ABSTRACT
In 1877 Mrs Besant published her The Gospel of Atheism, in which she attempted to define her attitude. She begins by making it clear that the Atheist does not assert that there is no God, but that he merely declares that he has no conception of the meaning of God. “The Atheist neither affirms nor denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those cognized by human experience. Mrs Besant acknowledged the fact, and made only one alteration to her text: she corrected a passage in which she had said that Atheism asserts that there is no God. No attempt has been made to enter in any detail into Annie Besant’s gradually developing views, through Deism and Theism into Freethought and Atheism. Elsewhere Mrs Besant made a more reasoned attempt to justify Atheism as a positive creed. Mrs Besant’s approach to the problems of the soul, and of life and death, was similar.
