In order to cope with the world in which they live, men need human education in many branches of learning. In fact, their ability to grasp the requirements of such education and to progress in the freedom from limitation it is designed to bring is evidence of their present demonstration of God-derived intelligence. Mary Baker Eddy had great respect for wholesome education and the liberation that should follow the expansion of useful knowledge. But she strongly stressed the need of keeping moral and spiritual objectives in the foreground of educational systems. She says in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 252), "The entire purpose of true education is to make one not only know the truth but live it—to make one enjoy doing right, make one not work in the sunshine and run away in the storm, but work midst clouds of wrong, injustice, envy, hate; and wait on God, the strong deliverer, who will reward righteousness and punish iniquity."
In this educational outline one may see moral and spiritual integrity winning the honors awarded by divine Principle. It requires an understanding of the Principle of all real being to make one desire to live the truth and be happy in righteousness, whether the clouds of human errors are glowering or not. And Principle, Christian Science reveals, is Love, the creator of a perfect spiritual universe. The sinfulness and the limitation of intelligence so common to human experience, when understood as illusion in the face of the revelation of Love's allness and man's eternal perfection, recede into the nothingness that they are and disappear.
What greater honor could one win than the ability to demonstrate the supremacy of Spirit over material ills and the sins that beset mortals? True education unfolds this ability, and with it come enlarged intellectual capacity, more inclusive comprehension of all subjects, greater retentiveness, a more spontaneous joy in study, and tireless receptivity.
