Annie Besant

“ We ought to be ready to acknowledge, also, that there is love in nature, although there is cruelty too; there is the sunshine as well as the storm, and we must not fix our eyes on the darkness alone and deny the light. In mother-love, in the love of friends, loyal through all doubt, true in spite of danger and difficulty, strongest when most sorely tried, we see gleams of so divine, so unearthly a beauty, that our hearts whisper to us of an universal heart pulsating throughout nature, which, at these rare moments, we cannot believe to be a dream. ”

“ 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. "What if the sin perpetuates itself, if the prolonged misery may be the offspring of the prolonged guilt?" Ponder it well, and, if you find it true, then cast out from your creed the belief in a Jesus who loved the lost; blot out from your Bible every verse that speaks of a Father's heart; tear from your Prayer-books every page that prays to a Father in heaven. ”

“ Vain are all efforts of priestly coercion; vain all toils of inspired books; vain the utter sacrifice of reason and conscience; their labour is but lost when they strive to build a temple of human faith, strong enough to bear the long strain of time, or the earthquake-shock of grief. God only, by the patient guiding of His love, by the direct inspiration of His Spirit, can lay, stone by stone, and timber by timber, that priceless fabric of trust and love, which shall outlive all attacks and all changes, and shall stand in the human soul as long as His own Eternity endures. ”

“ But even as we are not atheists, although we deny the Godhead of Jesus, so are we not unbelievers in inspiration because we refuse to bend our necks beneath the yoke of an inspired Bible. For we believe in a God too mighty and too universal to be wrapped in swaddling clothes or buried in a cave, and we believe in an inspiration too mighty and too universal to belong only to one nation and to one age. As the air is as free and as refreshing to us as it was to Isaiah, to Jesus, or to Paul, so does the spiritual air of God's Spirit breathe so softly and as refreshingly on our brows as on theirs. ”

“ Law is around us on every side; man is placed in a realm of law; he may-strive against the laws which encircle him, but he will only dash himself to pieces against a rock; he is under a code which he breaks at his peril. Here is perfect justice, a justice absolutely unwavering, deaf to cries, unseducible by-flatteries, unalloyed by favouritism: a law exists, break it, and you suffer the inevitable consequences. So far, then, the orthodox argument is sound and strong, but now it takes a sudden leap. "The penalty of the broken law is hell." ”

“ Salvation? Yes, you need saviours, but the saviours must save you from earthly woes and not from the wrath of God; save yourselves, by thought, by wisdom, by earnestness. Redemption? yes, you need redeeming, but the redemption you want is from vice, from ignorance, from poverty, and must be wrought out by human effort. Prayer? yes, you need praying for, but the prayer you want is work compelling the result; not crying out for what you desire, but winning it by labour and by toil. The world stretches wide before you, capable of paying you a thousandfold for all you do for it. ”

“ Can any words be too strong whereby to denounce a doctrine so shameful, an injustice so glaring? A child is born into the world; it is no fault of his that he is conceived in sin; it is no fault of his that he is born in sin; his consent was not asked before he was ushered into the world; no offer was made to him which he could reject of this terribly gift of a condemned life; flung is he, without his knowledge, without his will, into a world lying under the curse of God, a child of wrath, and heir of damnation. "By nature he cannot have." ”

“ Never will they who truly love man be content to snatch at bliss for themselves while others suffer, or endure to be crowned with glory while they are crowned with thorns. Better, far better, to suffer in hell and share the pains of the lost, than to have a heart so hard, a nature so degraded, as to enjoy the bliss of heaven, rejoicing over, or even disregarding, the woes of hell. ”

“ True, Christians do not carry out into daily life these phrases and thoughts of their creed, but in so much as they do not they are the less Christian, and the more imbued with the spirit of Rationalism. Rationalists they are, the vast majority, six days in the week, and are only Christians on the Sunday. To come out of, these old world dreams into Rationalism is like coming into the open air after a hothouse. Rationalism clears away the terrible God of orthodoxy, the fall, the serpent, the Saviour, the hell, the devil. "Work, toil, struggle," it cries to man ”

“ Whatever "eclipse of faith" may await England, whatever darkness of most hopeless scepticism, whatever depth of uttermost despair of God, there is not only the hope, but the certainty of the resurrection of religion, if we all hold fast through the driving storm to the sheet-anchor of pure morality, to most faithful discharge of all duty towards man to love, and tenderness, and charity, and patience. Morality never faileth; but, whether there be dogmas, they shall fail; whether there be creeds, they shall cease; whether there be churches, they shall crumble away ”

“ The melancholy dirge which succeeds this chapter sounds like a wail of despair: man "hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." Can any teaching be more utterly unwholesome? It is the confession of the most complete helplessness, the recognition of the futility of toil. And then the agonised pleading: "O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death." ”

“ No amount of argument, however powerful, should make us believe a doctrine from which our hearts recoil with such shuddering horror as they do from this doctrine of eternal torture and eternal sin. There is a divine instinct in the human heart which may be trusted as an arbiter between right and wrong; no supernatural revelation, no miracle, no angel from heaven, should have power to make us accept as divine that which our hearts proclaim as vile and devilish. It is not true faith to crush down our moral sense beneath the hoof of credulity ”

“ To the righteous heart the agony of hell is a far worse one than physical torture could inflict: it is the existence of men and women who might have been saints, shut out from hope of holiness for evermore; God's children, the work of his hands, gnashing their teeth at a Father who has cast them down for ever from the life he might have given; it is Love everlastingly hated; good everlastingly trampled under foot; God everlastingly baffled and defied; worst of all, it is a room in the Father's house where his children may hunger and thirst after righteousness, but never, never, can be filled. ”

“ For what has been the result of theology upon the whole? It has turned men's eyes from earth, to fix them on heaven; it has bid them be careless of the temporal, while luring them to grasp at the eternal; it has induced multitudes to lavish fervent sentiment upon a conception framed by Priests of an incomprehensible God, while diverting their strength from the plain duties which Humanity has before it; it has taught them to live for the world to come, when they should live for the world around them; it has made earth's wrongs endurable with the hope of the glory to be revealed. ”

“ We, of the Western nations, at once put aside the Hindoo Vedas, or the Zendavesta, on certain solid grounds; we reject their claims to be inspired books because they contain error; their mistaken science, their legendary history, their miraculous stories, stamp them, in our impartial eyes, as the work of fallible men; the nineteenth century looks down on thee ancient writings as the instructed and cultured man smiles at the crude fancies and imaginative conceits of the child. But when the generality of Christians turn to the Bible they lay aside all ordinary criticism and all common-sense. ”

“ The day is gone by for these barbarous, though poetic, ceremonials; the "flesh and blood," which was a bold figure for the heat and light of the sun, becomes coarse when joined in thought to a human being; ceremonies that fitted the childhood of the world are out of place in its manhood, as the play that is graceful in the child would be despicable in the man; these rites are the baby-clothes of the world, and cannot be stretched to fit the stalwart limbs of its maturer age, cannot add grace to its form, or dignity to its graver walk. ”

“ If people trusted God, as they pretend to trust him—if the phrases of the Sunday were the practice of the week—if men believed that God's ways were higher than man's ways, and his thoughts than their thoughts—then no Prayer would ever ascend from earth to the "Throne of grace," and man would welcome joy and sorrow, peace and care, wealth and poverty, as wise men welcome nature's order, when the rain comes down to swell the seed for the harvest, and the sunshine glows down upon earth to burnish the golden grain. ”

“ To the Atonement we owe it that God is served by fear instead of by love, that monasticism holds its head above the sweet sanctities of love and home, that religion is crowned with thorns and not with roses, that the miserere and not the gloria is the strain from earth to heaven. The Atonement teaches men to crouch at the feet of God, instead of raising loving, joyful faces to meet his radiant smile; it shuts out his sunshine from us, and veils us in the night of an impenetrable dread. What is the sentiment with which Canon Liddon closes a sermon on the death of Christ? ”

“ Only as experience gradually proved that no evil consequences followed each amendment of nature, were natural forces withdrawn, one by one, from the sphere of the unknown and the divine. Now, even pain, that used to be God's scourge, is soothed by chloroform, and death alone is left for nature to inflict, with what lingering agony it may. But why should death, any more than other ills, be left entirely to the clumsy, unassisted processes of nature?—why, after struggling against nature all our lives, should we let it reign unopposed in death? There are some natural evils that we cannot avert. ”

“ It is not I who am responsible for an idea so anomalous. The orthodox escape from this dilemma by an assumption, thus: "God, to whom is to be traced back all spirit, created matter." Why, am I not equally justified in assuming, if I please, that matter created spirit? Why should I be logical in one argument and illogical in another? If we come to assumptions, have not I as much right to my assumption as my neighbour has to his? Why may he predicate creation of one half of the universe, and I not predicate it of the other half? ”

“ I should speak of all natural glory as but the reflection of the Deity, or as the robe in which He veils His infinite beauty; I should bid my children rejoice in all happiness as in the gift of a Father who delights in sharing His joy with His creatures; I should point out that the pain caused by ignorance of, or by breaking natural laws, is God's way of teaching men obedience for their own ultimate good: in the freedom and fulness of Nature's gifts I should teach them to see the equal love of God for all ”

“ Imagine what it is to be saved from the hands of him who inflicted an agony admitted to be unlimited, and who took advantage of an infinite capacity in order to inflict an infinite pain. It is well for the men before whose eyes this awful spectre has flitted that the fair humanity of Jesus gives them a refuge to fly to, else what but despair and madness could have been the doom of those who, without Jesus, would have seen enthroned above the wailing universe naught but an infinite cruelty and an Almighty foe. ”

“ Allowing to the full the honour due to the heroism of the nurse, what are we to say to the patient who accepts the sacrifice? What are we to think of the morality of a human being who, in order to preserve the miserable remnant of life left to him, allows another to shorten life? If we honour the man who sacrifices himself to defend his family, or risks his own life to save theirs, we must surely blame him who, on the contrary, sacrifices those he ought to value most, in order to prolong his own now useless existence. ”

“ Yet men fear to trust that Heart, lest it should cease beating; they fear to rest on God, lest He should play them false. When will they catch even a glimpse of that great ocean of love which encircles the universe as the atmosphere the earth, which is infinite because God is infinite? If there is no spot in the universe of which it can be said, "God is not here," then is there also no spot where love does not rule; if there is no life existing without the support of the Life-Giver and the Life-Sustainer, then is there also no life which is not cradled in the arms of Love. ”