Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
God, then, did not find in Himself any reason for creating. If the reason for creation were to be found in the nature of the Absolute, there would be no creation. The existence of the world is therefore irrational, for what can be more irrational than the idea of something added to perfection? Nevertheless the world exists. Reality is not rational, it is superior to reason.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The faculty of teaching freely is a right, for instruction is a duty.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The times have been bad, the hay was black with rain, the corn did not kern well, the mottled cow dropped her calf, the tenants have not paid, and so my poor boy gets nothing but advice in bushels and exhortations in yards.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
All things tend to unity. It is the universal law of life.
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
If meditation be the affirmation of the existence of God--and meditation need not be lengthy, one rapid flash of thought is sufficient--to neglect it is practically to deny God.
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
When the creature takes full possession of the liberty it has received it becomes a person.
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
Art cannot become worn out; from change to change it will alter its type, but each type will be beautiful, and none will be exhaustive.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Thus there opens out to man a magnificent prospect of advance in the acquisition of truth, beauty and goodness; for if these are three aspects of the Ideal, three indefinite realities never to be attained in their entirety, because by their nature they are infinite, the progress of man in science, art and virtue is without possible limit.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Time is duration; but duration without something to endure is an absurdity. There can be no time without something existing, whose relation to something else it expresses. Time has no proper existence, and separated from beings, is annihilated. Hence it follows that the infinity we attribute to time has no rational foundation. Infinite time is impossible, indefinite duration is possible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Liberty is potential. To create a free being is to place before it the problem of its destiny.
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 drowning man may be saved by a plank or a rope, but there are circumstances in which plank or rope can not avail him. How much better for him to have learned that in himself is the principle of buoyancy.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Belief is the distinguishing of the existent from the nonexistent, it is the predication of reality, and on this reality depends the possibility of reasoning.
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
To create is to love, to will the creature for itself. The creature is therefore willed as its own end. God wills that the creature should be. He wills it in the interest of the creature. He wills its good, and its good consists in the realization of its being.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Worship is the language of belief.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
In vain is it argued that we are to give up our private judgment to a revelation; we can only admit the authority of the revelation by an act of our individual judgment.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity