Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
Liberty acting without motive is no more liberty, it is chance, and chance is another name for ignorance.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
God wills man to be free, but the emancipation of himself is in man's own hands.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Justice cannot be exerted in a vacuum where there is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Because one man is a fool, is that reason why his friend ... should not be wise? Because one man throws away a diamond, why his comrade should not pick it up and wear it on his finger?
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
The good, the true, and the beautiful, are three faces of the same ideal of perfection, the Infinite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Man is double, having an animal and a spiritual nature, at war with one another.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The idea of the supernatural is not a rational verity. It belongs to the sentiment which is the faculty of perceiving the infinite, whereas the reason is, by its nature, finite. God is perceived by the heart, not concluded by the mind.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Human authority may furnish conviction, but never certainty. Divine authority is immutable and infallible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The only knowledge man has of his thoughts is by their expression, consequently, every material being that can be conceived by the mind exists or can exist . He may imagine what is incongruous, as the sphinx. But his imagination is a piecing together of realities, not a creation out of nothing.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Power is the exercise of superior force against a body that resists. Suppress the idea of resistance, and the idea of power disappears.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Our convictions are the facts assured to us on the testimony of our own nature, our own senses, or our own reason.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The whole theory of Christian ethics is an application of the law of love as the link, and of reason as the differentiator. There are duties owed to God, to one's self, and to other men. The duty owed to God is the recognition of Him.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
I was fairly puzzled as I thought over all the divisions of the most learned Church in the most religious country in the world.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Only a Ghost
It is a singular fact that men generally, and every man in particular, constantly endeavor to desert real life for one which is altogether artificial, artistic, and, in a word, ideal. The ideal is an image of perfection created by the soul itself.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
If reason has never been able to found a religion which will bear criticism, it is because of this, that it begins with an undemonstrable hypothesis and ends in an hypothesis. Consequently, all attempts to prove the existence of God are convincing only to those already convinced.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Of love there are two sorts. The first is that whose highest manifestation is seen in the affection of the sexes. This is always egoistic. It arises from either sex being imperfect without the other; and it is the straining of one sex towards that other which will complete it, because alone it is unable to realize perfectly its nature.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Man and God being placed face to face, one as contingent, the other as absolute, the contingent lives as contingent and the absolute as absolute. To live as absolute, is to be at once the power and principle of life; to live as contingent is to live as effect, without ever being able to live as principle.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Christ, comprehending in one the two natures, human and divine, being the union of the relative and the absolute, is therefore the living realization of that Ideal, infinite in itself, and infinite in each of its terms, which marks the phases of His eternal work. Mediator between the create and the uncreate, which are united in Himself, He is, in His Church, which is His body, the eternal harmonizer of all individual reasons in the unity of the Divine reason, or the Word made flesh, conceived and realized by the Spirit of infinite love, in whom all love is also universalized.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
If we suppose for a moment that space exists, and that God placed the world in it, why did He place it in the spot it occupies instead of any other spot, all space being alike, and no one point being preferable to any other point? God acted without having a reason, for if space is, His choice of a place was arbitrary; but God cannot act irrationally. Therefore space is not.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity