“… only because of a dim sense of the supernatural existing within us, can we ever recognize the accent of the supernatural in the seer or the saint… any man or woman who has genuine experience of the inner life, and sufficient humility to realize the very low place most of us occupy on the great ladder of prayer, will, when they have found their place on that ladder, find that the advice of the mystics in respect of it always works. Those mystics are the true seat of authority for the conduct of the inner life, though not necessarily for anything else, for we must be careful to distinguish their accounts of spiritual experience from the explanations which they offer about it”:

Evelyn Underhill, “The Authority of Personal Religious Experience”[1925].

“Mysticism is the art of union with Reality:..above all else [it is] a Science of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out is a condition of being, not of seeing”

[Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People]

“One is oneself this piece of earth, this concoction of frailty, a momentary shadow upon the chaos of the accidental world” [ Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good ].

She also writes about “the deep dark logical injustice of forces which govern us at our most extreme moments”.

“As humans know themselves to dwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcending it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably exceeds all that they know to be – as the soul of the musician controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody, but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadences must play their part”: [Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism].

“Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence of all purification is self-simplification; the doing away of the unnecessary and unreal, the tangles and complications of consciousness”

[from Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism]

Some people regarded Bishop Ernest Barnes of Birmingham as a potty heretic. Here is how he was described by a fellow cleric:

“Tall, pallid with much study, with stooping shoulders, and a voice at once challenging and melancholy, he commands attention as well by his manner as by his opinions, which are almost insolently oppugnant to the general mind. He is a good man, but clearly a fanatic, and in a more disciplined age, could not possibly have avoided the stake”: H. H. Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (Oxford, 1943) II, p.272.