Annie Besant

“ Hateful and enemies of man are they, all these innumerable Gods. Love-worthy! it is blasphemy against Love to soil it by joining it to their names. "Whether these immense offers of religion are all genuine", is apparently a matter of small moment from Miss Cobbe's point of view. Yet on their genuineness must depend all their value. If they are not genuine, then the smallest gift of science, art, politics, commerce, or friendship, is more precious than the huge frauds of religion. The man who gives me a pound enriches me more than the man who promises me a million and gives me naught. ”

“ Miss Cobbe may ask. Death in old age, when life is fully lived, should lose much of the sadness it wears when it cuts short the thread of happy days. And annihilation is surely better than the life in torture which religions have offered to the world. Better the death of the beloved than the thought of agony after death. I am aware that Miss Cobbe believes in immortality but not in hell; that she regards all as "doomed to be saved". We are not all dowered with Miss Cobbe's facility for believing in pleasant things because we desire them. For many of us evidence must precede belief. ”

“ Even if Miss Cobbe points to her bête noire, vivisection, as an instance of scientific cruelty, she should remember that if her God had not devised frightful diseases for the torture of men and of brutes, scientists would not need to inflict passing pain to win permanent cure for pain; and that the human vivisector at his very worst limps far far behind the divine vivisector, who daily strews his mangled mutilated victims over the torture-trough of earth, till every forest is stained with blood and every sea and river is sobbing with incalculable pain. ”

“ But it is well to note the cool assumption that Atheism is "darkness". Whether it be darkness or not is the question at issue; to the Atheist the world is "dark with Gods", and as these awful shadows pass, the sunshine of hope and of love illumines the saddened earth. Nothing is proved by Miss Cobbe's assumption that Atheism is darkness, nor by mine that Atheism is light. ”

“ Another bestial tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling down the weaker in the mad struggle for wealth: how and when has religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present civilisation?
All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not eradicated them, but Science by tracing them to their source in our brute ancestry has explained them and has shown them in their true light. ”

“ It plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at them a thousandth part of their own product as "charity". It builds hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled superstructure founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey hopeless misery of the poor. ”

“ The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar and of arch, but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter echo the majestic music of Wagner and of Beethoven, and the teachers of the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and the wonders of the world. ”

“ It is the special and unique character of religion to deal with the whole of human nature, all our pleasures and pains and duties and affections and hopes and fears, here and hereafter. It offers to the intellect an explanation of the universe (true or false we need not now consider) ; and pointing to heaven, it responds to the most eager of its questions. ”

“ Will he be stronger there or better, that he should set right in that world the wrongs he has permitted here? Will he have changed his mind, or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in its hopelessness. ”

“ Miss Cobbe takes for her text some words of Mr. Justice Stephen on religion:
"We can get on very well without one; for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy. . . . The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. Love, friendship, ambition, science, literature, art, politics, commerce, professions, trades, and a thousand other matters, will go equally well, as far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state." ”

“ It is of the true source of inspiration for sculpture and painting. I allege that nature is the only source of inspiration for the graphic arts. Human, brute, vegetable, mineral, forms of beauty—on these alone can the sculptor and the painter draw. The existence of God, the immortality of the human soul, cannot affect the artist's materials. ”

“ Atheism will utilise, not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall hereafter be consecrated for Man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich color, its stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy subdued twilight soothing as "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land?" ”

“ There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as "the final goal of ill", and believing that that goal will be reached the sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward. ”

“ The masses and oratorios are at present more popular, partly because they are better known, partly because, being inferior, they are better understood by the majority, and chiefly because the religious words "cast a glamor over" the music, and make people fancy that they are performing a work of piety while listening to them. Amusement flavored with religion has a special charm for persons superficially religious and inwardly world-loving. But architecture, at least, it is urged, owes its greatness to religion. ”

“ These exist, whether or not there be a God; an invisible, incorporeal being is not well adapted to serve as model for sculptor or painter; souls may wield the chisel and the brush beyond the grave, but it is the human brain and the human hand that guide them here. ”

“ All their present parade of virtue is worthless; "full-blooded Theism" is as far off as "full-blooded Atheism". Theists are virtuous members of society, not because they love virtue, but because they are forced into outward decency by their ancestral "forty generations of Christians", and the pressure of Christianity around them. Miss Cobbe's Theism and my Atheism are both products of modern thought. Her arguments against the morality of the one tell with fatal force against the morality of the other. ”

“ And better, a thousandfold better, the sweet trust of human friendship, the priceless wealth of human sympathy, the tenderness, the peace, the perfect joy of human love, than any dream of some non-human, supernatural, unsympathetic Supreme Being, unsympathetic because sympathy implies fellow-feeling and equality, and these can never be between Man and God. ”

“ Only when they disappear will men perceive how the two thoughts—of this world as God's world and of ourselves as Immortal beings—have, between them, lighted up in rainbow hues the dull plains of earth. When they fade away, all things, Nature, Art, Duty, Love, and Death, will seem to grow grey and cold. Everything which casts a glamor over life will be gone." I meet this argument by denying the truth of Miss Cobbe's view of earth as well as by objecting to "glamor". The plains of earth are not dull ”

“ The Atheist desires personal perfection not only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature and each strengthening of the higher is a gain for all, and not for himself alone. If, however, by "aspiration" Miss Cobbe only means mere futile longing after good apart from effort to realise it, that will certainly disappear with the invertebrate folk who feel it, as the race grows stronger and more rational. ”

“ It is not necessary to be either unfortunate oneself or a very 'poor creature' to feel that the wrongs and agonies of this world of pain are absolutely intolerable unless we can be assured that they will be righted hereafter; that 'there is a God who judgeth the earth', and that all the oppressed and miserable of our race, aye, and even the tortured brutes, are beheld by him. ”

“ But even Miss Cobbe might deign to consider that it was scarcely worth while to waste fifteen pages of the Contemporary Review in solving a grotesque problem, and that the pains she takes to frighten people from Atheism prove that to her it is far more likely that intellectual people will accept it than her insolent parable would imply.
Religion, it seems, is the sun: friendship, science, art, commerce, and politics, are only "moonlike things". ”

“ Or is the moral law evolved by Miss Frances Power Cobbe out of her own inner consciousness to be the law for all humanity?
"It offers to the heart an absolutely love-worthy being as the object of its adoration." Which being? I have never yet met a love-worthy God. The Jahveh of the Jews is detestable. The "Father" of the Christians burns the majority of his children for ever. The God of the Theist has invented the struggle for existence, and looks on unmoved at the immense misery of the world when he might by a word turn all its mourning into joy. ”

“ Those of us who find joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows, who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it—we need no paltry payment after death for our life's labor, for in that labor is its own "exceeding great reward". ”

“ Miss Cobbe's blind and ignorant hatred of Science comes out strongly in this passage; the "survival of the fittest" in the struggle for existence is a fact which has underlain past progress; the weak sentimentalist may shriek over the truth, but the thoughtful prefer to recognise a fact as a fact. Miss Cobbe should at least remember, as a Theist, that her God is responsible for the sad truth, and that he deliberately chose that progress should only be possible through struggle and death. But Science does not say that this struggle need continue ”

“ Nor do poetry, music, and architecture, need religion for their inspiration now, any more than they have needed it in the past. Belief in God is no more necessary to great poetry than is belief in fairies or in magic, although poets have long used Gods, fairies, and witchcraft as part of their machinery, and will probably continue to do so for many a day to come. ”

“ Wild rose and clematis, mayflower and harebell, wood-sorrel and violet, have hues as lovely and more lasting than those of the rainbow, while earth's garlands fling on the breezes a fragrance that the colored mist of heaven cannot rival. ”

“ No one can argue who is incapable of appreciating the opponent's position, and Miss Cobbe cannot appreciate the Atheistic position if she thinks it comparable to that of her ignorant old woman. I pass the intolerable impertinence of her assumption that her opponents are ignorant fools, as much below herself in knowledge and intelligence as the woman referred to was below the average man and woman; it is one of the results of religion, this intense and arrogant self-conceit. ”

“ Private prayer will be given up, of course, when belief in God has vanished, and "with aspiration, repentance, and prayer renounced and forgotten", Miss Cobbe considers that the "inner life" will be made "easy". My blinded eyes fail to see why a man's life should become ignobly easy because he is forced to be self-reliant instead of being dependent on God. A child's legs do not grow strong if he is allowed to walk with the support of leading-strings or of a "go-cart". They grow strong when he is left to trust to them only for support. ”

“ So far from Science teaching us to remorselessly crush down the unfit, Science teaches us not only how to render the unfit more fit to-day, but by laying bare the causes of unfitness she teaches us how to prevent unfitness to-morrow. ”

“ National rivalries have often grown out of the rivalries of national Gods. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God", quoth Jahveh of the Hebrews, and the bloodiest wars waged by the human race have been the wars waged in the name of God. The "Holy War" has ever been a war of extermination, whether undertaken by the Moabites for Chemosh, by the Hebrews for Jahveh, by the Christians for Christ. ”