The Burning Fire of Love

They all know, as Richard of St Victor said, that the Fire of Love “burns.”  We have not fulfilled our destiny when we have sat down at a safe distance from it, purring like overfed cats, ‘suffering is the ancient law of love’—and its highest pleasure into the bargain, oddly enough....  A sponge cake and milk religion is neither true to this world nor to the next.  As for the Christ being too august a word for our little hardships—I think it is truer that it is “so” august as to give our little hardships a tincture of Royalty once we try them up into it.  I don’t think a Pattern which was ‘meek & lowly’ is likely to fail of application to very humble and ordinary things.  For most of us don't get a chance “but” the humble and ordinary: and He came that we might all have life more abundantly, according to our measure.  There that’s all!

– Evelyn Underhill, correspondence to Margaret Robinson, Armstrong, C. J. R., Evelyn Underhill: An Introduction to her Life and Writings, 86–87, A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1975

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