Chapter III A Verses 56-57
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She has had no chance to Love unless she first renounced the 
respect of society, and found a way to drive the wolf of hunger 
from her door.
Her chance is come! In any Abbey of Thelema any woman is 
welcome; there she is free to do her will, and held in honour for 
the doing. The child of love is a star, even as all are stars; but such 
an one we specially cherish; it is a trophy of battle fought and 
won!
57. Despise also all cowards; professional soldiers who dare not 
fight, but play; all fools despise!
Commentary: To fight is the right and duty of every male, as 
of every woman to rejoice in his strength and to honour and per­
petuate it by her love. My primary objection to Christianity is 
“gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” the pacifist, the conscientious 
objector, the Tolstoyan, the “passive resister.” When the Kaiser 
fled, and the Germans surrendered their fleet, they abandoned 
Nietzsche for Jesus. Rozhdestvenskii and Cervera took their fleets 
out to certain destruction.1 The Irish revolutionists of Easter 
Week, 1916, fought and died like men; and they have established 
a tradition.1 2
1 [In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, Vice Admiral Z. P. Rozh­
destvenskii led the Siberian Fleet into the Battle of Tsushima against 
impossible odds and lost. In 1898 Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete 
acted similarly, and lost, at the Battle of Santiago during the Spanish- 
American War.]
2 [In the Easter Rising, Irish revolutionaries briefly seized the General 
Post Office in Dublin. Its anniversary, April 24, is the date most 
revered by the Irish Republican Army.]
3 [Isaiah 50:7, paraphrase.]
“Jesus” himself, in the legend, “set his face as a flint to go to 
Jerusalem,”3 with foreknowledge of his fate. But Christians have 
not emphasized that heroism since the Crusades. The sloppy sen­
timental Jesus of the Sunday-school is the only survivor; and the 
War killed him, thank Ares!
When the Nonconformist Christian churches, especially in 
America, found the doctrine of Eternal Punishment no longer