SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES V

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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


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

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost


Supreme happiness to reason, that is the Ideal of the intellect, is the attainment of certainty upon every subject and about all things.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: happiness


Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.

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


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


Because one man is a fool, is that reason why his friend ... should not be wise? Because one man throws away a diamond, why his comrade should not pick it up and wear it on his finger?

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Urith

Tags: fool


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


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


Man and God being placed face to face, one as contingent, the other as absolute, the contingent lives as contingent and the absolute as absolute. To live as absolute, is to be at once the power and principle of life; to live as contingent is to live as effect, without ever being able to live as principle.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


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


Every religion is the expression of a want of man's spiritual nature, however uncouth or exaggerated may be the form it assumes. This uncouthness or exaggeration is due to negation of correlative wants. The want itself is the strain after a truth, the hunger of the spiritual nature. The Incarnation assumes to satisfy every one of these wants, and therefore must become a web, of which all philosophies are the warp, and all religions are the woof.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: nature


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


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


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


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

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


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


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


Evil is the rejection of the infinite for the finite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity