The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
presentment of the fundamental doctrines of Hindūism. They have been
taken up in school after school, adopted by prince after prince, so that
when the great Mussulmān ruler of Hyderabad in the Deccan wanted to give
his Hindū subjects Hindū education in the whole of the State schools,
he simply took these books and placed them in every school, so that the
Hindūs among his people might be instructed in their own faith. The same
thing was done by the English Government in the Princes’ College in
Rājputāna, because they found that secular education made princes who
were immoral and unfit to rule. During the last eight years these books
have spread everywhere, everywhere accepted and everywhere used. Do you
mean to tell me that the divisions among Christians are so much deeper
that they cannot do what the Hindūs have done, or that you have not more
on which you agree than on which you disagree; and that you could not
teach the children that in which you are united, and leave them in their
manhood or their womanhood to add the sectarian parts of the doctrines
for themselves? In India, to show you the effect of this, one of the
directors of public education asked me: “Cannot you write, Mrs. Besant,
a text-book for the Christians?” My answer was: “Yes, I could write it,
but I don’t think they would use it.” It must come from so recognised
Christian authority. I quite grant that a Theosophist would do it better
than anybody else, because the Theosophist has no quarrel with any form
of religious belief, and because the whole of his study leads him along
the lines of recognising the points of union rather than the points of
divergence; but it need not be done by a Theosophist, only by some one
with the spirit of Theosophy in him, and that only means the spirit of
the Divine Wisdom, of which every separate religion is an expression, so
that there ought to be no quarrel with any.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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