SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

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


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


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


Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


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


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


Consequently our idea of the Deity is that of the archetype of our own minds.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


That Eve was Adam's second wife was a common Rabbinic speculation; certain of the commentators on Genesis having adopted this view to account for the double account of the creation of woman in the sacred text--first in Genesis i. 27, and secondly in Genesis ii. 18; and they say that Adam's first wife was named Lilith, but she was expelled from Eden, and after her expulsion Eve was created.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters


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

Tags: music


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


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


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


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


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


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


Worship is the language of belief.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: belief


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

Tags: exercise


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


Between the essential infinity and the realized finality there is opposition of natures; they are radically inverse. Nevertheless the finite is possible, because the infinite is.

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

Tags: perfection