Individuals and nations separated by schism or heresy from the visible communion of the church do not become at once absolutely and in all respects unprogressive, for they are carried on for a time by the momentum she baa given them, and besides, they are not, as she continues to exist, absolutely beyond or outside of the sphere of her influence, though indirect and reflected. But from the moment of the separation their progress begins to slacken, their spiritual life becomes sickly and attenuated, and gradually they lose all that they had received from the church, and lapse into helpless and unassisted nature. This, which is demonstrable _à priori_, is proved by the experience of those nations that separated from the church in the sixteenth century. These nations at first retained a large portion of their old Catholic culture, and many of the habits acquired under the discipline and training of the church. But they have been gradually losing them ever since, and the more advanced portions of them have got pretty clear of them, and thrown off, as they express it, the last rag of Popery. Indeed this is their boast. In throwing off the authority of the church, they came in religious matters under the authority of the state, or the temporal sovereign or ruler--a purely human authority, without competency in spirituals--and thus lost at once their entire religious freedom, or liberty of conscience. In Catholic nations the civil authority has always, or almost always, been prone to encroach on the authority of the church, and to attempt to control her external discipline or ecclesiastical administration; but, in the nations that were carried away by the so-called reformation, the civil authority assumed in every instance complete control over the national church, and prescribed its constitution, its creed, its liturgy, and its discipline. This for them completely humanized religion, and made it a department of state. It is true these nations professed to recognize the Bible as containing a divine revelation, and to be governed by it; and this would have been something, even much, had they not remitted its interpretation to the civil magistrate, the king, the parliament, the public judgment of the people, or the private judgment of the individual, which made its meeting, as practically received, vary from nation to nation, and even from individual to individual.