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 freethinker
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