CHRISTIAN SCIENCE presents a simple and scientific approach to education. It presents the proposition that all human concepts are directly or indirectly beliefs about ultimate spiritual facts. Students in search of a genuine education are concerned with learning how to discover spiritual facts and how to apply them to the correction of human concepts and the improvement of human conditions.

Mary Baker Eddy sought to learn the ultimate spiritual cause for all outward effects. Of her search, she wrote (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 109), "I knew the Principle of all harmonious Mind-action to be God, and that cures were produced in primitive Christian healing by holy, uplifting faith; but I must know the Science of this healing and I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration."

Revelation, reason, and demonstration were the means by which she discovered this Science. Christian Science includes all three. Revelation, we know, is the disclosure to human thought of scientific truth. Demonstration means proof. Between these lies reason.

Human ability to reason is borrowed from a higher source than the brain; it patterns some divine faculty. On page 72 of Science and Health, our Leader names this faculty. She writes, "God, good, being ever present, it follows in divine logic that evil, the suppositional opposite of good, is never present." Divine logic, then, is what sound human reasoning patterns and with which it coincides.

Divine logic rests upon divine premises and arrives at sound conclusions. The all-knowing divine Mind, God, is and knows Himself to be the premise of all true knowledge, the cause of all creation. God knows Himself to be Mind and therefore knows creation to be mental — that man and the universe consist of ideas. This knowledge of the relation of creator and creation, cause and effect, Mind and idea, premise and conclusion, is the divine Mind's logic.

Mrs. Eddy perceived this divinely scientific logic not only in the Bible, but directly from the source whence the Bible writers learned it — from God, from divine Mind itself. And that is where we may find it. God is our divine Mind too!

The simplest forms of human reasoning follow the connection between cause and effect. This connection is established by the divine law that like produces like. Like producing like is a law of logic as well as of causation, for Mind is cause. Perfect God, perfect man. Perfect Mind, perfect idea. Right premise, right conclusion. This law is enunciated in the first chapter of Genesis (verse 26), "Let us make man . . . after our likeness."

Christ Jesus reasoned in the same way. He said (Matt. 7:17, 20) : "Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit," and, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Intelligence impels the search for cause and is never satisfied short of discovery. Children are always asking, "Why?" The physical sciences tread the irresistible course of thought from effect back to cause.

Our young people in school and college are given highly technical knowledge supported by material theories and material reasoning. Are material sciences more logical than Christianity? Is the explanation of matter more logical than the explanation of divine Mind? "Has God no Science to declare Mind, while matter is governed by unerring intelligence?" asks our Leader (Science and Health, p. 546).

Shall we abandon the young people to material theories? Shall we not be as scientific, as precise, as explanatory, and as logical as their schoolteachers are? Christian Science is logical. Our textbook is logical. Divine Mind is logical. The time for us to be logical thinkers has come!

What is it that analyzes human thought, tests its premises and conclusions, and so exposes and disposes of error? Sound logic, always working with the love which expresses God, who is Love as necessarily as He is Mind. Love and logic are the upper and nether millstones in the mills of God, which grind all with exactness and "grind exceeding small." From them no fallacy can escape. Both millstones are necessary — one alone grinds nothing. For lack of divine logic, mercy alone was unable to save early Christian healing from the materialism and subtlety of pagan reasoning.

The method of educating and convincing human thought that evil is unreal is the method of Christian Science. No other method known to man has ever led to this conclusion. We should do well to cultivate our skill in using it.

The educative function of logic is not only to test conclusions already arrived at but to lead thought to new conclusions, to ideas never before apprehended. Mrs. Eddy arrived at the inescapable and revolutionary conclusion that evil is nothing because God is good and God is All. Can anyone say that this conclusion came by pure inspiration and not by logic? It is as divinely logical as it is inspired.

Where does logic begin and inspiration end? Neither begins nor ends. Our genuine, spiritual intuitions, our spiritual inspirations, soaring above and beyond the slow plodding of mortal mind, do not leave logic behind. The unfolding of spiritual ideas is logical and orderly in sequence. Genuine, divine logic is as spontaneous and unshackled as divine inspiration; they are not mutually exclusive but mutually inclusive; they are distinguishable but inseparable, because they express two aspects of the one divine consciousness. Their union is an element of Christian Science and its educative method.

This divine consciousness is the Christ. It made Christ Jesus the most wise, the most loving, and the best human being that ever trod the earth. As we develop and demonstrate this consciousness, we become more wise and loving.

The Christ-consciousness is not the human intellect. It is that which enlightens the intellect, that which guides, instructs, inspires, clarifies the intellect, and frees it from ignorance, frustration, dullness, materialism, animality. The Christ improves and humbles the intellect by causing it to exchange its beliefs for the ideas of Mind — the Mind that is God. It exchanges false reasoning based on matter for divine logic based on Spirit, God.

Educational psychology has progressed through many stages. The Christ is not in those successive stages, but it is the power that has impelled them; it is driving psychology to explore its own mistakes until it discredits and abandons them. The course of mortal mind is a zigzag course; it is ever attenuating itself, not because of any virtue of its own, but because it is impelled to do so by the Science of Spirit, Soul, the true Science of psychology (see Miscellaneous Writings by Mrs. Eddy, p. 3). For the Greek word "psyche" means "the spirit, soul, mind," and the suffix "ology" denotes "a science or department of knowledge."

Christian Science uses the term Science of psychology in its spiritual meaning—the genuine, original, divine Science of Spirit, Soul, Mind—divine Mind's own Science, its logical consciousness of itself and of its likeness, spiritual man. Christian Science provides a logical and inspired method of education.