Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
If Catholicism be the principle of inclusion, Protestantism is the principle of exclusion. The first is the system of conciliation of all verities, the second is the opposition of all verities to their mutual exclusion.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Curiosity, is a movement of the soul towards Truth, which it seeks to assimilate by Knowledge. It is the first step in the direction of Certainty.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
What is all creation but an aspiration towards what it presupposes, the Infinite, from the atom to the globes that revolve in space, from the mineral to the man?
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
Before the world was, God was the Absolute, inconceivable save as being. We cannot attribute to Him any quality, for qualities are inconceivable apart from matter.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
The only knowledge man has of his thoughts is by their expression, consequently, every material being that can be conceived by the mind exists or can exist . He may imagine what is incongruous, as the sphinx. But his imagination is a piecing together of realities, not a creation out of nothing.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The faculty of teaching freely is a right, for instruction is a duty.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The free creature can alone say of itself "I am." In a word, the free creature is the only one with veritable being.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
God is not a person in the human sense, which is exclusive of other personalities. He is immutable, all-inclusive, absolutely free, intelligent and loving, that is, He is personal, because the world exists, and by its existence He becomes relative.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
If God had designed to work a miracle, it may justly be argued, He would certainly have given, or suffered to be acquired, a preliminary knowledge of the laws on which the miraculous derogation would take effect. But man, even now, knows so little of the world, that he is at all moments arrested by facts in disaccord with those laws which he does know, facts which are only explained by laborious study, and a more profound exploration of the nature of things. Moreover, a miracle which took place at a certain place, at a certain time, and which was to serve all humanity, must have been subjected to several or some witnesses. But the testimony of men, of history, of tradition, is never infallible; and the guarantee to us of the fact of the miracle is a fallible guarantee after all.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
After his fall, Satan took to himself four wives, Lilith and Naama the daughter of Lamech and sister of Tubal-Cain, Igereth and Machalath. Each became the mother of a great host of devils, and each rules with her host over a season of the year; and at the change of seasons there is a great gathering of devils about their mothers.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
Some of the angels by an act of free will obeyed the will of God, and in such obedience found perfect happiness; other angels by an act of free will rebelled against the will of God, and in such disobedience found misery.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
In the family, from the first, the idea of authority has appeared. Protection and order are requisites of the family; and these cannot exist without recognition of an authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity