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
Supposing that to be done for the whole of the Empire wherever Christians
are found, see how enormous would be the gain; and it would not be
so difficult. There are certain doctrines you all accept if you are
Christian at all: you would only have to put those into a rational,
intelligible form, and then gather from your own Scriptures the verses
which support and give them authority to all who look on those Scriptures
as authoritative. I have had in my mind an idea that may possibly
be carried out, of trying whether it would not be possible to write
a Universal Text-Book of Religion and Morals, with texts from every
Scripture of the great religions, from all the Bibles of mankind, drawing
the authority in support of the universal doctrine, and in that way
making a book that Christian and Hindū, Parsī, Buddhist and Mussulmān
could use; for all their Scriptures might be quoted in support of the
general doctrine, and each might then add its own specific teachings to
that great broad foundation, showing the real Brotherhood of faiths.
That is a dream, but I think it may become a reality.
Along that line, then, in our education we must have religious teaching,
in order that we may have a firm foundation for morals. With regard to
other teaching, what would grow out of the principle of the State being
a great family, with children of many ages and varying capacities that
ought to be equally trained? There would grow up a system of education
in which one broad common basis would be given to every child alike up
to about the age of ten or eleven years, and then there would come a
differentiation according to the capacities of the children. You would
no longer, when a child has musical capacity, insist that that child
shall get a smattering of three or four other arts, so that he is not
good in any one, but only superficial in all. If you saw musical ability
you would let the other points go, and music would form the predominant
part of the education of such a child. If you found power of colour,
power of form, then along the plastic or the painting art the child would
have developed his natural capacity; and slowly and gradually you would
learn that the power of art must pass into the handicrafts of the nation,
and that large numbers of your boys and girls should be trained to the
handicraft as against the machine-made product; because there you have
the possibility of general beauty coming back to life, and there alone
will the sense of beauty be cultivated throughout the nation. Where you
see the tendency is literary, there you should not insist, especially as
you do with girls still, that they should all play a little music, and
all do a little drawing, and all learn a little singing; you would let
all that go, and you would cultivate the literary faculty where you found
it, and make that the special point of this more specialised education.
Where you found the scientific faculty, there you would make that the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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