Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
Immorality is the negation of my higher nature; the affirmation of my animality alone and its opposition to my spirituality to the exclusion of the latter.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
All things tend to unity. It is the universal law of life.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
God, then, did not find in Himself any reason for creating. If the reason for creation were to be found in the nature of the Absolute, there would be no creation. The existence of the world is therefore irrational, for what can be more irrational than the idea of something added to perfection? Nevertheless the world exists. Reality is not rational, it is superior to reason.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Worship is the language of belief.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Belief is the distinguishing of the existent from the nonexistent, it is the predication of reality, and on this reality depends the possibility of reasoning.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Time is duration; but duration without something to endure is an absurdity. There can be no time without something existing, whose relation to something else it expresses. Time has no proper existence, and separated from beings, is annihilated. Hence it follows that the infinity we attribute to time has no rational foundation. Infinite time is impossible, indefinite duration is possible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity