Besides this darkness of ignorance, there is also at our birth, the darkness of evil in our hearts. Everyone is born with the seeds of evil in his or her innermost being, dormant and almost unsuspected to begin with, but nothing can stop them from growing and bearing fruit within a very short time indeed. For there is no natural development of good within the human heart – quite the reverse.

The fractious self-centredness of the baby kicking violently in his or her pram changes by clearly discernible stages into the calculated selfishness of the adult. For age, so far from removing that selfishness, serves only to give greater opportunity for its fuller and wider exercise. What begins as a tendency away from God, ends only too often in his total exclusion. If self takes up all the room there is in a person’s heart, what place is there left for God?