odern 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.

I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some
extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to
disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine,
nor can anybody tell me. For some inconceivable cause a "broad" or
"liberal" clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish
the number of miracles; it never means a m