Sentence:  Even Rector himself was prey to this spirit of competition and he knew it , not for a more exalted office in the <WSD>hierarchy</WSD> of the church - his ambitions for the bishopry had died very early in his career - but for the one clear victory he had talked about to the colonel . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  a series of ordered groupings of people or things within a system