other sects of which Hippolytus alone gives us a notice in his Philosophumena (Docetae, Perates, Sethiani, the adherents of Justin, the Gnostic of Monoimos).

Tradition says that one of the Gnostic sects known as the Ophites caused a tame serpent to coil round the sacramental bread and worshipped it as the representative of the Saviour.

On the other hand, he looked upon what he considered to be Christianity proper - that is, Christianity as it had been developed among the sects of Basilidians, Marcionites, and perhaps Bardesanites, as a comparatively valuable and sound religion.

More than once, however, Manichaeism experienced attempts at reformation; for of course the auditores very easily became worldly in character, and movements of reformation led temporarily to divisions and the formation of sects.

Its adherents were recruited on the one hand from the old gnostic sects (especially from the Marcionites - Manichaeism exerted besides this a strong influence on the development of the Marcionite churches of the 4th century), on the other hand from the large number of the "cultured," who were striving after a "rational" and yet in some manner Christian religion.

But it still continued to exist elsewhere, both in the Byzantine Empire and in the West, and in the earlier part of the middle ages it gave an impulse to the formation of new sects, which remained related to it.'

The continuation of these labours was seen in a Dictionary of Sects and Heresies (1874), an Annotated Bible (3 vols., 1878-1879), and a Cyclopaedia of Religion (1884), and received recognition in the shape of the D.D.

The immigrant movement brings with it many new sects, as, for example, the Eastern.

Most Christian Sects Agreed That Easter Should Be Celebrated On A Sunday.

Its formation was due to a desire of the British government to protect South Carolina from invasion by the Spaniards from Florida and by the French from Louisiana, as well as to the desire of James Edward Oglethorpe to found a refuge for the persecuted Protestant sects and the unfortunate but worthy indigent classes of Europe.

It appears no longer as the object of a special cult, but limited to the homage of certain sects, expressed by superstitious rites of obscure significance.