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_.