But in these admissions I am making no concession to the believer in original sin; for he regards human nature as such as congenitally depraved, and therefore can take no cognisance of exceptional cases of congenital depravity, cases which by breaking the rule that the new-born child is morally and spiritually healthy, may be said to prove it.
In fine, then, all moral evil can be accounted for on grounds which are quite compatible with the assumption that the normal child is healthy, on all the planes of his being, at the moment of his birth.
That he carries with him into the world the capacity for being affected by adverse influences of various kinds, is undeniable; but so does every other living thing; and if congenital depravity is to be predicated of him for that reason, it must also be predicated of every new-born animal and plant.
But the final proof that Man is by nature a child of God, is one which has already been hinted at, and will presently be further developed,--namely, that growth--the healthy, vigorous growth of the whole human being, the harmonious development of his whole nature--is in its essence a movement towards moral and spiritual perfection.

And the final proof that the doctrine of Man's congenital depravity is false is the practical one that the doctrine is ever tending to fulfil its own gloomy predictions, and to justify its own low estimate of human nature,--in other words, that by making education repressive and devitalising, by introducing externalism, with its endless train of attendant evils, into Man's daily life, and by making him disbelieve in and even despair of himself, it has done more perhaps than all other influences added together to deprave his heart and to wreck his life.
To one who has convinced himself that human nature is fundamentally good, in the sense that the new-born child is as a rule sound and healthy on all the planes of his being, it must be clear that the path of soul-growth or self-realisation is the only way of salvation.
What salvation means, what the path of self-realisation will do for him who enters it, is a theme to which I could not hope to do justice within the limits of this work.

I will therefore content myself with indicating certain typical aspects of the process which I have called self-realisation, and saying something about each of these.

Four aspects suggest themselves to me as worthy of special consideration,--the _mental_, the _moral_, the _social_, and the _religious_.[26] _The Mental Aspect of Self-realisation._ There are two features of the process of self-realisation, on the importance of which I cannot insist too often or too strongly.

The first is that the growth which the life of self-realisation fosters is, in its essence, harmonious and many-sided.