AS we accept the teaching of Christian Science, we certainly learn that material appearances do not reveal the truth of what is happening around us. When Jesus became aware that his disciples were consistently seeing matter as real and seemed to misunderstand his purpose and meaning, he asked them a little sadly, "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?" (Mark 8:18.) Mrs. Eddy refers to this passage on page 38 of Science and Health and adds, "He taught that the material senses shut out Truth and its healing power."
Seeking as we do to follow the way revealed by Jesus, we need to explore further what is meant by the question, "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?" We need surely to find out what is actually true about the things that are going on around us, things which we neither see nor hear.
Material sense, as anyone knows from experience, is not even humanly reliable; for example, a railroad track appears to converge but does not; the warm water that was made to trickle over the felon's arm, referred to on page 379 of Science and Health, was not blood, as the felon thought; yet the uncorrected sense testimony—that he was bleeding—caused his death. We have learned through experience to correct the material sense testimony many times a day, most of the time without being conscious that we are doing so. As Christian Scientists, however, we must go a step further; we must learn to see beyond and beneath the surface appearance and discern, as Jesus did, the reality composed of eternal verities. In every case he beheld what the human mind did not see, whether it was food for the five thousand, calm instead of storm, or life to replace death.
