Religious Problem in India

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 12

THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA
Look at Arabia, Arabia where there is a fierce and cruel idolatry that even offers up human beings in sacrifice to idols, and where the worshippers feast on the bodies of the dead; where lust has taken the place of human love, and utter licentiousness the place of family life; where bitter and bloody wars break out on the slightest provocation; where kinsman slays kinsman and neighbor neighbor, and life is almost too foul for words.
Into that seething hell of human passion, murder, lust and cruelty a Child is born. He "opens his innocent eyes on the light” on the 29th August 570 A.D. in Mecca, born of the Quraish clan. A few weeks cre his birth his father had died—his father who in the full bloom of his manhood had been given up by his own father as a human sacrifice, and whose life was saved as it were by a miracle by the mouth of the temple priestess, who bade that the youth should be spared. The widowed mothier, widowed but a few weeks, gives birth to the child, and then when a few brief years are over, follows her hnsband to the grave. In his grandfather's house he grows up, a quiet, silent child, loving, gentle, patient, beloved by all. A few years more, and the grandfather dies. An uncle, Abū Tālil), noblest among luis kinsmen, takes him orphaned, doubly, trebly orphaned, to his home, and there lie grows up to youthful manhood. Then he goes travelling, in trade, in commerce, through Syria, and watching with grave deep eyes the scenes that ro on around him. Fonr and twenty years have passed over his head, and he has been travelling in