Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
Worship is the language of belief.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.
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
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
To create is to love, to will the creature for itself. The creature is therefore willed as its own end. God wills that the creature should be. He wills it in the interest of the creature. He wills its good, and its good consists in the realization of its being.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
The notion of the first man having been of both sexes till the separation, was very common. He was said to have been male on the right side and female on the left, and that one half of him was removed to constitute Eve, but that the complete man consists of both sexes.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
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
Freedom consists in the exercise of the will in overthrowing every opposition which restrains the development of the nature of the creature.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
There is not a single right to be discovered without a duty from which it springs.
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
Man has no knowledge of things except by the thoughts present to his mind; that is, he can only know what is thinkable.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The cravings of the soul of man before music and painting were discovered must have resembled the stutterings for impossible utterance in the dumb.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
It is not the place or authority of Church or Bible to strangle reason, defy criticism, and fetter inquiry, for reason is a faculty given to man by God for the purpose of criticizing, and thereby distinguishing error, so that he may reject it; and of inquiring, so that he may find truth under the veil which ignorance or error has cast over it. The place of the Church is to declare authoritatively to every man that his own partial view and individual judgment are not the whole truth, and the complete measure of truth, but that the whole truth is the syncretism of all partial aspects.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The narrative of the Gospels may carry conviction to some minds, the testimony of the Church may take hold of and satisfy others, but if so, what is it that really convinces? It is the fact, or, if the expression be preferred, the idea of the Incarnation commending itself to the soul of man. That idea, looking upon the soul of man, bears its own guarantee with it, and thus, and thus only, through the head or through the heart, enchains consent.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity