THAT all real progress, all genuine gain, is an educational advance, the displacement of the error in human consciousness by truth, is a mere truism, and yet how frequently we all need to be reminded of it. This thought of salvation as the attainment of wisdom was expressed by the Master in his teaching that freedom is to be gained as we "know the truth," and it is reechoed in Mrs. Eddy's statement that our awakening to the illusions of material sense "is the forever coming of Christ, the advanced appearing of Truth, which casts out error and heals the sick" (Science and Health, p. 230).
If not keenly and continuously alive to this fact, we are sure to find ourselves impelled to effort, for the most part, by thought of material benefits, the loaves and fishes of sense-satisfaction. Advance is being estimated in the ability to purchase and to control, rather than in our conscious accretions of wisdom, our escape from the bondage of false belief. We need to remember ever that growth, true living, means something learned, and not something commercially acquired. Our angle of vision here determines whether thought and life shall be merged in the miserliness of materiality or dwell ever elate and enlarging amid the infinities of Spirit. He who has learned to live by living to learn, has entered the corridors of the treasury of Truth. No good thing is withheld from him who has mastered the art of inquiry. "Ask, and ye shall receive," now finds fulfilment, and the unlimited possibilities of good are opened to all who would thus companion with that which is eternal.
It is important just here, however, that we think of truth knowing as something more than familiarity with facts and their arrangement. An eminent teacher has said that while the imparting of information is one of the functions of education, "it must be kept in right relations with the function of training and discipline, and with the function of putting men into vital touch with life in its breadth and depth, by lighting the whole field of knowledge with ideals and principles." The teacher of the classics who lays all his stress upon the mastery of vocabularies and syntax, defeats the ends of education, though his pupils make great progress in the line of his endeavor. The profitable study of a language includes inquiry into the spirit of the people who spoke it, their history and ideals, their prejudices and point of view. The study of any subject may be carried on in a so-called scientific way that wins the distinctions of scholarship, and yet that ministers in no degree to the expansion of one's life, nor contributes in the least to the advance of the race. Such an education is in fact a handicap to the higher nature and to progress. In not choosing, or even recognizing the better part, it is, in effect, unmoral. History has named unnumbered men who were very erudite, and yet very narrow, selfish, unspiritual, and altogether uninspiring. Every well instructed man must have acquired the habit of being philosophical, and have a world-bettering end in view.
