"Knowing the truth" is an expression sometimes heard among Christian Scientists. It derives from the words of Christ Jesus, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." ^{John 8:32;}

A friend and I were talking about this, coming at it from different angles. He said he had found on occasion, while teaching in Sunday School, that some students thought of this knowing as only cognitive. They disassociated it from feeling, which they regarded as merely emotive, subjective, and mortal—to be avoided. I told him I had been interested in the fact that Mrs. Eddy was a lifelong student of poetry, and in the fact that poetic sensibility is generally accepted as involving both thought and feeling in its approach to understanding.

We jokingly agreed that knowing the truth was surely not like the process Mr. Spock uses in so many episodes of Star Trek. He disciplines his thinking solely to logical processes, generally to the consternation of his fellows, who desperately want him to respond with some sensitivity to the situations he is in.

Not only is responsiveness natural to humanity, but it is widely viewed as worthy of much attention. Almost nightly, watchers of the TV news catch a reporter thrusting a mike at someone to ask him how he feels about an event. The answer is less often an analysis or a judgment than a statement of emotive reaction. The person may describe an ephemeral mood, a passion, a fear, or an anxiety. These subjective apprehensions, we understand, will change quickly as conditions change.

On the other hand, Mrs. Eddy writes in Rudimental Divine Science, "You must feel and know that God alone governs man; that His government is harmonious; that He is too pure to behold iniquity, and divides His power with nothing evil or material; that material laws are only human beliefs, which govern mortals wrongfully." ^{Rud.,p. 10;} Here, the metaphysician in search of reality can sit up and take notice. He begins to see feeling coupled with knowing as a legitimate way of perceiving absolute spiritual Truth.

In addition, among the seven synonyms for God in Christian Science is Love, of which Mrs. Eddy writes the following: "In divine Science, we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity." ^{Science and Health, p. 517;} Surely we understand what Love is, at least in part, through our outreaching, intuitive response of immediate joy, our sense of uplifting harmony, our grateful recognition of God's care for man. Knowing Love is not a process carried on exclusively by reason.

Looking at Galatians, too, we find in Paul's description of "the fruit of the Spirit" an abundance of qualities we clearly understand to be or to include feeling. These are "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." Of them, Paul says, "Against such there is no law." ^{Gal. 5:22,23;} This seems to say that they are useful in approaching reality because our expression of them indicates our deepening appreciation of divine Love.

How, then, are we to identify qualities of feeling that are spiritually-minded and God-derived? We find that they are not subjective mortal thoughts with opposites brought on by various human conditions. While mortal pleasure has its opposite (pain), spiritual joy is a condition of the nature of reality, without an actual opposite. Love, constructive of harmony, has no contrary quality in God's creation. Peace, spiritually perceived, describes all real being. It has no opposite.

We find also that none of these qualities is associated with mortal passion—envy, hatred, anger—with those false and ungodlike "works of the flesh" Paul also describes in Galatians. ^{See v. 19 .} Understanding man as spiritual, the offspring of God, we have no need to illustrate or accept as real any such products of false sense.

Another quality of Soul-sense, or real sensibility, is that it always agrees with intelligence. In the daily round, feeling and thought are often at odds. We understand that it is intelligent to do our homework, but we would like to go to the movies. We perceive rationally that we have had enough to eat, but we crave that banana split. We know it makes Christian sense to love our neighbor, but some mortal prejudice impels us to dislike another. Far from being a real state of things, this sort of misapprehension, allowed to persist, brings its disruptive concepts into experience as conflict.

On the other hand, our understanding of spiritual purity—as a quality that is in no way adulterated, marred, or intermixed with anything unlike itself—accords perfectly with the feeling purity gives us as we demonstrate it. Our comprehension of love as a cherishing, promoting, cooperating, and harmonious power for good is in exact agreement with the feeling that love imparts. In any situation we may encounter, the two ways of comprehending blend perfectly in that capacity known in Christian Science as spiritual sense.

Our recognition of spiritual sense enriches and uplifts us. We no longer worry about whether we ought to feel, because we see spiritual sense as our real mode of feeling and know that this does not involve mortal passions, which clash and disrupt. In our prayers for guidance, direction, and healing we are open to the complete answer given by the Mind that is Love. We realize in a measure, with Paul, that "against such"—Love's qualities—"there is no law."