SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

Of love there are two sorts. The first is that whose highest manifestation is seen in the affection of the sexes. This is always egoistic. It arises from either sex being imperfect without the other; and it is the straining of one sex towards that other which will complete it, because alone it is unable to realize perfectly its nature.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: sex


Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


Just as every man must see for himself, so every man must believe for himself. Acceptation of truth is a purely personal, individual act.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


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

Tags: desert


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

Tags: God


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

Tags: authority


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


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

Tags: belief


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

Tags: art


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 notion of the first man having been of both sexes till the separation, was very common. He was said to have been male on the right side and female on the left, and that one half of him was removed to constitute Eve, but that the complete man consists of both sexes.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters


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


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

Tags: love


Certain of the angels having fallen, God made men, that they might take their vacated places.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters

Tags: angels


Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


And as we perceive that virtue assumes a multitude of diverse forms, this variety discovered in intelligent beings convinces us that the most perfect Being is He who unites in Himself the greatest number, or the sum total, of all these perfections.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: variety


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 commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


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