Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
God wills man to be free, but the emancipation of himself is in man's own hands.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Our convictions are the facts assured to us on the testimony of our own nature, our own senses, or our own reason.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Because one man is a fool, is that reason why his friend ... should not be wise? Because one man throws away a diamond, why his comrade should not pick it up and wear it on his finger?
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
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 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
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
Religion! you should have seen his face, he started at the word as if he had been shot.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Only a Ghost
The narrative of the Gospels may carry conviction to some minds, the testimony of the Church may take hold of and satisfy others, but if so, what is it that really convinces? It is the fact, or, if the expression be preferred, the idea of the Incarnation commending itself to the soul of man. That idea, looking upon the soul of man, bears its own guarantee with it, and thus, and thus only, through the head or through the heart, enchains consent.
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
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
It is a singular fact that men generally, and every man in particular, constantly endeavor to desert real life for one which is altogether artificial, artistic, and, in a word, ideal. The ideal is an image of perfection created by the soul itself.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
But if every positive sentiment is good and true, by the sole fact of its existence, it follows that a sentiment which contradicts another may be a good and a relative truth, inasmuch as it is the veritable expression of an individual conscience, but that it is also an evil and an error, inasmuch as it contradicts another sentiment, thought or will, which emanates, with the same titles, from another individual conscience.
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
In considering the right of man, we have had to treat him as an unit, but the state of separation is not that of the primitive existence of men. On the contrary, the first man alone could have risen into being outside of all social relations; every other man has been born in the bosom of a family, and therefore finds himself in the midst of a society already shaped; and, being unable to grow up without assistance, the association has maintained itself, and the ideas of those educated in it have been moulded by the organization.
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