Article September 1, 2013

The hearing ear

Alfred F. Schneider

Originally published in the December 1975 issue of the Spanish Herald

Hearing is a faculty derived from the divine Mind. It can be denied to no one, because it is God-bestowed. The Bible declares, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” James 1:17;

Christian Science enables us to demonstrate the perfect, permanent nature of man's God-ordained spiritual senses. It reveals man as spiritual and immortal and denies reality to the corporeal senses, which portray him as ﬂeshly and subject to sin, disease, and death. Science shows God to be inﬁnite intelligence, the one all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-hearing Mind, whose ideas comprise reality. It explains Him as seeing all and hearing all that He makes. Nothing exists outside of Mind's cognizance. Nothing but inﬁnite good is included in it. Man, who embodies and expresses Mind's faculties, reﬂects God's inﬁnite cognition and is endowed to perceive and apprehend all that God knows.

In the textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy refers to the perceptive faculties as originating in Mind, not in physical organs. She writes: "The 'divine ear' is not an auditory nerve. It is the all-hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each need of man is always known and by whom it will be supplied." Science and Health, p. 7; Where does this hearing and knowing activity of God take place? God, divine Mind, has only one mode of expressing Himself, namely through His ideas. Because the true selfhood of each one of us is God's perfect idea, we must express the perceptive activity of the all-hearing Mind. God's hearing activity, just as His knowing and loving activity, is forever operating in His ideas, is manifested through them and forever inseparable from them. The real man continuously expresses the qualities and faculties of God, who is inﬁnite Spirit. He has perfect use of all his faculties because God could not make man deﬁcient in any respect. Man's God-given faculties can never be destroyed or damaged.