Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
"Onward Christian Soldiers"
Man cannot possibly be absolute, he is altogether partial and relative. The good, the beautiful, and the true to one man may be very different from the good, the beautiful, and the true to another man, but the aspect seen by each man is an aspect of the Absolute. One aspect alone, if insisted on to the negation and exclusion of other aspects, is erroneous—erroneous inasmuch as it negatives and excludes, but in itself it is true. To recompose the whole body of truth, it is necessary to accept every aspect, and to weave them together into an indissoluble unity.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
To consider reason to be hostile to revelation is to regard God as divided against Himself, labouring to destroy His own work. Reason is a gift of God and faith is a gift of God. Each has its own sphere.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
No man or corporation has a right to employ any man without giving him the equivalent of his labor.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
In ethics, the conscience judges, according to a sliding scale; what it judges at one time to be admissible and good, it decides, as its experience grows, or as circumstances alter, to be inadmissible and bad. That which was right one day is wrong the next, for as conscience grows, its perception strengthens, and it discriminates with greater acuteness; its powers of analysis increase, not for the purpose of dividing and opposing, but for the purpose of reducing what is divided and opposed to unity.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Reason starts from itself to return to itself.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The idea so prevalent that man without woman, or woman without man, is an imperfect being, was the cause of the great repugnance with which the Jews and other nations of the East regarded celibacy.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
Every logical act of the intellect is an assertion that something is.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
When we say that God is infinite, we do not mean that He is of immeasurable size and duration, but that He is beyond all space and time. He is neither in space nor in time; for this reason He is eternal and infinite, and therefore He is also incomprehensible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Prayer is the assertion of the two personalities, the personality of God and that of the suppliant. It is the affirmation of the existence of a link uniting the two individualities.
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 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
In this is the great weakness of Protestantism. In their impatience of the authority of the Church, the reformers threw the proof of Christianity on a collection of documents bound together; they assumed it to be infallible, and its authors to be inspired—a claim not put forth by the authors themselves for writings which they never intended to serve as demonstrations of the faith.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
TRUTH, such as it appears to us, can only be relative, because we ourselves, being relative creatures, have only a relative perception and judgment. We appreciate that which is true to ourselves, not that which is universally true. And truth may well assume an aspect to one different from that it assumes to another.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
It must not be supposed that women, as they are now, are at all comparable to Eve in her pristine beauty.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
Properly speaking, the name of God is not to be given to the Absolute before creation; the Absolute is the only philosophical name admissible, and that is unsatisfactory, for it is negative; but the idea of God before matter was must be incomprehensible by material beings.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The God of reason cannot be the object of religion.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
If Ahab had no weak places in his armour, the bow drawn at a venture would not have sent an arrow to him with death at the point. No bluebottles are bred where carrion is not found.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
Although the drizzle was excluded by roof and walls from the house, the moisture-charged atmosphere could not be shut out, and it made the interior only less wretched than outside the house.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
We say that science is in its infancy; it will never become decrepit, for if truth be infinite, there will always be new aspects of it to be discovered.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity