Article February 25, 1911 Issue

THE VALUE OF TRUE EDUCATION

EUGENIA BEATRICE MABURY.

During schooldays, while a nominal student of Christian Science and depending solely upon it for physical help, the writer found little time or inclination for religious reading, as the hours seemed filled to overflowing with college work and college play. However, a few years after leaving school, having become absorbed in the affairs of life, she experienced a sense of keen disappointment to find that the knowledge so eagerly as well as laboriously acquired seemed fast slipping away. Facts of history, names, periods, data in the fields of literature, art, and ethics, once carefully gathered and ticketed in memory, appeared as time went on less readily available, if not entirely obliterated.

This is, perhaps, a more or less common experience with the college graduate; but in the light of subsequent sore trials and spiritual awakening the writer views with a very different sense this seeming loss, as she begins to realize with Paul that the wisdom of this world is indeed "foolishness with God." To her mother, a devout Christian Scientist, she owes her escape from some of the more objectionable material studies, but many were the wasted hours (as she now reviews her course) spent in delving into the accumulation of philosophical dogmas and vague hypothetical theories based on mortal mind as premise, with which she sought to lumber up her mental storehouse. During the years which have since elapsed, many of these theories have become obsolete to mortal mind itself. Time and again do our Leader's words recur to thought: "Give to it [Christian Science] the place in our institutions of learning now occupied by scholastic theology and physiology, and it will eradicate sickness and sin in less time than the old systems, devised for subduing them, have required for self-establishment and propagation" (Science and Health, p. 141).

The feelings thus expressed as to the nature and futility of material learning seemed to culminate during a little incident a few years ago. The writer was visiting one of the world-famous observatories, where her friend, the professor in charge, explained the mechanism of the huge telescope which, like a superhuman eye, nightly swept the heavens. The clarity of the atmosphere in that particular latitude, the vast reach of the instrument, the distance and magnitude of the celestial bodies, and the still unexplored fathoms of space were expatiated upon, while the professor with pardonable pride—for his name stands among the foremost in the astronomical world—recounted the many, many months and even years spent in patient search of double-stars, their calculation and measurement. Hundreds had been discovered and tabulated, but there were yet many more, and the astronomer spoke enthusiastically of the years of work before him.

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