434 The Spiritual Man
The Proper Use of EmotionIf God’s children permit the cross to operate deeply upon their
emotion they shall find afterwards that it no longer obstructs, but
rather cooperates with, their spirit. The cross has dealt with the
natural life in the emotion, has renewed it, and has made it a channel
for the spirit. A spiritual man we have said before is not a spirit, but
neither is he a person devoid of emotion; on the contrary, the
spiritual man will use his feeling to express the divine life in him.
Before it is touched by God emotion follows its own whim. And
hence it habitually fails to be an instrument of the spirit. But once it
is purified it can serve as the means of the spirit’s expression. The
inner man needs emotion to express its life: it needs emotion to
declare its love and its sympathy towards man’s suffering: and it also
needs emotion to make man sense the movement of its intuition.
Spiritual sensing is usually made known through the feeling of a
quiet and pliable emotion. If emotion is pliably subject to the spirit
the latter, through the emotion, will love or hate exactly as God
wishes.
Some Christians, upon discerning the truth of not living by
feeling, mistake spiritual life as one without it. They accordingly try
to destroy it and to render themselves as insensate as wood and stone.
Because of their ignorance of the meaning of the death of the cross,
they do not understand what is meant by handing over one’s emotion
to death and living by the spirit. We do not say that, in order to be
spiritual, a Christian must become exceedingly hard and void of
affection like inanimate objects—as though the term spiritual man
means for him to be emptied of feeling. Quite the contrary. The most
tender, merciful, loving, and sympathetic of persons is a spiritual
man. To be entirely spiritual by delivering his emotion to the cross
does not denote that henceforth he is stripped of his feeling. We have
observed numerous spiritual saints and have noticed that their love is
greater than that of others, which demonstrates that a spiritual man is