SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

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


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


Evil eyes look out for occasion, therefore give none.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Urith


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


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

Tags: reality


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


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


Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: mysteries


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


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


Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


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


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

Tags: conscience


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


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


Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: truth


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


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


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


In vain is it argued that we are to give up our private judgment to a revelation; we can only admit the authority of the revelation by an act of our individual judgment.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority