Faith & Spirit Quote by Evelyn Underhill

Underhill’s line refuses the polite, compartmentalized religion of the parlor. It’s not a claim about being “good” so much as a claim about being permeable: the self as a house with no locked rooms left for God to stay out of. The genius is in the double image of “place” and “corner” - spatial language that turns interior life into architecture. You can almost feel the reader mentally touring their own mind, checking closets for what’s being hidden: vanity, resentment, appetite, ambition. Underhill makes that inventory the point.

The intent is devotional, but the subtext is bracingly unsentimental. “No corner” doesn’t mean constant serenity; it implies total exposure. If God is everywhere in the soul, then God is also present in the messy parts people prefer to quarantine with euphemisms: the half-truths, the compulsions, the secret self-pity. The line is an assertion of wholeness that also functions as a spiritual dare.

Context matters: Underhill wrote in an early 20th-century Britain shaken by modernity and war, when institutional Christianity was losing cultural monopoly and private spirituality was being reshaped. Her broader project - recovering Christian mysticism for modern readers - often insists that the divine isn’t an occasional visitor but the environment you’re already breathing. This sentence compresses that worldview into a stark paradox: surrender that sounds like possession. If there’s no place untouched, then the self is not conquered; it’s finally integrated, with nowhere left to perform.