Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
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
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
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
Worship is the language of belief.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The method by which Nature proceeds is invariable. First she watches over the conservation of the individualities she has called out, then she takes care of the species to which they belong, and lastly, she assigns to all their places and their functions in the scale of creatures. Thus, she introduces into the world duration, stability, and unity.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Religion! you should have seen his face, he started at the word as if he had been shot.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Only a Ghost
If God, placing the attributes of each man under the seal of an eternal limit, had said to him," Thus far shalt thou go, and no further," each man, enclosed within this insurmountable barrier, might have questioned the Divine Justice for having refused to him what was given to another. But God has, on the contrary, made the talents of one to be the property of all, so that "none of us liveth or dieth to himself," and has given to all an unlimited power of acquisition, for the purpose of perpetually assimilating the gifts of others.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
Of authority there are two sorts, the authority of right, and the authority of force.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
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
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
The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.
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
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
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