Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
The first natural right man has in society is that of disposing freely of his person. It is the most sacred property in the world. Of what use is any other property, if between it and you is an impenetrable wall.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
Christ is not simply God and man, but is God-man indivisibly and simultaneously; that is to say, He is at once the infinite, or the idea of the divine personality, and the finite, or the idea of the created personality. In Him the two personalities are not only welded together, and brought into reciprocal communion, but are emphasized and distinguished at the same time. Without Him the Absolute could not have called the finite into existence, for there would be no mode of passage from the timeless and spaceless, the imponderable and immaterial Being to matter, subject to extension, duration, and gravitation; apart from Him man could not enter into relation with God, for he would be the finite dislocated from the infinite, without connecting bridge.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Duty is the faculty of doing freely, and if necessarily, forcibly, that which is imposed on man by God. It is a dogma, and must be accepted as an irrational verity. We can have our rights and demand liberty on no other condition.
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
Justice cannot be exerted in a vacuum where there is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Liberty acting without motive is no more liberty, it is chance, and chance is another name for ignorance.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Thus man believes in truths of two kinds, in those of absolute certainty through direct conviction, and in those of comparative certainty through conviction of the trustworthiness of the authority which propounds them.
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
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
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
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
Power is the exercise of superior force against a body that resists. Suppress the idea of resistance, and the idea of power disappears.
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
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
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