Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
Immorality is the negation of my higher nature; the affirmation of my animality alone and its opposition to my spirituality to the exclusion of the latter.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
But if every positive sentiment is good and true, by the sole fact of its existence, it follows that a sentiment which contradicts another may be a good and a relative truth, inasmuch as it is the veritable expression of an individual conscience, but that it is also an evil and an error, inasmuch as it contradicts another sentiment, thought or will, which emanates, with the same titles, from another individual conscience.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
The cravings of the soul of man before music and painting were discovered must have resembled the stutterings for impossible utterance in the dumb.
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