wheat. Growth can and
does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth
can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. A
poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant;
and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger
will the poisonous plant become.

The time has come, then, for us to throw to the winds the
time-honoured, but otherwise dishonoured and discredited, belief that
the child is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and that
therefore his nature, if allowed to obey its own laws and follow its
own tendencies, will ripen into death, instead of into a larger
and richer life. I shall perhaps be told that if this belief is
abandoned, other religious beliefs will go with it. Let them go. They
have kept bad company, and if they cannot dissociate themselves from
it, they had better share its fate. What is real and vital in our
religious beliefs will gain incalculably by being disengaged from
what may once have had a life and a meaning of its own but is now
nothing better than a morbid growth. To tell a man that, apart from a
miracle, he is predestined to perdition, is the surest way to send
him there; and it is probable that the doctrine of his own innate
depravity is the deadliest instrument for achieving his ruin, that
Man, in his groping endeavours to explain to himself the dominant
facts of his existence, has ever devised.

Nor is the practical failure of the doctrine--its failure to achieve
any lasting result but the strangulation of Man's expanding life--the
only proof that it is inherently unsound. There is positive proof
that the counter doctrine, the doctrine of Man's potential goodness,
is inherently true. We have seen that the great arterial instincts
which manifest themselves in the undirected play of young children,
are making for three supreme ends,--the sympathetic instincts for the
goal of _Love_, the artistic instincts for the goal of _Beauty_, the
scientific instincts for the goal of _Truth_. We have seen, in other
words, that the push of Nature's forces in the inner life of the
young child is ever tending to take him out of himself in the
direction of a triune goal which I may surely be allowed to call
_Divine_. If we follow towards "infinity" the lines of love, of
beauty, and of truth, we shall begin at last to dream of an ideal
point--the meeting-point of all and the vanishing-point of each--for
which no name will su