One might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of 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.