Evelyn Underhill - Soul Quotes

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Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.

Evelyn Underhill
Though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit — merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.

Evelyn Underhill
Much is now being said about evangelism; but before we get effective evangelism, we have to get effective evangelists. Evangelism is useless unless it is the work of one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God. New machinery, adaptations and adjustments, are not the first need... but more devoted, adoring, sacrificial souls.

Evelyn Underhill
No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge soul unstained.

Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God...

Evelyn Underhill
The first question here, then, is not "What is best for my soul?" nor is it even "What is most useful to humanity?" But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?

Evelyn Underhill
In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.

Evelyn Underhill
A saint is simply a human being whose soul has... grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response to its environment, God. He has achieved a deeper, bigger life than the rest of us, a more wonderful contact with the mysteries of the Universe; a life of infinite possibility, the term of which he never feels that he has reached.

Evelyn Underhill
The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.

Evelyn Underhill
The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.

Evelyn Underhill
Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.

Evelyn Underhill
Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality... The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him.

Evelyn Underhill
Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own.

Evelyn Underhill