Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
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
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
Worship is the language of belief.
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
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
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
There is this peculiarity about the pleasure derived from the beautiful, that when raised to the highest pitch it sharpens into pain, acute and exquisite—pain which is itself a delight, produced by the strain of the soul to grasp and assimilate the perfect.
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
If man refused to believe those truths which were not made evident to his reason, he could not live among his fellows, nor could he make the slightest progress in civilization.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
The whole theory of Christian ethics is an application of the law of love as the link, and of reason as the differentiator. There are duties owed to God, to one's self, and to other men. The duty owed to God is the recognition of Him.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
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
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
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