424 The Spiritual Man
and (3) feeling. These groups cover the three aspects of the function
of emotion. Should a saint overcome all three, he is well on the way
to entering upon a pure spiritual path.
To be sure, man’s emotion is nothing but the manifold feelings he
naturally has. He may be loving or hateful, joyful or sorrowful,
excited or dejected, interested or uninterested, yet all are but the
ways he feels. Should we take the trouble to observe ourselves we
will easily perceive how changeful are our feelings. Few matters in
the world are as changeable as emotion. We can be one way one
minute and feel quite opposite the next. Emotion changes as feeling
changes, and how rapidly the latter can change. He therefore who
lives by emotion lives without principle.
The emotion of man often displays a reactionary motion: a time of
activity in one direction will sometimes produce an opposite
reaction. For example, unspeakable sorrow usually follows upon
hilarious joy, great depression after high excitement, deep
withdrawal after burning fervor. Even in the matter of love, it may
commence as such but due to some emotional alteration it may end
up with a hatred whose intensity far exceeds the earlier love.
A Believer’s Emotional LifeThe more one probes the workings of an emotional life the more
he will be convinced of its vacillation and undependability. No one
should wonder that a child of God who walks by emotion rather than
by spirit usually comports himself in a wavelike fashion. He
bemoans his existence because it is so unstable. Sometimes he
appears to live in the third heaven transcending everything, while at
other times he plunges to the low level of an ordinary man. His
experience is replete with ups and downs. It does not require an
enormous circumstance to change him, for he is unable to withstand
even the tiniest mishap.