"Spiritual sense," Mary Baker Eddy says in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God."^{Science and Health, p. 209;} God is Life. Man is the reflection of Life. We can see man really only by using the "conscious, constant capacity to understand" Life, which is eternal and never in matter.

Spiritual sense is a faculty of the divine Mind. Insofar as we recognize ourselves as reflections of Life, God, we become conscious of this faculty and can use it. But insofar as we think of ourselves as mortals apart from God and living in matter, we cannot see spiritually. We cannot see the real man.

Now it does no good to sit as a mortal, trying to use the faculty that belongs to divine Mind and its immortal idea. A mortal will never see more than a mortal sense of existence. But as the mortal yields to the divine idea, spiritual sense becomes, to the individual, an active faculty he can use. And as he uses it, he sees man spiritually.

Paul wrote, "Henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more." ^{II Cor. 5:16;} Christ Jesus had been crucified and buried, and he had risen from the tomb and ascended out of material sight. As we accept the significance of these events, our thought ascends above the material sense of things into spiritual reality, where we realize the "conscious, constant capacity to understand God." Then we begin to see people in a spiritual, instead of a material, sense. But we do not see mortals in a spiritual sense. We see that man was never mortal, never born. As Mrs. Eddy writes, "Never born and never dying, it were impossible for man, under the government of God in eternal Science, to fall from his high estate."^{Science and Health, p. 258.}

The question we are considering is, Do we really want to discern the spiritual idea of God, "never born and never dying"? Or do we only want to see in a materially personal sense those who were born and either will die or have died? It takes self-discipline to put a desire for spiritual sense into practice. We need to focus our attention on the divine Mind and its idea, man, who has never fallen "from his high estate," recognize the capacity we have to understand eternal Life, and use that capacity to discern the spiritual, which is true, and to discard the material, which is always false.

The motive power behind all right desire is God, Spirit, Himself. Spirit's omnipotence enables us to accomplish whatever we desire that is entirely spiritual. We cannot communicate with those who seem to us to have died. We cannot see those whom we think of as not yet born. But if our consciousness of man is spiritual, we can commune with God's spiritual idea, which is never born and never will die. And the spiritual sense of communion with an individual instance of this divine idea will be more real to us than a personal sense of a him or her could appear to be.

God, Life, is timeless. The spiritual sense that comprehends God as Life is timeless. Through gaining an understanding of eternal Life, many have been able to see man so clearly in a spiritual sense that a loved one's passing from mortal sight did not bring a sense of loss or even a sense of his absence. And there have been those who have become conscious in a spiritual sense of an individual before he appeared to be born as a mortal. Actually, the seeming birth or death of a mortal body has nothing whatever to do with the presence or absence of an individual idea of divine Life.

Seeing man no longer "after the flesh" is not something we can willfully decide to do and then do. It is the result of deep, consecrated study of the spiritual message of the Bible and of the revelation of the scientific meaning of this message in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health. Consecrated study necessarily involves the practice of the rules for living—practice that expresses our desire to follow God's direction as it comes to us in these two books.

If our desire is genuine, and if we are persistent in putting that desire into practice, we will grow in our ability to use spiritual sense; and little by little—sometimes with vivid glimpses—we will see man as the eternal idea he really is. The healings of sin and disease that result from such seeing will strengthen our understanding and lead us higher in the ascending scale of conscious being. Death will finally disappear.

Carl J. Welz