In illustration Isaiah takes the conventional abuse of certain moral terms, exposes it and declares it shall cease: _The vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful_. _Liberal_ and _bountiful_ were conventional names. The Hebrew word for _liberal_ originally meant exactly that--_open-hearted_, _generous_, _magnanimous_. In the East it is the character which above all they call princely. So like our words "noble" and "nobility," it became a term of rank, _lord_ or _prince_, and was often applied to men who were not at all great-hearted, but the very opposite--even to the _vile person_. _Vile person_ is literally the _faded_ or the _exhausted_, whether mentally or morally--the last kind of character that could be princely. The other conventional term used by Isaiah refers to wealth rather than rank. The Hebrew for _bountiful_ literally means _abundant_, a man blessed with plenty, and is used in the Old Testament both for the rich and the fortunate. Its nearest English equivalent is perhaps _the successful man_. To this Isaiah fitly opposes a name, wrongly rendered in our version _churl_, but corrected in the margin to _crafty_--_the fraudulent_, _the knave_. When moral discrimination comes, says Isaiah, men will not apply the term _princely_ to _worn-out_ characters, nor grant them the social respect implied by the term. They will not call the _fraudulent_ the _fortunate_, nor canonise him as successful, who has gotten his wealth by underhand means. _The worthless character shall no more be called princely, nor the knave hailed as the successful._ But men's characters shall stand out true in their actions, and by their fruits ye shall know them. In those magic days the heart shall come to the lips, and its effects be unmistakeable. _For the worthless person, worthlessness shall he speak_--what else can he?--_and his heart shall do iniquity, to practise profaneness and to utter against the LORD rank error, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail_. _The tools, too, of the knave_ (a play upon words here--"Keli Kelav," _the knave his knives_) _are evil; he! low tricks he deviseth to destroy the poor with words of falsehood, even when the poor speaks justice_ (that is, has justice as well as poverty to plead for him). _But the princely things deviseth, and he upon princely things shall stand_--not upon conventional titles or rank, or the respect of insincere hearts, but upon actual deeds of generosity and sacrifice.
After great characters, then, what society needs is capacity to discern character, and the chief obstacle in the way of this discernment is the substitution of a conventional morality for a true morality, and of some distinctions of man's making for the eternal difference which God has set between right and wrong.
Human progress consists, according to Isaiah, of getting rid of these conventions; and in this history bears him out. The abolition of slavery, the recognition of the essential nobility of labour, the abolition of infanticide, the emancipation of woman--all these are due to the release of men's minds from purely conventional notions, and the courageous application in their place of the fundamental laws of righteousness and love. If progress is still to continue, it must be by the same method. In many directions it is still a false conventionalism,--sometimes the relic of barbarism, sometimes the fruit of civilisation,--that blocks the way. The savage notions which obstruct the enforcement of masculine purity have to be exposed. Nor shall we ever get true commercial prosperity, or the sense of security which is indispensable to that, till men begin to cease calling transactions all right merely because they are the custom of the trade and the means to which its members look for profits.
But, above all, as Isaiah tells us, we need to look to our use of language. It is one of the standing necessities of pure science to revise the terminology, to reserve for each object a special name, and see that all men understand the same object by the same name. Otherwise confusion comes in, and science is impossible. The necessity, though not so faithfully recognized, is as imperative in morals. If we consider the disgraceful mistakes in popular morals which have been produced by the transference and degradation of names, we shall feel it to be a religious duty to preserve for these their proper meaning. In the interests of morality, we must not be careless in our use of moral terms. As Socrates says in the _Phædo_: "To use words wrongly and indefinitely is not merely an error in itself; it also creates evil in the soul."[49] What noxious misconceptions, what mistaken ideals of life, are due to the abuse of these four words alone: "noble," "gentleman," "honour" and "Christian"! By applying these, in flattery or deceit, to persons unworthy of them, men have not only deprived them of the virtue which originally the mere utterance of them was enough to instil into the heart, but have sent forth to the world under their attractiveness second-rate types of character and ideals. The word "gentleman"! How the heart sickens as it thinks what a number of people have been satisfied to aim at a shoddy and superficial life because it was labelled with this gracious name. Conventionalism has deprived the English language of some of its most powerful sermons by devoting terms of singular moral expressiveness to do duty as mere labels upon characters that are dead, or on ranks and offices, for the designation of which mere cyphers might have sufficed.