British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
At last, after many lives of striving, many lives of working, growing purer and nobler and wiser, life after life, the Soul makes a distinct and clear speaking forth of a will that now has grown strong; and when that will announces itself as a clear and definite purpose, no longer the whisper that aspires, but the word that commands, then that resolute will strikes at the gateway which leads to the Outer Court of the Temple, and strikes with a knocking which none may deny--for it has in it the strength of the Soul that is determined to achieve, and that has learned enough to understand the vastness of the task that it undertakes.
ANNIE BESANT
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In the Outer Court
So long as you feel yourself separate from others, so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long as you say "my" and "mine," so long the realisation of the Spirit is not yet possible for you.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
To the savage everything is divine; he hears one God's voice in the clap of the thunder, another's in the roar of the earthquake, he sees a divinity in the trees, a deity smiles at him from the clear depths of the river and the lake; every natural phenomenon is the abode of a god; every event is controlled by a god; divine volition is at the root of every incident. To him the rule of the gods is a stern reality; if he offends them they turn the forces of nature against him; the flood, the famine, the pestilence, are the ministers of the avenging anger of the gods.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Christian reader, do not be afraid to realise the future in which you say you believe, and which the God of Love has prepared for the home of some of his children. Imagine yourself, or any dear to you, plunged into guilt from which there is no redeemer, and where the voice cannot penetrate of him that speaks in righteousness, mighty to save. In the well-weighed words of a champion of Christian orthodoxy, think there is no reason to believe that hell is only a punishment for past offences; in that dark world sin and misery reproduce each other in infinite succession.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The various classes of orthodox Christian doctrines should be attacked in very different styles by the champions of the great army of free-thinkers, who are at the present day besieging the venerable superstitions of the past. Around the Deity of Jesus cluster many hallowed memories and fond associations; the worship of centuries has shed around his figure a halo of light, and he has been made into the ideal of Humanity; the noblest conceptions of morality, the highest flights of enlightened minds, have been enshrined in a human personality and called by the name of Christ; the Christ-idea has risen and expanded with every development of human progress, and the Christ of the highest Christianity of the day is far other than the Christ of Augustine, of Thomas à Kempis, of Luther, or Knox; the strivings after light, after knowledge, after holiness, of the noblest sons of men have been called by them a following of Jesus; Jesus is baptized in human tears, crucified in human pains, glorified in human hopes. Because of all this, because he is dear to human hearts and identified with human struggles, therefore he should be gently spoken of by all who feel the bonds of the brotherhood of man; the dogma of his Deity must be assailed, must be overthrown, because it is false, because it destroys the unity of God, because it veils from us the Eternal Spirit, the source of all things, but he himself should be reverently spoken of, so far as truthfulness permits, and this dogma, although persistently battled against, should be attacked without anger and without scorn.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Further, is it impossible to make Christians understand that were Jesus all they say he is, we should still reject him; that were God all they say He is, we would, in that case, throw back His salvation. For were this awful picture of a soul-destroying Jehovah, of a blood-craving Moloch, endowed with a cruelty beyond human imagination, a true description of the Supreme Being, then would we take the advice of Job's wife, we would "curse God and die?" we would hide in the burning depths of His hell rather than dwell within sight of Him whose brightness would mock at the gloom of His creatures, and whose bliss would be a sneer at their despair.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
We find amongst animals, as amongst men, power of feeling pleasure, power of feeling pain; we see them moved by love and by hate; we see them feeling terror and attraction; we recognize in them powers of sensation closely akin to our own, and while we transcend them immensely in intellect, yet, in mere passional characteristics our natures and the animals' are closely allied. We know that when they feel terror, that terror means suffering. We know that when a wound is inflicted, that wound means pain to them. We know that threats bring to them suffering; they have a feeling of shrinking, of fear, of absence of friendly relations, and at once we begin to see that in our relations to the animal kingdom a duty arises which all thoughtful and compassionate minds should recognize -- the duty that because we are stronger in mind than the animals, we are or ought to be their guardians and helpers, not their tyrants and oppressors, and we have no right to cause them suffering and terror merely for the gratification of the palate, merely for an added luxury to our own lives.
ANNIE BESANT
speech given at Manchester UK, October 18, 1897
For so reverent is God to that Spirit which is Himself in man, that He will not even pour into the human soul a flood of strength and life unless that soul is willing to receive it.
ANNIE BESANT
Esoteric Christianity
That is one reason for thinking hard—in order to think better. And the harder you think, the more will your thinking instrument improve.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
But even the most general ideas of God should not be forced on a childish mind; they should come, so to speak, by chance; they should be presented in answer to some demand of the child's heart; they should be inculcated by stray words and passing remarks; they should form the atmosphere surrounding the child habitually, and not be a sudden "wind of doctrine."
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
The Atonement is not only doubly unjust, but it is perfectly futile. We are told that Christ took away the sins of the world; we have a right to ask, "how?" So far as we can judge, we bear our sins in our own bodies still, and the Atonement helps us not at all. Has he borne the physical consequences of sin, such as the loss of health caused by intemperance of all kinds? Not at all, this penalty remains, and, from the nature of things, cannot be transferred. Has he borne the social consequences, shame, loss of credit, and so on? They remain still to hinder us as we strive to rise after our fall. Has he at least borne the pangs of remorse for us, the stings of conscience? By no means; the tears of sorrow are no less bitter, the prickings of repentance no less keen. Perhaps he has struck at the root of evil, and has put away sin itself out of a redeemed world? Alas! the wailing that goes up to heaven from a world oppressed with sin weeps out a sorrowfully emphatic, "no, this he has not done." What has he then borne for us? Nothing, save the phantom wrath of a phantom tyrant; all that is real exists the same as before. We turn away, then, from the offered atonement with a feeling that would be impatience at such trifling, were it not all too sorrowful, and leave the Christians to impose on their imagined sacrifice, the imagined burden of the guilt of the accursed race.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Most liberal thinkers agree in recognizing the fact that the duties of the State in the matter of education must, in the nature of things, be purely "secular:" that is to say, that while the State insists that the future citizen shall be taught at least the elements of learning, so as to fit him or her for fulfilling the duties of that citizenship, it has no right to insist on impressing on the mind of its pupil any set of religious dogmas or any form of religious creed. The abdication by the State of the pretended right of enforcing on its citizens any special form of religion, is not at all identical with the opposition by the State to religious teaching; It is merely a development of the very wise maxim of the great Jewish Teacher, to render the things of Caesar to Caesar, and the things of God to God. To teach reading, writing, honesty, regard for law, these things are Caesar's duties; to teach religious dogma, creed, or article, is entirely the province of the teachers who claim to hold the truth of God.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
A married woman loses control over her own body; it belongs to her owner, not to herself; no force, no violence, on the husband's part in conjugal relations is regarded as possible by the law; she may be suffering, ill, it matters not; force or constraint is recognized by the law as rape, in all cases save that of marriage; the law "holds, it to be felony to force even a concubine or harlot", but no rape can be committed by a husband on a wife; the consent given in marriage is held to cover the life, and if—as sometimes occurs—a miscarriage or premature confinement be brought on by the husband's selfish passions, no offence is committed in the eye of the law, for the wife is the husband's property, and by marriage she has lost the right of control over her own body. The English marriage law sweeps away all the tenderness, all the grace, all the generosity of love, and transforms conjugal affection into a hard and brutal legal right.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
In concentration, the consciousness is held to a single image; the whole attention of the Knower is fixed on a single point, without wavering or swerving.
ANNIE BESANT
Thought Power: Its Control and Culture
There is one obvious fact that throws into bright relief the absurdity of Prayer. Two people pray for exactly opposite things; whose Prayers are to be answered? Two armies ask for victory; which is to be crowned? Amongst ourselves, now, the Church is divided into two opposing camps, and while the Ritualists appeal to God for protection, the Evangelical clamour also for his aid. To which is he to bend his ear? which Prayer is he to answer? Both appeal to his promises; both urge that his honour is pledged to them by the word he has given; yet it is simply impossible that he should grant the Prayer of both, because the Prayer of the one is the direct contradiction of the prayer of the other.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Wise men, in modern times, are striving earnestly and zealously to, as far as possible, free religion from the cramping and deadening effect of creeds and formularies, in order that it may be able to expand with the expanding thought of the day.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
All Nature was sacred. God expressed Himself in every object, in every form. All that could be said was that through one form more of His glory came than through another. The form might be more or less transparent, but the inner radiant light was the same in all.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "The Place of Masters in Religions", June 23, 1907
In savage times marriage was a matter either of force, fraud, or purchase. Women were merchandise, by the sale of whom their male relatives profited, or they were captives in war, the spoil of the conqueror, or they were stolen away from the paternal home. In all cases, however, the possession once obtained, they became the property of the men who married them, and the husband was their "lord," their "master."
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
Yet that is the most splendid privilege of man, that the true birthright of the human Spirit, to know his own Divinity, and then to realise it, to know his own Divinity and then to manifest it.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophist, vol. 33
Liberty used to be regarded as a privilege bestowed, instead of as an inherent right; rights of classes have often been claimed: right to rule, right to tax, right to punish, all these have been argued for and maintained by force; but these are not rights, they are only wrongs veiled as legal rights.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be