X.

TRUE AND FALSE CONCEPTIONS OF

THE ATONEMENT.*

1894.†

PREFATORY.

THIS volume presents to us an object of considerable interest. It inspires sympathy with the writer, not only as a person highly gifted, but as a seeker after truth, although it is to be regretted that at a particular point of the narrative the discussion borders on the loathsome. Indeed, it becomes hard to conceive by what mental process Mrs. Besant can have convinced herself, that it was part of her mission as a woman to open such a subject as that of the Ninth Chapter, in the face of the world, and in a book meant for popular perusal. Instruction will be derived from the work at large; but probably not exactly the instruction intended by the authoress. Her readers will find that they are expected to feel a lively interest in her personality: and, in order that this interest may not be disappointed, they will find her presented to their view in no less

* Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century.

Annie Besant: an Autobiography' (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894).

than three portraitures, at different portions of the volume. They will also find, that the book is a spiritual itinerary, and that it shows with how much at least of intellectual ease, and what unquestioning assumptions of being right, vast spaces of mental travelling may be performed. The stages are, indeed, glaringly in contrast with one another; yet their violent contrarieties do not seem at any period to suggest to the writer so much as a doubt whether the mind, which so continually changes in attitude and colour, can after all be very trustworthy in each and all its movements. This uncomfortable suggestion is never permitted to intrude; and the absolute self-complacency of the authoress bears her on through tracts of air buoyant and copious enough to carry the Dircæan swan. Mrs. Besant passes from her earliest to her latest stage of thought as lightly, as the swallow skims the surface of the lawn, and with just as little effort to ascertain what lies beneath it. An ordinary mind would suppose that modesty was the one lesson which she could not have failed to learn from her extraordinary permutations; but the chemist, who shall analyse by percentages the contents of these pages, will not, I apprehend, be in a condition to report that of such an element he can find even the infinitesimal quantity usually and conveniently denominated a "trace." Her several schemes of belief, or non-belief, appear to have been entertained one after another, with the same undoubting confidence, until the junctures successively arrived for their not regretful, but rather contemptuous, rejection. They are nowhere based upon reasoning, but they rest upon one and the same authority-the authority of Mrs. Besant. In the general absence of argument, to explain the causes of her movements, she apparently

thinks it sufficient to supply us with her three portraits, as carrying with them sufficient attestation. If we ask upon which of her religions, or substitutes for religion, we are to place reliance, the reply would undoubtedly be, upon the last. Yes; but who is to assure us that it will be the last? It remains open to us to hope, for her own sake, that she may yet describe the complete circle, and end somewhere near the point where she began.

Religion had a large share in the interests of Mrs. Besant's early childhood; and at eight years old she received a strongly Evangelical bent. She is sensible of having been much governed by vanity at this period of her life, while she does not inform us whether this quality spontaneously disappeared, or what had become of it in the later stages. It can hardly be made matter of reproach to Mrs. Besant that such early years did not supply her with her final standing-ground; or that, like most of the other highly gifted pupils in the school popularly known as Evangelical, she felt herself irre sistibly impelled to an onward movement. She came to rejoice, as so many more have done, in the great conception of a Catholic Church lasting through the centuries; † "the hidden life grew stronger," and the practice of weekly communion, nay, even that of self-chastisement, was adopted. In retrospect, she perceives that the keynote of her life has been a "longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self." When she

married, at the age of twenty, she "had no more idea of the marriage relation than if she had been four years old." The supremacy of the new form given to her religious ideas is not very well defined, nor is there any + Page 57.

* Page 45.

† Page 56.

intelligible account of the process through which it was summarily put upon its trial. She informs us, indeed, that she went up to the sources, and made herself acquainted with the Fathers of the Christian Church. It would be interesting to know what were her opportunities, or what was the extent of the girl's patristic reading.* Suffice it to say that it has not left the smallest trace upon the matter or spirit of this volume. And, indeed, that a reader of the early Fathers should present to us, as agreeable to the teaching "of the Churches," that utterly modern caricature of the doctrine of the Atonement which will presently be cited, is a solecism which, along with a multitude of other solecisms, we must leave it to her readers to examine. As for Mrs. Besant she is frankly astonished at the amount of her own religiosity, and she accepts with apparent acquiescence the remark of her dying father,† that "darling Annie's only fault was being too religious." In all her different phases of thought, that place in the mind where the sense of sin should be, appears to have remained, all through the shifting scenes of her mental history, an absolute blank. Without this sense, it is obvious that her Evangelicalism and her High Churchism were alike built upon the sand, and that in strictness she never quitted what she had never in its integrity possessed. Speaking generally, it may be held that she has followed at all times her own impulsions with an entire sincerity; but that those impulsions have been wofully dislocated in origin, spirit, and direction, by an amount of egregious self-confidence which is in itself a guarantee of failure in mental investigations.

After a physical crisis, brought about by the sufferings of a child in illness, her religion received a shock which it had not strength to survive. She resolved carefully and thoroughly to examine its dogmas one by one; * and she addressed herself, by a process which she does not describe, to four propositions, which, as she states, are assailed by "the steadily advancing waves of historical and scientific criticism." The propositions are: †

1. The eternity of punishment after death.

2. The meaning of goodness and love, as applied to a God who had made this world with all its sin and misery.

3. The nature of the Atonement of Christ, and the justice of God in accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious righteousness from the sinner.

4. The meaning of inspiration as applied to the Bible, and the reconciliation of the perfections of the Author with the blunders and immoralities of the work.

These propositions were rejected by the young lady not long out of her teens. But lest we should resent her reticence as to the method in which she fulfilled her plan of systematic examination, she gives us this assurance: "Looking back I cannot but see how orderly was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first terrible earthquake." ‡

Still, beyond this authoritative notice, we have not the smallest tittle of evidence to show either, first, that any of the propositions were ever subjected to any serious examination at all, or even, secondly, that any pains were taken to verify them as propositions really incorporated in that teaching of "the Churches" with which she was resolved to deal. It is hardly needful to observe that, to allege such incorporation, with respect