Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
If reason has never been able to found a religion which will bear criticism, it is because of this, that it begins with an undemonstrable hypothesis and ends in an hypothesis. Consequently, all attempts to prove the existence of God are convincing only to those already convinced.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The idea of the supernatural is not a rational verity. It belongs to the sentiment which is the faculty of perceiving the infinite, whereas the reason is, by its nature, finite. God is perceived by the heart, not concluded by the mind.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
There is this peculiarity about the pleasure derived from the beautiful, that when raised to the highest pitch it sharpens into pain, acute and exquisite—pain which is itself a delight, produced by the strain of the soul to grasp and assimilate the perfect.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Hell's foundations quiver
At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices,
Loud your anthems raise.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
"Onward Christian Soldiers"
Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Of love there are two sorts. The first is that whose highest manifestation is seen in the affection of the sexes. This is always egoistic. It arises from either sex being imperfect without the other; and it is the straining of one sex towards that other which will complete it, because alone it is unable to realize perfectly its nature.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
God, then, did not find in Himself any reason for creating. If the reason for creation were to be found in the nature of the Absolute, there would be no creation. The existence of the world is therefore irrational, for what can be more irrational than the idea of something added to perfection? Nevertheless the world exists. Reality is not rational, it is superior to reason.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
That we may be able to profit by the experience of others, we are endowed with an instinct adapted to the purpose of drawing us into the company of our fellows--this is the social instinct.
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
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
Human authority may furnish conviction, but never certainty. Divine authority is immutable and infallible.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
I was fairly puzzled as I thought over all the divisions of the most learned Church in the most religious country in the world.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Only a Ghost
The whole theory of Christian ethics is an application of the law of love as the link, and of reason as the differentiator. There are duties owed to God, to one's self, and to other men. The duty owed to God is the recognition of Him.
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
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
If we suppose for a moment that space exists, and that God placed the world in it, why did He place it in the spot it occupies instead of any other spot, all space being alike, and no one point being preferable to any other point? God acted without having a reason, for if space is, His choice of a place was arbitrary; but God cannot act irrationally. Therefore space is not.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
Belief is the distinguishing of the existent from the nonexistent, it is the predication of reality, and on this reality depends the possibility of reasoning.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity