SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES VI

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

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


Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


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


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


Before the Fall, wheat grew to a tree with leaves like emeralds. The ears were red as rubies and the grains white as snow, sweet as honey, and fragrant as musk. Eve ate one of the grains and found it more delicious than anything she had hitherto tasted, so she gave a second grain to Adam. Adam resisted at first, according to some authorities for a whole hour, but an hour in Paradise was eighty years of our earthly reckoning. But when he saw that Eve remained well and cheerful, he yielded to her persuasions, and ate of the second grain which Eve had offered him daily, three times a day, during the hour of eighty years.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters

Tags: leaves


Religion! you should have seen his face, he started at the word as if he had been shot.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost


As those things affording animal pleasure are necessary to the well-being of the body, so are those things yielding intellectual or moral delight necessary for the perfecting of the spirit.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: pleasure


Reason is a faculty for extracting truth out of materials provided by the sentiment.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


In considering the right of man, we have had to treat him as an unit, but the state of separation is not that of the primitive existence of men. On the contrary, the first man alone could have risen into being outside of all social relations; every other man has been born in the bosom of a family, and therefore finds himself in the midst of a society already shaped; and, being unable to grow up without assistance, the association has maintained itself, and the ideas of those educated in it have been moulded by the organization.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: family


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

Tags: facts


Society is the theatre, obligatory for the emancipation and development of the creative power in man. To reject social life is to deprive ourselves of the power of profiting by the experience of the past and the present.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: power


God, the infinite Being, arrives at the finite only through the eternal Word, the mediating moment; the creature, or the finite, can only lift itself towards the infinite by means of the same mediator.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


My dear sir, if we only talked about what we understood, our conversation would be extremely limited.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost

Tags: conversation


That personal autocracy is the destruction of religion is evident from the nature of the case; it is the negation of absolute law, and may be called personal theocracy or autotheism, for the individual thereby assumes a right and supremacy which is not the subordination of God to man, but the annihilation of God before the individual man.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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

Tags: authority


Take a man, place him outside of all society, leave him to his own inspirations; he will do a little more than will an animal born at the same time, but he will not advance far in the study of the world and the appropriation of material for his use. He will begin like the first man, by taking the first step in civilization. If men were to succeed one another in isolation, each would be learning the alphabet of experimental truths, and none would be able to put the letters together into practical rules.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: civilization


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


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

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle see His banners go!

SABINE BARING-GOULD

"Onward Christian Soldiers"

Tags: Jesus


Our parents were then driven out of Paradise, and one leaf alone was given to each, wherewith to hide their nakedness.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters

Tags: paradise