Quotes from baring gould sabine ii

The drowning man may be saved by a plank or a rope, but there are circumstances in which plank or rope can not avail him. How much better for him to have learned that in himself is the principle of buoyancy.

Liberty is potential. To create a free being is to place before it the problem of its destiny.

Beauty warms, and Truth illumines.

Immorality is the negation of my higher nature; the affirmation of my animality alone and its opposition to my spirituality to the exclusion of the latter.

Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.

If there be an axiom evident to all, it is this, that liberty is a first necessity of existence.

Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.

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.

Art cannot become worn out; from change to change it will alter its type, but each type will be beautiful, and none will be exhaustive.

Liberty acting without motive is no more liberty, it is chance, and chance is another name for ignorance.

I was fairly puzzled as I thought over all the divisions of the most learned Church in the most religious country in the world.

Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.

To consider reason to be hostile to revelation is to regard God as divided against Himself, labouring to destroy His own work. Reason is a gift of God and faith is a gift of God. Each has its own sphere.

Life is not a mere exterior movement, the movement of the being in its relations to other beings, but it is also, and especially, an internal movement from the visible to the invisible, from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite.

Just as every man must see for himself, so every man must believe for himself. Acceptation of truth is a purely personal, individual act.

By the conception of Christ as the eternal equation of the finite and the infinite, one obtains a clear notion of the grandeur of the mystery of mediation . He is not merely the regenerator of man, He is the peacemaker between man and man, man and all nature, and man and God; the link between man and man, and man and nature, and man and God.

Worship is the language of belief.

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.