SABINE BARING-GOULD QUOTES IV

Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)

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

Tags: property


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

Tags: nature


Religion! you should have seen his face, he started at the word as if he had been shot.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost


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

Tags: nature


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

Tags: God


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


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


God, the infinite Being, arrives at the finite only through the eternal Word, the mediating moment; the creature, or the finite, can only lift itself towards the infinite by means of the same mediator.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity


Curiosity, is a movement of the soul towards Truth, which it seeks to assimilate by Knowledge. It is the first step in the direction of Certainty.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: knowledge


Worship is the language of belief.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: belief


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

Tags: time


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

Tags: duty


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


Of authority there are two sorts, the authority of right, and the authority of force.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity

Tags: authority


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

Tags: evil


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


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


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


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


My dear sir, if we only talked about what we understood, our conversation would be extremely limited.

SABINE BARING-GOULD

Only a Ghost

Tags: conversation