62. And in association with the pure, light world impulse represented by Jesus of Nazareth throughout nineteen hundred years, it is impossible to avoid realizing the fact that in the form of Catholicism it simply has had to use such methods as excommunication and burning at the stake in order to be able to push its way through at all. It was obliged to usurp power over kings and emperors, for in many cases in those days such persons were in reality brigand chiefs and gang leaders. So in order to penetrate through that armour-plating of darkness the light world impulse had itself to put on armour. And thanks to Catholicism, barbarism received its death-blow, while millions of people appropriated so much from the light impulse that it enabled them to begin to understand it in such pure essence as emanated from the mouth of the Nazarene. They could thus begin to distinguish between this pure essence and the "hard skin" which it had incurred subsequently by its contact with the dark radiation. This had again resulted in such people deviating more and more from the fixed "crystallization", beginning to progress independently and wishing to eliminate the intermixed element of darkness. Among such people are those we call "reformers". The effect of those reformers was that schisms occurred within the "crystallization". New religious tendencies appeared, each of which is to be recognized as one of the "religious sects" previously mentioned. The value of these sects would naturally be in relation to their source and would be more or less pure or impure according to how much their source had been pure or impure. But these sects - apart from the possible inspiration they may have been able to give to some of their members - have outwardly only created dissension and disturbance, in that each one of them aimed at winning over the whole world and each one proclaimed itself to be the one and only salvation. This easily led to the waging of war with each other, especially as the majority of members of such a sect still had not overcome what we express as the concept of "intolerance". In this way those sects became very extensively an expression of spiritual unrest, creating groups or associations which, indeed, if it had not been for the new world impulse coming into force, would have developed into religious communities warring against each other in such a way that growth towards "one flock and one shepherd" would have been impossible. And it is precisely on account of this spiritual or religious unrest that the new world impulse from the Creative Principle can now begin to find a foothold in the world.