Education means "leading out." It has not anything special to do with learning Latin or Greek. Indeed, far too much stress has been laid on mere learning of intellectual data. This learning does not lead men out; any one who has met Professor Dryasdust knows quite well that it tends to shut men up and in a very dull box, too. The learning of certain facts or rules may be necessary to a student, just as the buying of paints may be necessary to an artist, in order to bring out certain ideas or perform certain work; but if once facts and rules get on top of a man they lock him in a box to which the key has been lost. The trouble is that Professor Dryasdust likes to lock every one else up in the same box that he is in.
If education means "leading out," the question is, from what are we to be led out? The answer is, from personal considerations, from the domination of the live senses, our prejudices, our favoritisms, our fears, our selfish ambitions; from "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," which are not of the Father-Mother, which do not come from Principle, the First Cause. To learn art as the Renaissance artists learned it to learn natural science as Huxley and Pasteur learned it to learn philosophy as Plato learned it to learn poetry as Byron or Swinburne learned it is to gain little in education; for the work of all these men, fine as it was from a human standpoint, ended in the worship of mortal mind, in a bowing to its laws, an acceptance of its standpoint, a glorification of its works, a gratification of its pride. Huxley, most honest of scientists, was indeed forced to own in the end that the human mind could only be destructive; and to offset this perpetual destruction of one human theory by another human theory, he set up "the indestructibility of matter" as an axiom, which has already gone by the board. To any one who follows carefully the thought of leading thinkers today, it is positively comic to watch the rejection on every hand of those "fundamental axioms" which the great Victorians asserted with such solemnity—all this outside Christian Science. Inside Christian Science of course, the whole mass of human thinking went by the board at one blow. Writes Mrs. Eddy, "After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 10). "And thank God for that," might well murmur many a good scholar who has found that all his learning only leads him back into himself, piling up the reality of sin sickness, and death into a veritable mountain of horror, or torturing him with the burning joys of mental excitement.
Now all this by no means implies that a man should deny himself all books as St. Francis of Assisi did. Jesus did not deny himself all books for he was ready with a quotation in every emergency. A careful perusal of Mrs. Eddy's works reveals the fact that she was acquainted with nearly every great author of the Anglo-Saxon people and with many others also. The hold on her of the material theories and methods of these authors was gone, however, and the whole of their work had begun to assume a merely secondary place in her thought. She realized their work as of value relatively in human life; but she realized its inability to lead her out of human life,—truly to educate. She did not cease to adorn the rooms of her thought with flowers; but she realized that it was the reality which the flowers indicated that mattered. Throughout the work of the greater authors a man may find much to sweeten the way of human life and to give him a nobler concept of humanity; but he loses the full harmony of the universe if he accepts this sweetness and nobility as the real good. "There is none good but one, that is, God." said Jesus. "In our immature sense of spiritual things." writes Mrs. Eddy in "Miscellaneous Writings," page 87, "let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: 'I love your promise: and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied. Matter is a frail conception of mortal mind; and mortal mind is a poorer representative of the beauty, grandeur and glory of the immortal Mind.'" Thus Mrs. Eddy teaches us to climb above ourselves to the divine heights of Jesus.
