Editorial March 5, 1904 Issue

Just Discrimination

May we beg our friends of the daily press to exercise the same care in determining the authenticity and news value of articles reflecting upon Christian Scientists that they use in passing upon the merits of other matters coming to them through channels apart from their own recognized and carefully selected avenues of new-gathering. We do not referentirely to communications for which the paper itself takes no responsibility, but to that which appears under the guise of news, and in the regular news columns. Weighed in the scale by which a newspaper man must determine what is news and what is not, these items frequently do not come up to the standard, but a far more serious offence is that they are, in the main, attacks upon persons whose standing in the community is of the best, persons who have attained this standing through exemplary life and conduct. There are but very few newspapers whose columns would not be found closed to such articles as we refer to if they were aimed at a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Presbyterian for no other reason than that his church affiliation was not approved. Neither would the question of his preference for homeopathy or allopathy be allowed to subject him to attack or denunciation, or to open the columns of any paper to a general and indefinite pillorying of the medical profession.

Perhaps the answer of those newspapers which have unconsciously allowed themselves to be used in this manner would be that Christian Science is so new that anything about it or about its followers is news. That may be true to a certain extent, but not to an extent which justifies giving space to the statements of unknown or anonymous persons who trade upon the fact that it seems possible under present conditions to secure a hearing for attacks upon Christian Scientists, no matter how unsupported they may be. The comparative novelty of Christian Science should have worn off by this time. The movement is long past the allotted twenty-one years of infancy, and has taken its place among the recognized religious denominations of the world, and its practice of healing by prayer is so well established and has proven so successful that it is being generally accepted. The fact that it has seemed necessary for Christian Scientists, like all who step out of the ruts of common and generally accepted theories, to "run the gauntlet" of public misrepresentation until they had definitely taken their place in the public thought, does not warrant the continuation of such refinement of cruelty after even so poor an excuse has become "stale, flat, and unprofitable."

All we ask is that the same discrimination be used where Christian Science or Christian Scientists are said to be involved that is used in all other cases. We do not mean to be understood as alleging that all newspapers are careless in this matter, for we know many that are most punctilious, and yet even they are sometimes imposed upon. To those, however, who have not reached the point of careful and impartial discrimination we say, in the words of Jesus, "Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of these works do ye stone me?"

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