Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
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
Worship is the language of belief.
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
Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Evil is the rejection of the infinite for the finite.
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
Reason is dependent on faith, and faith is helpless without reason. A belief of some sort underlies every system of thought. If we bore as deep as we can through systems, the deepest thing we reach is an undemonstrable thesis, which is accepted and believed in as a verity. It is the primary substance which is unaffected by the most corrosive acid so long as it remains uncombined.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
That Eve was Adam's second wife was a common Rabbinic speculation; certain of the commentators on Genesis having adopted this view to account for the double account of the creation of woman in the sacred text--first in Genesis i. 27, and secondly in Genesis ii. 18; and they say that Adam's first wife was named Lilith, but she was expelled from Eden, and after her expulsion Eve was created.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
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
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
If prayer be the affirmation of the link between God and man, to neglect prayer is to disallow the link; and the link severed, the two personalities are opposed and become actively hostile, so that the idea of God is destroyed or at least is passively ignored.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Supreme happiness to reason, that is the Ideal of the intellect, is the attainment of certainty upon every subject and about all things.
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 notion of the first man having been of both sexes till the separation, was very common. He was said to have been male on the right side and female on the left, and that one half of him was removed to constitute Eve, but that the complete man consists of both sexes.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets and Other Old Testament Characters
The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Before the world was, God was the Absolute, inconceivable save as being. We cannot attribute to Him any quality, for qualities are inconceivable apart from matter.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Evil eyes look out for occasion, therefore give none.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
Man has no knowledge of things except by the thoughts present to his mind; that is, he can only know what is thinkable.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity