My Path to Atheism. Annie Besant

of slavery and low descent; then, groping after his meaning, they exclaim, "We have one Father, even God," and he—whom we know as the tenderest preacher of that Father's universal love—surely he gladly catches at their struggling appreciation of his favourite topic, and fans the hopeful spark into a flame? Yes! Jesus of Nazareth would have done so. But Jesus, "according to St. John," turns fiercely on them, denying the sonship he elsewhere proclaims, and retorts, "Ye are of your father, the devil." And this to men who "believed on him;" this from lips which said, "One is your Father," and He, in heaven. He argues next with the Pharisees, and we find him arrogantly exclaiming: "all that ever came before me were thieves and robbers." What, all? Moses and Elijah, Isaiah and all the prophets? At length, after he has once more repulsed some inquirers, the Jews take up stones to stone him, as Moses commanded, because "thou makest thyself God." He escapes by a clever evasion, which neutralises all his apparent assertions of Divinity. "Other men have been called gods, so surely I do not blaspheme by calling myself God's son." Never let us forget that in this gospel, the stronghold of the Divinity of Jesus, Jesus himself explains his strongest assertion "I and my Father are one" in a manner which can only be honest in the mouth of a man.* We pass to the celebrated "last discourse." In this we find the same peculiar style, the same self-assertion, but we must note, in addition, the distinct tritheism which pervades it. There are three distinct Beings, each necessarily deprived of some attribute of Divinity: thus, the Deity is Infinite, but if He is divided He becomes finite, since two Infinites are an impossible absurdity, and unless they are identical they must bound each other, so becoming finite. Accordingly "the Comforter" cannot be present till Jesus departs, therefore neither Jesus nor the Comforter can be God, since God is omnipresent. Since, then, prayer is to be addressed to Jesus as God, the low theory of tri-theism, of a plurality of Gods, none of whom is a perfect God, is here taught. In this discourse, also, the Christian horizon is bounded by the figure of Jesus, the office of the Comforter is sub-servient to this one worship, "he shall glorify me." Jesus, at last, prays for his disciples, markedly excluding from his intercession "the world" he was said to have come to save, and, as throughout this gospel, restricting all his love, all his care, all his tenderness to "these, whom Thou hast given me." Here we come to the essence of the spirit which pervades this whole gospel. "I pray for them; I pray not for the world: not for them who are of their father the devil, nor for my betrayer, the son of perdition." This is the spirit which Christians dare to ascribe to Jesus of Nazareth, the tenderest, gentlest, widest-hearted man who has yet graced humanity. This is the spirit, they tell us, which dwelt in his bosom, who gave us the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son. "No," we answer, "this is not the spirit of the Prophet of Nazareth, but" (Dr. Liddon will pardon the appropriation) "this is the temper of a man who will not enter the public baths along with the heretic who has dishonoured his Lord."

      * "For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy;

       and because that thou being a man makest thyself God." Jesus

       answered them, "Is it not written in your law, I said, ye

       are gods? If he called them gods unto whom the word of God

       came (and the scripture cannot be broken), say ye of him

       whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world,

       Thou blasphemest, because I said I am the son of God?"

      This is the spirit of the writer of the gospel, not of Jesus: the egotism of the writer is reflected in the words put into the mouth of his master; and thus the preacher of the Father's love is degraded into the seeker of his own glory, and bearing witness of himself, his witness becomes untrue. I must also draw attention to one or two cases of unreality attributed to Jesus by this gospel. He prays, on one occasion, "because of the people who stand by:" he cries on his cross, "I thirst," not because of the burning agony of crucifixion, but in order "that the Scriptures might be fulfilled:" a voice answers "his prayer," "not because of me, but for your sakes." This calculation of effect is very foreign to the sincere and open spirit of Jesus. Akin to this is the prevarication attributed to him, when he declines to accompany his brethren to Judaea, but "when his brethren were gone up then went he also up to the feast, not openly but as it were in secret." All this strikes us strangely as part of that simple, fearless life.

      We reject this gospel, sixthly, for the cruel spirit, the arrogance, the self-assertion, the bigotry, the unreality, attributed by it to Jesus, and we denounce it as a slander on his memory and an insult to his noble life.

      We may, perhaps, note, as another peculiarity of this gospel—although I do not enter here into the argument of the divinity of Jesus—that when Dr. Liddon, in his celebrated Bampton Lectures, is anxious to prove the Deity of Jesus from his own mouth, he is compelled to quote exclusively from this gospel. Such a fact as this cannot be overlooked, when we remember that "St. John's gospel is a polemical treatise" written to prove this special point. We cannot avoid noting the coincidence.

      We have now gone through this remarkable record and examined it in various lights. At the outset we conceded to our opponents all the advantage which comes from admitting that the gospel may be written by the Apostle John; we have left the authorship a moot point, and based our argument on a different ground. Apostolic or non-apostolic, Johannine or Corinthian, we accept it or reject it for itself, and not for its writer. We have found that all its characters speak alike in a marked and peculiar style—a style savouring of the study rather than the street, of Alexandria rather than Jerusalem or Galilee. We have glanced at its immoral partiality. We have noted the numerous discrepancies between the history of this gospel and that of the three synoptics. We have discovered it to be equally opposed to them in morals as in history: in doctrine as in morals. We have seen that, while it degrades God to enthrone Jesus in His stead, it also degrades Jesus, and so lowers his character that it defies recognition. Finally, we have found it stands alone in supporting the Deity of Jesus from his own mouth.

      I know not how all this may strike others; to me these arguments are simply overwhelming in their force. I tear out the "Gospel according to St. John" from the writings which "are profitable" "for instruction in righteousness." I reject it from beginning to end, as fatally destructive of all true faith towards God, as perilously subversive of all true morality in man, as an outrage on the sacred memory of Jesus of Nazareth, and as an insult to the Justice, the Supremacy, and the Unity of Almighty God.

ON THE ATONEMENT.

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      THE Atonement may be regarded as the central doctrine of Christianity, the very raison d'être of the Christian faith. Take this away, and there would remain indeed a faith and a morality, but both would have lost their distinctive features: it would be a faith without its centre, and a morality without its foundation. Christianity would be unrecognisable without its angry God, its dying Saviour, its covenant signed with "the blood of the Lamb:" the blotting out of the Atonement would deprive millions of all hope towards God, and would cast them from satisfaction into anxiety from comfort into despair. The warmest feelings of Christendom cluster round the Crucifix, and he, the crucified one, is adored with passionate devotion, not as martyr for truth, not as witness for God, not as faithful to death, but as the substitute for his worshippers, as he who bears in their stead the wrath of God, and the punishment due to sin. 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 inta 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: as Luther expressed it, he "is the greatest and only sinner;" literally "made sin" for mankind, and expiating the guilt which, in very deed, was transferred from man to-him.

      I wish at the outset, for the sake of justice and candour, to acknowledge frankly the good which has been drawn forth by the preaching of the Cross. This good has been, however, the indirect rather than the direct result of a belief in the Atonement. The doctrine, in itself, has nothing elevating about it,