Soul-sense: Indestructible and Unrestricted

"The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them." ^{Prov. 20:12 ;} God never made faculties vulnerable to accident, disease, or passing years, restricted in range or incapable of clear definition.

The ears and eyes of God's making—to carry on briefly the Psalmist's usage—are not material. They are not organs, physiological or otherwise, conveying impressions to a brain in response to external stimuli. Instead, they indicate modes of divine Mind's perfect cognition of its own infinite self-containment, its spiritual universe; and they are individualized in Mind's spiritual idea, man.

These statements are not philosophical abstractions. They are practical and scientific. The sight and hearing made by God are more actual than any physical sense or faculty. When Christ Jesus from this spiritual basis healed the blind and deaf, the blind saw, the deaf heard. Today when Christian Science restores sight or hearing from this same spiritual basis, the blind see, the deaf hear.

The final chapter of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, entitled "Fruitage," consists of one hundred pages of letters from persons healed by reading this textbook. On the second page of "Fruitage" a writer tells of astigmatism healed. Six pages later another tells of cataract quickly cured. A number of writers tell of sight becoming normal and of glasses, worn for years, being laid aside. In the same chapter several testifiers tell of long-standing hearing troubles being healed. Since the publication of these letters the record of sight and hearing spiritually restored has been carried forward in the testimony sections in the Christian Science periodicals and at the Wednesday evening meetings in our churches.

The effects of Christian Science can be observed outwardly, but its method does not manipulate physical conditions by material means or by techniques of the human mind. Christian Science treatment is not concerned with physical organ-building or organ-reconditioning. Instead, it shows that all man's faculties of spiritual perception reflect the divine perception and are eternally indestructible. As the one in search of healing grasps this spiritual fact and begins to exercise man's spiritual faculties through expressing spiritual qualities—love, joy, tranquillity, for instance—malfunctioning or defective organs conform to normalcy.

This conforming, however, of the physical condition, desirable as it is, isn't the essential healing. The essential healing is what has happened in consciousness: it is the replacing of a materially mental error as to what the senses are and how they work by the spiritual mental truth or fact of what they are and how they operate. Even when an organ has again begun to function normally, perception has not become material or dependent on matter. Our perception is in reality, as it has always been, wholly spiritual.

Mrs. Eddy describes the basis for spiritual healing like this: "Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost. Their reality and immortality are in Spirit and understanding, not in matter,—hence their permanence." ^{Science and Health, p. 486 ;} There's the point. When sight and hearing are correctly identified as among man's spiritual senses, they are seen to be perfect and indestructible. Inevitably then the human condition conforms.

Many claims of defective sight or hearing are made in terms of distance. They say, "You're shortsighted," "You're longsighted," "You can only hear if you sit in the front row." We silence all these claims when we acknowledge sight and hearing to be spiritual and operating in the limitless realm of Spirit.

Spiritual sense, reflecting infinite Spirit, cannot be divided up into a limited number of limited senses that can become defective one by one. Nor is it "extrasensory perception," which supposedly registers impressions on human thought without going through organic channels. Spiritual sense operates entirely within divine Mind and as the expression of divine Mind. And within this Mind it is not divided into five or six or sixty ways of perceiving; on the contrary, it has infinite and unlimited modes of perceiving and understanding spiritual reality. And it also ensures, regardless of distance, that we know and see and hear whatever we need to of the human scene.

When the Syrian king found his plans known to the Israelites, he asked who was the traitor. A servant replied, "None, my lord, O king: but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber." ^{II Kings 6:12 ;} The Bible records a number of such instances where spiritual sense perceived what was needful, regardless of the capacity of physical organs. Of the origin of this ability in divine Mind Mrs. Eddy writes: "This Mind-reading is the opposite of clairvoyance. It is the illumination of the spiritual understanding which demonstrates the capacity of Soul, not of material sense. This Soul-sense comes to the human mind when the latter yields to the divine Mind." ^{Science and Health, p. 85 .}

Soul-sense knows nothing of physical distance, longer or shorter; it knows nothing of back rows or front rows. It cannot be lost or dimmed by years, accident, or disease. Always we can claim it as ours to reflect. In proportion as we do this, we can find ourselves exercising every useful mode of perception, perfectly functioning.