Anglican priest & novelist (1834-1924)
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
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
Before the Fall, wheat grew to a tree with leaves like emeralds. The ears were red as rubies and the grains white as snow, sweet as honey, and fragrant as musk. Eve ate one of the grains and found it more delicious than anything she had hitherto tasted, so she gave a second grain to Adam. Adam resisted at first, according to some authorities for a whole hour, but an hour in Paradise was eighty years of our earthly reckoning. But when he saw that Eve remained well and cheerful, he yielded to her persuasions, and ate of the second grain which Eve had offered him daily, three times a day, during the hour of eighty years.
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
Worship is the language of belief.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The only knowledge man has of his thoughts is by their expression, consequently, every material being that can be conceived by the mind exists or can exist . He may imagine what is incongruous, as the sphinx. But his imagination is a piecing together of realities, not a creation out of nothing.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
As those things affording animal pleasure are necessary to the well-being of the body, so are those things yielding intellectual or moral delight necessary for the perfecting of the spirit.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
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
Time commences with mutable things; if they perish, it perishes with them.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
The faculty of teaching freely is a right, for instruction is a duty.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
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
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
Every religion is the expression of a want of man's spiritual nature, however uncouth or exaggerated may be the form it assumes. This uncouthness or exaggeration is due to negation of correlative wants. The want itself is the strain after a truth, the hunger of the spiritual nature. The Incarnation assumes to satisfy every one of these wants, and therefore must become a web, of which all philosophies are the warp, and all religions are the woof.
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
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
Evil is the rejection of the infinite for the finite.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud, and honor unto Christ the King,
This through countless ages men and angels sing.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
"Onward Christian Soldiers"
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