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24  errors of ages. Regarding them merely as disciples, he had no views of political advancement. As a preacher of peace and goodwill to man he told them to "fight with valour, but with no weapon except the Word of God," an injunction to which his successors in the apostleship later on, when driven by persecution to defend themselves, added, "and with the sword of the Lord." His care was to prevent his people from contracting into a sect or into monastic distinctions, proving this by excluding his son, a meditative ascetic, from the ministry after him—the son who justified his fears by becoming the founder of a sect called "Oodasses, indifferent to the world," still existing in considerable numbers, proud of their origin, and using the 'Granth,' but not regarded as genuine Sikhs. Nanak's line of the Bedi clan through his younger son has been preserved to the present day. During these four hundred years they have been held in much