Characteristic of modern times has been the Protestant rehabilitation of the cult and its tenets. In this rehabilitation, which has not been without effect even within the Catholic church, much of the ancient spirit of subjection has been lost, replaced in part with a certain attitude of self-help and autonomy on the part of the laity. There is a degree of democratic initiative and a gild-like spirit of lay discretion in spiritual affairs. As already noted above, the tenets of the faith have also in some degree been revised and reconstructed in terms consonant with the workmanlike conceptions of the handicraft system. Such a protestant or quasi-protestant reconstruction of the cult and its tenets set in, as is well known, successively in the several leading countries of Europe, somewhat in the same order as these several countries successively advanced to a high level of technological and commercial enterprise. As noted above, in the south in the so-called Latin countries, this era of industrial and commercial enterprise was presently checked; the like being true in a less pronounced fashion for the peoples of Central Europe. Wherever the advance was seriously checked, so that the era of handicraft closed in collapse or reaction on its secular side, there the reconstruction of the religious cult also came to an incomplete issue at the most. So that by the definitive close of the era of handicraft those peoples of Christendom that had maintained the advance achieved in this secular respect were also the ones that had accepted and continued to hold the revised form of the faith. Where this era of industrial and business enterprise closed in exhaustion and collapse, there the ancient form of the faith also triumphed over the heretics. It is, indeed, to be remarked as a sufficiently striking coincidence that even now the centre of diffusion of the modern industry is at the same time the centre of diffusion of religious protestantism and heresy. And the antique forms and fervour of the faith are found in better preservation progressively outward from this centre of diffusion; and even in somewhat minute detail it appears to hold true not only that the more advanced industrial peoples are the less amenable to religious control and less given to superstitious observances of the archaic sort, but also that within these industrial countries the industrial centres in the narrower sense of the word are less devout, or devout in a less archaic fashion, than the non-industrial population at large. Something of the kind, indeed, has been visibly true ever since a relatively early phase of the handicraft system; though nothing like undevoutness can be alleged of the industrial town population during the handicraft era proper. The handicraft population was devout, but not consistently orthodox; and the industrial towns of that time were devout enough in their way, but it was in a way obnoxious to the received dogmas of the church.