British activist & theosophist (1847-1933)
Hitherto the supernatural has always been the makeweight of human ignorance; is it, in truth, this and nothing else?
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
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
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
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
Would to God that Christian men and women would ponder it well and think it out for themselves, and when they go into the worst parts of our great cities and their hearts almost break with the misery there, then let them remember how that misery is but a faint picture of the endless, hopeless, misery, to which the vast majority of their fellow-men are doomed.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
There is no suffering for him who has finished his journey, and abandoned grief, who has freed him self on all sides, and thrown off all fetters.
ANNIE BESANT
In the Outer Court
Men are apt to turn aside somewhat impatiently from an argument about the Nature and Existence of the Deity, because they consider that the question is a metaphysical one which leads nowhere; a problem the resolution of which is beyond our faculties, and the study of which is at once useless and dangerous; they forget that action is ruled by thought, and that our ideas about God are therefore of vast practical importance.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
It is said that there is no reason that we should not be contented in heaven while others suffer in hell, since we know how much misery there is in this world and yet enjoy ourselves in spite of the knowledge. I say, deliberately, of every one who does realise the misery of this world and remains indifferent to it, who enjoys his own share of the good things of this life, without helping his brother, who does not stretch out his hand to lift the fallen, or raise his voice on behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed, that that man is living a life which is the very antithesis of a Divine life--a life which has in it no beauty and no nobility, but is selfish, despicable, and mean. And is this the life which we are to regard as the model of heavenly beauty? Is the power to lead this life for ever to be our reward for self-devotion and self-sacrifice here on earth? Is a supreme selfishness to crown unselfishness at last? But this is the life which is to be the lot of the righteous in heaven. Snatched from a world in flames, caught up in the air to meet their descending Lord, his saints are to return with him to the heaven whence he came; there, crowned with golden crowns, they are to spend eternity, hymning the Lamb who saved them to the music of golden harps, harps whose melody is echoed by the curses and the wailings of the lost; for below is a far different scene, for there the sinners are "tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night."
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
For he who is love is God; he whose whole being is love is the image of the Supreme; in himself he reproduces the divinity, for Love is God and God is Love.
ANNIE BESANT
The Three Paths to Union with God
Everyone knows the beautiful story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. How this noble father led his child to the slaughter; how Isaac meekly submitted; how the farce went on till the lad was bound and laid on the altar, and how God then stopped the murder, and blessed the intending murderer for his willingness to commit the crime.
ANNIE BESANT
The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant
We dare not call ourselves spiritual until we have reached that point which none of us as yet has reached, for to reach it means to become a Christ.
ANNIE BESANT
lecture delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall, London, "Psychism and Spirituality", June 16, 1907
The Christian is taught to see in the bleeding Christ the victim slain in his own place; he himself should be hanging on that cross, agonised and dying; those nail-pierced hands ought to be his; the anguish on that face should be furrowed on his own; the weight of suffering resting on that bowed head should be crushing himself into the dust. In the simplest meaning of the words, Christ is the sinner's substitute, and on him the sin of the world is laid.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
Amongst many semi-barbarous nations the wives are still bought; in some parts of Africa the wooer pays a certain number of cows for his bride; in other places, money or goods are given in exchange. The point to be noted is that the wife is literally taken by force, or bought; she is not free to choose her husband; she does not give herself to him; she is a piece of property, handed over by her original owner—her father—to her new owner—her husband—in exchange for certain solid money or money's worth; hence she becomes the property of the man who has paid for her.
ANNIE BESANT
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be
There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life.
ANNIE BESANT
A Study in Consciousness
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; true faith believes in God only as a "Power which makes for Righteousness" and recks little of threats or curses which would force her to accept that which conscience disapproves. And what is more, if it were possible that God were not what we dream, if he were not "righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works," then were it craven cowardice to worship him at all.
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
Is the wrath of God against humanity justified by the circumstances of the case, so that we may be obliged to own that some sacrifice was due from sinful man to his Creator, to propitiate a justly incensed and holy God? I trow not. On this first count, the Atonement is a fearful injustice. For God has allowed men to be brought into the world with sinful inclinations, and to be surrounded with many temptations and much evil. He has made man imperfect, and the child is born into the world with an imperfect nature. It is radically unjust, then, that God should curse the work of His hands for being what He made them, and condemn them to endless misery for failing to do the impossible.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
If men would try to read nature instead of revelation, if they would study natural laws and leave revealed laws, if they would follow human morality instead of ecclesiastical morality, then there might be some chance of real improvement for the race, and some hope that the Divine Voice in Nature might be heard above the babble of the Churches.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
In stately harmony all Nature moves, evolving link after link of the endless chain, each link bound firmly to its predecessor, and affording, in its turn, the same support to its successor.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism
We will admit, for argument's sake, the Deity of Jesus, in order that we may thus see the more distinctly that a mediator of any kind between God and man is utterly uncalled for. It is mediation, in itself, that is wrong in principle; we object to it as a whole, not to any special manifestation of it. Divine or human mediators, Jesus or his mother, saint, angel, or priest, we reject them each and all; our birthright as human beings is to be the offspring of the Universal Father, and we refuse to have any interloper pressing in between our hearts and His.
ANNIE BESANT
My Path to Atheism