A Life of Feeling 471
experiences a life of feeling, he has reached one more station on his
spiritual journey. God grants him a foretaste of what He desires him
to have: first He arranges for the Christian to sense it and next He
withdraws the sensation so that by his spirit through his will he may
keep what he has felt. If his spirit can press on with the assistance of
his will, the Christian, by disregarding his emotion, can then see that
he has made real progress in his walk. This is confirmed by our
common experience. While we are pursuing an up-and-down type of
existence we usually assume we have not made any advance. We
conclude that during these months or years we have simply gone
forward and then backward or simply backwards and then forwards.
If, however, we were to compare our current spiritual state with that
which obtained at the commencement of such alternating phenomena,
we would discover we have actually made some progress. We
advance unknowingly.
A great number err because they have not appropriated this
teaching. Upon fully consecrating themselves to the Lord for
entering upon a new experience such as sanctification or victory over
sin, they truly and distinctly step into a new kind of life. They believe
they have made progress, for they are brimming with joy, light and
lightness. They account themselves already in possession of that
perfect course which they admired and sought. But after awhile their
new and happy circumstance suddenly evaporates: gone are the joy
and thrill. Most of them faint in their hearts. They judge themselves
unqualified now for perfect sanctification and unfit to have the more
abundant life which others possess. Their judgment is based on the
fact that they have lost what they had long admired and had
possessed for but a brief moment. What they do not realize is that
they have been experiencing one of God’s vital spiritual laws, which
is: that what has been possessed in the emotion must be preserved in
the will: that only what is retained in the will truly becomes a part o f
one’s life. God has only withdrawn the feeling; He wants us to
exercise our volition to do what we had formerly been stimulated to
do by our feeling. And before long we shall discover that what had