lists 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
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 not