SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

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


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

Tags: nature


Many are the origins attributed to man in the various creeds of ancient and modern heathendom. Sometimes he is spoken of as having been made out of water, but more generally it is of earth that he has been made, or from which he has been spontaneously born. The Peruvians believed that the world was peopled by four men and four women, brothers and sisters, who emerged from the caves near Cuzco. Among the North American Indians the earth is regarded as the universal mother. Men came into existence in her womb, and crept out of it by climbing up the roots of the trees which hung from the vault in which they were conceived and matured; or, mounting a deer, the animal brought them into daylight; or, groping in darkness, they tore their way out with their nails.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters

Tags: Men


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


Christ is not simply God and man, but is God-man indivisibly and simultaneously; that is to say, He is at once the infinite, or the idea of the divine personality, and the finite, or the idea of the created personality. In Him the two personalities are not only welded together, and brought into reciprocal communion, but are emphasized and distinguished at the same time. Without Him the Absolute could not have called the finite into existence, for there would be no mode of passage from the timeless and spaceless, the imponderable and immaterial Being to matter, subject to extension, duration, and gravitation; apart from Him man could not enter into relation with God, for he would be the finite dislocated from the infinite, without connecting bridge.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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

Tags: evil


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


Freedom consists in the exercise of the will in overthrowing every opposition which restrains the development of the nature of the creature.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: exercise


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


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 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

Tags: property


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


The good, the true, and the beautiful, are three faces of the same ideal of perfection, the Infinite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: perfection


If prayer be the affirmation of the link between God and man, to neglect prayer is to disallow the link; and the link severed, the two personalities are opposed and become actively hostile, so that the idea of God is destroyed or at least is passively ignored.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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


Between the essential infinity and the realized finality there is opposition of natures; they are radically inverse. Nevertheless the finite is possible, because the infinite is.

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


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


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


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