We frequently hear of the weakening or loss of faculties, such as sight, hearing, reason, or memory. This is commonly taken as normal and something to be expected as a result of advancing years; whereas the retention of all the faculties unimpaired throughout the span of human life is regarded as most unusual. But is this view rightly taken? What should be accepted as normal?
According to the Scriptures some of the antediluvians reputedly lived hundreds of years. Later in the Bible we read that "Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" (Deut. 34: 7) and that Caleb in his eighty-fifth year was, as he said, "as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me" (Josh. 14: 11). Did those ancient worthies perhaps have a working knowledge of God far above the ordinary? This is easily believable when we ponder Moses' life and experience, throughout which he was divinely led. Those who lived close to God and were conscious of His presence found that their faculties did not diminish.
What are faculties? Are they physical attributes of the body and subject to death? Christian Science shows the physical faculties to be illusions and declares all the faculties of Mind or Life to be spiritual. Mary Baker Eddy writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 486): "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."
Since the spiritual faculties of man are not in the body, but are of Spirit, Life, the clearer our concept of Life, God, the clearer will be our faculties. Because these real senses are faculties of Life, they are each one of them indispensable to man, the complete expression of Life. In Science, Life is synonymous with God, as the Master himself implied when he said (John 17:3), "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
Life that is God is perfect and eternal. It could be nothing less. It lacks no quality, element, or attribute of perfection. As the expression of that Life, man is complete and replete in all the faculties, functionings, and activities which are the constituent elements of full animation or being. If this were not so, man would be the imperfect, incomplete reflection of Life or God. The individual who according to human belief lacks or has lost a faculty is not the perfect product of God's creating. In reality this mortal belief of lack does not exist; for God made all, and He did not create imperfection. All that God made, everything that expresses Life or God, is perfect.
Mrs. Eddy writes on page 407 of Science and Health: "If delusion says: 'I have lost my memory,' contradict it. No faculty of Mind is lost. In Science, all being is eternal, spiritual, perfect, harmonious in every action." What our Leader says of this delusion is true of all the false presentations regarding the faculties created by mortal mind, alias the physical senses. The loss or impairment of sight, of hearing, of reason, of memory, is known only to mortals, not to God or to the children of God.
In proportion as the individual sees and knows God and man as perfect and makes that fact the basis of his thought, he will be immune from impairment of sight, hearing, reason, or any other faculty. A fundamental premise in scientific logic is perfect God and perfect man. Before we can rightly adopt this premise, however, we must allow Truth to displace the false premises thought valid by mortals: that man is material; that his faculties belong to a physical organism; that they are therefore subject to deterioration and loss.
Proclaiming of old the joyful coming of Christ's kingdom, which today we know as the enlightening, liberating truth, Isaiah, the great foreteller of the Messiah's coming, gave comfort and encouragement to multitudes of those who were weak and incapacitated. To those who had seemingly suffered the loss of one or some of the faculties and whom mortal mind's delusion held in bondage, the prophet Isaiah brought the glorious assurance (35: 5, 6): "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing."
How bountifully was that prophecy fulfilled through the Christ by Jesus and his disciples! And today, through the inspired work of Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science is utilizing the same Christ, Truth, to restore faculties supposedly lost. It is restoring to health and full activity the physically and mentally weak. The writer can bear humble and grateful testimony to this. When he was a young man, his eyesight was badly affected by snow blindness; and for eighteen years, even with the aid of glasses, he was greatly hampered in his work and his reading. Then an illness brought him into Science.
A Christian Science practitioner explained that sight, or perception, is in reality an activity of Mind, not of the body. Like all faculties, it is indestructible and cannot be lost. This knowledge was assimilated and shortly afterward turned disaster into blessing when his glasses were swept from his face and the lenses were shattered. Accepting the challenge of Truth, the writer discarded glasses. His sight, he found, was perfectly normal. For years afterwards he worked with ease and comfort on micrometric precision work.
Such experiences encourage and help one the more strongly to believe the promises of the Bible. They are the signs or proofs which "follow them that believe" (Mark 16:17). One's belief grows to faith, and his faith ripens to spiritual understanding as he learns through Christian Science more of the man he really is—the spiritually perfect man of God's creating. That man, the only real man, is and always has been perfect. His faculties can never be impaired or lost. He cannot lose them; he can only use them by reflection or expression, for as Mrs. Eddy again reminds us on page 488 of the textbook, "Mind alone possesses all faculties, perception, and comprehension."
