THE purpose of education is to destroy ignorance and establish knowledge; and as ignorance and knowledge are wide terms, so also is education a wide term. In its usually accepted sense, education is confined within the circle of temporal thoughts, human history, material sense phenomena cognizable through instruments or physical research. Hence this material concept of education lacks the spiritual enlightenment which is humanity's first need, very often last sought.
Christian Science sets due value on academic education and intellectual development, but urges, in addition, spiritual education, sound in basis and practical and protective in usage. Leading human thought beyond the best that academic teaching has to offer, the education of Christian Science is simple, yet all-inclusive. Its textbooks are the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." In the latter book its author, Mary Baker Eddy, presents divine, demonstrable knowledge, the revelation of Truth, which is of profound value to humanity; and the light which it throws upon the spiritual, scientific, and practical meaning of the Scriptures is competent to silence the doubts of skeptics.
However brilliant and erudite one may become through material education, one is sooner or later led into a blind alley, for everything that is material is confessedly limited. Christian Science, on the other hand, points to the open doorway to heaven on earth and explains the practical utility of these words of Christ Jesus: "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." This spiritual pasture, ever verdant, nourishes and quickens all that is good in an individual. Christian Science denounces hypnotism as wholly undesirable, since the blind cannot "lead the blind." The carnal mind cannot enlighten itself.
