Because God is both infinite Mind and infinite Life, man in His image and likeness cannot help both living and knowing. This truth is ever forcing the human sense of things to rid itself of its ignorance— in reality of its very self. From earliest times, therefore, education of some sort has obtained. It was at first, of course, merely a very crude and unsystematic effort on the part of those of more mature experience to teach by word of mouth what they knew about how to live to those of less experience. And so long as education of some sort has existed, the Adam-dream, or belief in the reality of both good and evil, has attempted to thwart the growth of knowledge which means the sure destruction of error. It has tried to appropriate to itself the functions of knowing and living which belong alone to God and His idea, and to assert that the only education is education in the knowledge of good and evil in preparation for life of the same sort. It has endeavored to limit the content of that which is taught, to cramp the method, and it has tried to restrict the scope by suggesting that there are only a few people who can "take" education, by making it expensive, and denying it funds for maintenance.
But because the desire for knowledge, like the desire for life, does not originate in the human mind, so called, at all, does not spring out of ignorance and death but has its real cause in God, Life, intelligence, it is forever protected by God. Under this protection, one by one the false claims about it have given way before the unfoldment of education. Written language, systematized instruction, the printing press, all are evidences of this unfoldment. The free public school, free to all, and free from sectarian and political bias, marks an important step in the unfoldment of the truth that education is unlimited. Further manifestations of the increasing understanding of this truth have appeared more recently in the growth of continuation classes, extension courses, and summer schools, setting aside the false beliefs that education is a brief and seasonal affair. As Mr. H. G. Wells writes, "It is only quite recently that this idea has passed beyond a special class and pervaded the world generally—the idea of every one being a lifelong student and of the whole world becoming, as it were, a university for those who have passed beyond the schooling stage. It has spread rapidly because in recent years the world has changed so rapidly that the idea of settling down for life has passed out of our minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous adaptation.... It is no good settling down in a world that, on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort."
There is, as students of Christian Science are aware, a reason for the rapid change in the world in recent times, which Mr. Wells has observed. It is that after all the gropings of the centuries, at last, through the efforts of Mary Baker Eddy, the exact truth about God and man's relation to Him has been made available to all the world. This exact knowledge, once discovered, has begun immediately to work and has wrought much more rapid changes than could the guesswork which preceded it. Mrs. Eddy has set up a standard, capable of proof, whereby everything that claims to be knowledge can be accurately gauged, when she writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," on page 127, "If God, the All-in-all, be the creator of the spiritual universe, including man, then everything entitled to a classification as truth, or Science, must be comprised in a knowledge or understanding of God, for there can be nothing beyond illimitable divinity."
