SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

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


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

Tags: circumstances


Duty is the faculty of doing freely, and if necessarily, forcibly, that which is imposed on man by God. It is a dogma, and must be accepted as an irrational verity. We can have our rights and demand liberty on no other condition.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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


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


Consequently our idea of the Deity is that of the archetype of our own minds.

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

Tags: exercise


Thus man believes in truths of two kinds, in those of absolute certainty through direct conviction, and in those of comparative certainty through conviction of the trustworthiness of the authority which propounds them.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: conviction


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


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


If there be an axiom evident to all, it is this, that liberty is a first necessity of existence.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: liberty


Worship is the language of belief.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: belief


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 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


Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: mysteries


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


Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud, and honor unto Christ the King,
This through countless ages men and angels sing.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

"Onward Christian Soldiers"

Tags: angels


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


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

Tags: music