360 The Spiritual Man
spirit. If the spirit of believers is flooded with the power of the Holy
Spirit, it is independent of the soul. Unlike the latter the spirit does
not require outside stimuli by which to be activated but is able to be
active on its own initiative. It can move under any circumstances.
Hence those who are genuinely spiritual can be active whether or not
their soul has feeling or their body has strength. These ones live by
the ever-active spirit.
Now as a matter of fact the sense of the soul and the intuition of
the spirit are distinctly opposite; nevertheless, occasionally they
appear to be quite similar. Their similarity can be so close as to
confuse Christians. Should they be hasty to move, they will not
easily escape being deceived at these times of similarity. Yet if they
would wait patiently and test the source of their feelings again and
again, they would be told the real source by the Holy Spirit at the
right hour. In walking after the spirit we must avoid all haste.
Soulish Christians generally bend to certain directions. Most of
them lean either towards emotion or towards reason. Now when
these people become spiritual they tend to fall towards the opposite
extreme from what they formerly were. Emotional persons will then
be tempted to adopt their own cold reason as the leading of the spirit.
Because they appreciate how soulish their former passionate life was,
they now mistake their own reasoning to be spiritual. Likewise those
who were rational believers may subsequently accept their passionate
feeling to be the leading of the Holy Spirit. They too are conscious of
the soulish cast of their hitherto cold and quiet life; consequently
they now interpret their emotion to be of the spirit. These are equally
ignorant of the fact that the reversal of position between emotion and
reason does not render them a shade less soulish. Let us therefore
remember the functions of the spirit. To be led by the spirit is to
follow its intuition. All spiritual knowledge, communion and
conscience come via the intuition. The Holy Spirit leads the saints by
this intuition. They need not themselves figure out what possibly is