But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a party name.  Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in conduct.  Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity.  And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed.  The ‘Modernist’ Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term ‘Catholic Church’ to mean a society which has gone through various intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future.  He therefore calls himself a Catholic.  To the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging revelation.  Father Tyrrell, when he says that he ‘believes’ in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent purposes.  They can no more understand him than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies.  Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of thought.

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party—­a political entity—­in himself.  He may fashion a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as ‘Honest John’ or ’The Grand Old Man.’  But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman’s intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.  The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate.  He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time.  A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.