A Life of Feeling 473
leans on feeling is deprived of its sovereign power: his intuition is
stifled and cannot transmit a distinct voice. Since the will thereby
slips into a withered condition, the believer requires even more help
from feeling to provoke the will to work. The will turns by feeling. If
the latter is high the will is active; but should it be taken away the
will suspends action. It is powerless to do anything by itself; it relies
on the activation of emotion to propel it. Meanwhile the believer’s
spiritual life naturally sinks lower and lower until it seems that
whenever emotion is absent no spiritual life is indicated at all. The
operation of emotion has become an opiate to such ones! How tragic
that some remain unconscious of this fact and seek emotion as the
zenith of spiritual life.
The cause behind this error lies in the deception which feeling
imparts. At the moment of great ecstasy the child of God not only
senses love from the Lord but feels an intense love of his own
towards the Lord as well. Must we deny our feeling of loving the
Lord? Can such a warm sensation of affection towards Him hurt us?
This very interrogation discloses the folly of these saints.
Let the question be asked instead: is a person actually loving the
Lord when he is full of exultation? Or is it that he loves the exultant
feeling? Granted, this joy is given us by God; but is it not God Who
also takes it away? If we genuinely loved Him we should fervently
love Him in whatever circumstances He may put us. If our love is
present merely when we feel, then perhaps what we love is not God
but our feeling.
Moreover, a person may misinterpret such a feeling to be God
Himself, not aware that a vast distinction exists between God and the
joy of God. Not until the time of barren feeling shall the Holy Spirit
show this one that what he so earnestly sought was not God but His
joy. He does not really love God; what he loves is the feeling which
makes him joyous. The sensation does in truth give him the sense of
God’s love and presence, yet he does not love Him for His sake