In this way much confusion arose. The word became too vague and indefinite to be distinctive. It was applied--frequently as an epithet--indiscriminately to persons of widely differing, and often conflicting, views. Every one who complained of social inequalities, every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper, who would extol Law, and spread the net of government over the whole of life, and the iconoclastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, by their friends no less than by their opponents. The confusion thus introduced has had the effect of seriously complicating the study of Socialism from the historical point of view. Much that one finds bearing the name of Socialism in the literature of the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, is not at all related to Socialism as that term is understood to-day. Thus the Socialists of the present day, who do not advocate Communism, regard as a classic presentation of their views the famous pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, _The Communist Manifesto_. They have circulated it by millions of copies in practically all the languages of the civilized world. Yet throughout it speaks of "Socialists" with ill-concealed disdain, and always in favor of Communism and the Communist Party. The reason for this is clearly explained by Engels himself in the preface written by him for the English edition, but that has not prevented many an unscrupulous opponent of Socialism from quoting the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels against the Socialists of the Marx-Engels school.[7] In like manner, the utterances and ideas of many of those who formerly called themselves Socialists have been quoted against the Socialists of to-day, notwithstanding that it was precisely on account of their desire to repudiate all connection with, and responsibility for, such ideas that the founders of the modern Socialist movement took the name "Communists."