importance and lasting value, for she has provided an experimental
basis for the idea that salvation is to be achieved by growth, and
growth alone.

I will now try to interpret that idea.

The education of the child in school begins when he is four or five
years old, and lasts till he is thirteen or fourteen. But he enters
the path of salvation the day he is born. He comes into the world a
weak, helpless baby; but, like every other seedling, he has in him
all the potencies of perfection,--the perfection of his kind.
To realise those potencies, so far as they can be realised within
the limits of one earth-life, is to achieve salvation. Are those
potencies worth realising? To this question I can but answer: "Such
as they are, they are our all." We might ask the same question with
regard to an acorn or a grain of wheat; and in each case the answer
would be the same. There are, indeed, plants and animals which are
noxious _from our point of view_. But that is not the view which they
take of themselves. Each of them regards his own potencies in the
light of a sacred trust, and strives with untiring energy to realise
them. If the potencies of our nature are not worth realising we had
better give up the business of living. If they are, we had better
fall into line with other living things.

An unceasing pressure is being put upon us to do so. The perfect
manhood which is present in embryo in the new-born infant, just as
the oak-tree is present in embryo in the acorn, will struggle
unceasingly to evolve itself. With the dawn of self-consciousness, we
shall gradually acquire the power of either co-operating with, or
thwarting, the spontaneous energies that are welling up in us and
making for our growth. In this respect we stand, in some sort, apart
from the rest of living things. But the power to co-operate with
our own spontaneous energies is to the full as natural as are the
energies themselves. To fathom the mystery of self-consciousness is
beyond my power and beside my present purpose; but we may perhaps
regard our power of interfering, for good or ill, with the
spontaneous energies of our nature, as the outcome of a successful
effort which our nature has made both to widen the sphere of its own
life and to accelerate the process of its own growth. But just
because we possess that power, it is essential that we, above all
other living things, should believe in ourselves, should believe in
the intrinsic value of our natu