Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
The method by which Nature proceeds is invariable. First she watches over the conservation of the individualities she has called out, then she takes care of the species to which they belong, and lastly, she assigns to all their places and their functions in the scale of creatures. Thus, she introduces into the world duration, stability, and unity.
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
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
Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
"Onward Christian Soldiers"
Individuality, the more emphasized it is, the better it is for the social welfare; for individuality is the perfecting of a member of the whole body. Of course, if one be emphasized at the expense of others, there is wrong done to, and injury sustained by, the body; but the perfection of solidarity will consist in the simultaneous development to its highest pitch of the individuality of every member of society.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The idea so prevalent that man without woman, or woman without man, is an imperfect being, was the cause of the great repugnance with which the Jews and other nations of the East regarded celibacy.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
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
Every logical act of the intellect is an assertion that something is.
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
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
When we say that God is infinite, we do not mean that He is of immeasurable size and duration, but that He is beyond all space and time. He is neither in space nor in time; for this reason He is eternal and infinite, and therefore He is also incomprehensible.
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
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
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
In this is the great weakness of Protestantism. In their impatience of the authority of the Church, the reformers threw the proof of Christianity on a collection of documents bound together; they assumed it to be infallible, and its authors to be inspired—a claim not put forth by the authors themselves for writings which they never intended to serve as demonstrations of the faith.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Man cannot possibly be absolute, he is altogether partial and relative. The good, the beautiful, and the true to one man may be very different from the good, the beautiful, and the true to another man, but the aspect seen by each man is an aspect of the Absolute. One aspect alone, if insisted on to the negation and exclusion of other aspects, is erroneous—erroneous inasmuch as it negatives and excludes, but in itself it is true. To recompose the whole body of truth, it is necessary to accept every aspect, and to weave them together into an indissoluble unity.
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
If Ahab had no weak places in his armour, the bow drawn at a venture would not have sent an arrow to him with death at the point. No bluebottles are bred where carrion is not found.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
That which mankind wanted, and wants still, is not new truths, but the co-ordination of all aspects of the truth.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity