Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
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
Every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The desire to love is the impulsion of the soul towards the Ideal, it is the sense of the indefinite, the perfect. It is also insatiable, for the perfect is always on the horizon, never attainable.
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
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
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
Reason starts from itself to return to itself.
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
The God of reason cannot be the object of religion.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Hitherto Christianity has leaned, or has been represented as leaning, on authority--on the authority of an infallible text, or of an inerrable Church. The inadequacy of either support has been repeatedly demonstrated, and as the props have been withdrawn, the faith of many has fallen with a crash.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
But the right of might is not a right, it is the violation of right; and the obligation to obey the strongest is not a duty, it is a physical necessity. It is playing with words to call that a right which is a faculty growing and waning with the power which imposes it, and that a duty which is necessary submission to a power against which resistance is vain.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Every logical act of the intellect is an assertion that something is.
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
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
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
What then is Error? It is nothing per se. It is the opposition of one relative truth against another to the exclusion of the latter.
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