In various ways the Church has striven to exact implicit obedience from her children.
Through the medium of the Confessional she has secured some measure of control over their morals.

By regulating the worship of God--both public and private--she has been able to rule off a sphere of human conduct in which her own authority is necessarily paramount.

By supplying the faithful with rations of "theological information" (to quote the apt phrase of a pillar of orthodoxy), and requiring them to accept these on her authority as indisputably true, she has succeeded in imposing her yoke on thought as well as on conduct.

By claiming to control the outflow of Divine grace, through the channels of the Sacraments, she has been able to threaten the rebellious with the dread penalty of being cut off from intercourse with God.
And by telling men, with stern insistence, that the choice between obedience and disobedience to herself is the choice between eternal happiness and eternal misery, she has sought to extend her dominion beyond the limits of time and to raise to an infinite power her supremacy over the souls of men.
But just because the life of collective Humanity is large, complex, and full of change and variety, the Church which aspires to be universal, however strong may be her desire to superintend all the details of human thought and conduct, and however ready she may be to adapt herself to local and temporal variations, must needs allow whole aspects and whole spheres of human life to escape from her control.

The history of Christendom is the history of the gradual emancipation of the Western world from the despotism of the Church.
The various activities of the human spirit--art, science, literature, law, statecraft, and the rest--have, one and all, freed themselves by slow degrees from ecclesiastical control, till little or nothing has been left for the Church to regulate but her own rites and ceremonies, the morals (in a narrow and ever-narrowing sense of the word), and the faith (in the theological sense of the word), of the faithful.
With the emancipation of Man's higher activities from ecclesiastical control, the distinction between the _religious_ and the _secular_ life has gradually established itself.