SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


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

Tags: liberty


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

Tags: time


Christ is not simply God and man, but is God-man indivisibly and simultaneously; that is to say, He is at once the infinite, or the idea of the divine personality, and the finite, or the idea of the created personality. In Him the two personalities are not only welded together, and brought into reciprocal communion, but are emphasized and distinguished at the same time. Without Him the Absolute could not have called the finite into existence, for there would be no mode of passage from the timeless and spaceless, the imponderable and immaterial Being to matter, subject to extension, duration, and gravitation; apart from Him man could not enter into relation with God, for he would be the finite dislocated from the infinite, without connecting bridge.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


That Eve was Adam's second wife was a common Rabbinic speculation; certain of the commentators on Genesis having adopted this view to account for the double account of the creation of woman in the sacred text--first in Genesis i. 27, and secondly in Genesis ii. 18; and they say that Adam's first wife was named Lilith, but she was expelled from Eden, and after her expulsion Eve was created.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters


Therefore science and religion are each necessary, the one to distinguish individualities, the other to bring individualities into unity.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: religion


The first natural right man has in society is that of disposing freely of his person. It is the most sacred property in the world. Of what use is any other property, if between it and you is an impenetrable wall.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: property


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

Tags: God


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

Tags: God


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

Tags: God


Hell's foundations quiver
At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices,
Loud your anthems raise.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

"Onward Christian Soldiers"

Tags: praise


Curiosity, is a movement of the soul towards Truth, which it seeks to assimilate by Knowledge. It is the first step in the direction of Certainty.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: knowledge


Scholasticism is the least incomplete, when, starting from revelation, it rests unshaken on its divine foundation, and never deserts the formulae of absolute verity.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


Man has no knowledge of things except by the thoughts present to his mind; that is, he can only know what is thinkable.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: knowledge


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

Tags: imagination


There is not a single right to be discovered without a duty from which it springs.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: duty


Worship is the language of belief.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: belief


The liberty of the creature is at once alienable and inalienable; alienable because it depends on the will of the creature, and inalienable because it is absolutely willed by the Creator. It is alienable in fact, but inalienable by right. Natural right is the will of God, as it expresses itself in the essence of our reason, which is His workmanship. And as God alone is absolute, no pretended positive has any authority to contravene a natural right proceeding from Him.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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

Tags: chance


God, the principle and the end of all, gives Himself to all to multiply indefinitely His gifts one by the other, and to distribute them, thus inimitably augmented, through each to all. Associated in this work of universal solidarity, we reunite all the scattered fragments of God's perfection manifested in ourselves.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: perfection