SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES III

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

If God, placing the attributes of each man under the seal of an eternal limit, had said to him," Thus far shalt thou go, and no further," each man, enclosed within this insurmountable barrier, might have questioned the Divine Justice for having refused to him what was given to another. But God has, on the contrary, made the talents of one to be the property of all, so that "none of us liveth or dieth to himself," and has given to all an unlimited power of acquisition, for the purpose of perpetually assimilating the gifts of others.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


Art cannot become worn out; from change to change it will alter its type, but each type will be beautiful, and none will be exhaustive.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: change


The faculty of teaching freely is a right, for instruction is a duty.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: duty


Liberty is potential. To create a free being is to place before it the problem of its destiny.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: destiny


Thus there opens out to man a magnificent prospect of advance in the acquisition of truth, beauty and goodness; for if these are three aspects of the Ideal, three indefinite realities never to be attained in their entirety, because by their nature they are infinite, the progress of man in science, art and virtue is without possible limit.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: art


The times have been bad, the hay was black with rain, the corn did not kern well, the mottled cow dropped her calf, the tenants have not paid, and so my poor boy gets nothing but advice in bushels and exhortations in yards.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Urith

Tags: advice


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


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


Christ, comprehending in one the two natures, human and divine, being the union of the relative and the absolute, is therefore the living realization of that Ideal, infinite in itself, and infinite in each of its terms, which marks the phases of His eternal work. Mediator between the create and the uncreate, which are united in Himself, He is, in His Church, which is His body, the eternal harmonizer of all individual reasons in the unity of the Divine reason, or the Word made flesh, conceived and realized by the Spirit of infinite love, in whom all love is also universalized.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: love


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


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


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


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


If meditation be the affirmation of the existence of God--and meditation need not be lengthy, one rapid flash of thought is sufficient--to neglect it is practically to deny God.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: God


Many are the origins attributed to man in the various creeds of ancient and modern heathendom. Sometimes he is spoken of as having been made out of water, but more generally it is of earth that he has been made, or from which he has been spontaneously born. The Peruvians believed that the world was peopled by four men and four women, brothers and sisters, who emerged from the caves near Cuzco. Among the North American Indians the earth is regarded as the universal mother. Men came into existence in her womb, and crept out of it by climbing up the roots of the trees which hung from the vault in which they were conceived and matured; or, mounting a deer, the animal brought them into daylight; or, groping in darkness, they tore their way out with their nails.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters

Tags: Men


The drowning man may be saved by a plank or a rope, but there are circumstances in which plank or rope can not avail him. How much better for him to have learned that in himself is the principle of buoyancy.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: circumstances


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


Therefore science and religion are each necessary, the one to distinguish individualities, the other to bring individualities into unity.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: religion


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

Tags: God