But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing.  This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things.  Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word “idealist” has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric.  In the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up “materialist” as a term of cosmology with “materialist” as a moral taunt.  So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates “progressives” in London always calls himself a “progressive” in South Africa.

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word “liberal” as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society.  It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free.  You might just as well say that all idealists ought to be High Churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high.  You might as well say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass, or that Broad Churchmen ought to like broad jokes.  The thing is a mere accident of words.  In actual modern Europe a free-thinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself.  It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on.  And none of these ideas are particularly liberal.  Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.

In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal.  Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world.  For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions.  It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity.  And every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.  In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression.  There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression—­and that is orthodoxy.  I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant.  But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.

Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new theology or the modernist church.  We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them.  The very doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies of the earth.  The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people.  In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin.  So it is, I maintain, in all the other cases.