t, but he does no more than
these. He realises that in all these operations he is only taking
advantage of the innate powers and tendencies of the tree, and
enabling these to deploy themselves under as favourable conditions
as possible; and he is therefore well content to leave the rest to
the tree itself, feeling sure that its own spontaneous effort to
achieve perfection will do all that is needed. His trust in the
ability and willingness of the tree to work out its salvation is
complete.

These are the lines on which the farmer and the fruit-grower conduct
their business,--lines, the neglect of which would involve them in
early disaster and in ultimate ruin. And these are the lines on which
human nature ought to be trained, in school and out of school, from
the day of birth to the day of death. But they are lines on which it
will never be trained so long as the doctrine of the depravity of
Nature in general and human nature in particular controls our
philosophy of life.

The doctrine of natural depravity, or original sin, is the outcome of
Man's attempt to explain to himself the glaring fact of his own
imperfection. The doctrine grew up in an age when men were ignorant
of the fundamental laws of Nature, and among a people who, though
otherwise richly gifted, had no turn for sustained thought. So long
as men were ignorant of Nature's master law of evolution, it was but
natural that they should account for their own imperfection by
looking back to a Golden Age,--a state of innocence and bliss from
which they had somehow fallen, and to which they could not, by any
effort or process of their corrupted nature, hope to return. While
this idea--half myth and half doctrine--was growing up in the mind
of Israel, the counter idea of the evolution or growth of the soul,
of its ascent from "weak beginnings" towards a state of spiritual
perfection, was growing up among the thinkers of India, and the
derivative doctrine of salvation through the natural process of
soul-growth was being gradually elaborated. But though the philosophy
of India produced some impression on the conscious thought, and a
far deeper impression on the subconscious thought, of the West, its
master idea of spiritual evolution--_through a long sequence of
lives_--was wholly foreign to the genius of Christendom, which had
borrowed its _ideas_ from the commonplace philosophy of Israel; and
it was not till the nineteenth century of our era that the idea of
evo