The Laws of the Mind 557
however, this is but intuitive knowledge; that is to say, the inner man
knows while the outer man remains ignorant. The communication to
the outward man of what has been known by the inward man is an
indispensable step, the lack of which prevents united action by the
inner and outer man together. How then can there be this
communication? The Scripture informs us that our spirit will
enlighten our mental faculty to make it understand the meaning of
the revelation in the intuition. Since our outward man depends on the
mind in order to comprehend things, the spirit must convey what it
knows intuitively to the mind so that the latter can deliver the
message to the entire being and enable the child of God to walk
according to the spirit.
We first come to know the will of God in our intuition and then
our intellect interprets that will to us. The Holy Spirit moves in our
spirit, producing in us a spiritual sense; afterwards we exercise our
brain to study and to understand the meaning of this sense. It requires
the cooperation of both spirit and mind to comprehend fully the will
of God. The spirit enables our inner man to know, while the mind
causes our outer man to understand. Such cooperation occurs in a
second, although it takes longer to describe with pen and ink. They
operate like two hands: and in the twinkling of an eye the spirit
already has made known to the mind what it has seen. All revelations
come from the Holy Spirit and are received not by the mind but by
man’s spirit, so that man may know by intuition; they are then
studied and understood by his mental powers.
We consistently ought to refuse to allow the mind to serve as the
prime element for receiving God’s will, yet we must not inhibit it
from serving as the secondary apparatus for understanding that will.
A carnal Christian mistakes the thought of the head to be the
criterion for his conduct because he has not yet learned how to walk
after the spirit. A spiritual Christian follows the spirit, but he also
permits his mind to comprehend what the spirit means. In true
guidance these two elements are one. Ordinarily the leading in the