nd in history. The Interpreter's Hand had to do
with all these things. Vanity Fair is not a place through which all
pilgrims must pass as quickly as possible, shutting their eyes and
stopping their ears so that they should neither see nor hear the wicked
things that are done and said there. Vanity Fair is the world in which
we all have to live and do our work well, or neglect it. Pope and Pagan
are not the old giants who used to devour pilgrims, but who can now
only gnash their teeth at them in impotent rage. They are live forces,
quite active, and with agents and supporters alert to capture souls. Of
all the influences which affected for evil my young life I perhaps
resented most Mrs. Sherwood's "Infant's Progress." There were three
children in it going from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City
by the route laid down by John Bunyan; but they were handicapped even
more severely than the good Christian himself with his heavy
burden--for that fell off his back at the first sight of the Cross and
Him who was nailed to it, accepted by the eye of Faith as the one
Sacrifice for the sins of the world--for the three little ones, Humble
Mind, Playful, and Peace, were accompanied always and everywhere by an
imp called Inbred Sin, who never ceased to tempt them to evil.

The doctrine of innate human depravity is one of the most paralysing
dogmas that human fear invented or priestcraft encouraged. I did not
think of publishing "An Agnostic's Progress" at first. I wrote it to
relieve my own mind. I wanted to satisfy myself that reverent agnostics
were by no means materialists; that man's nature might or might not be
consciously immortal, but it was spiritual; that in the duties which
lay before each of us towards ourselves and towards our
fellow-creatures, there was scope for spiritual energy and spiritual
emotion. I was penetrated by Browning's great idea expressed over and
over again--the expansion of Paul's dictum that faith is not certainty,
but a belief without sufficient proof, a belief which leads to right
action and to self-sacrifice. Of the 70 years of life which one might
hope to live and work in, I had no mean idea. I asked in the newspaper,
"Is life so short?" and answered. "No." I expanded and spiritualized
the idea in a sermon, and I again answered emphatically "No." I saw the
continuation and the expansion of true ideas by succeeding generations.
To the question put sometimes peevishly, "Is life worth living?"