Article February 1, 1919 Issue

The Christian Science Monitor

SYLVIA LOINES

Just at the right of the main entrance to the New York Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street is engraved on the side of the building in great letters the following inscription: "But above all things Truth beareth away the victory." This brief quotation is taken from the interesting account, in the first book of Esdras (Apocrypha), of the three young men at the court of King Darius, who in the hope of a promised reward strove to excel each other in wise speeches, and it was the above sentence which brought victory to the speaker when he declared and amplified it before the king. To quote from the Apocryphal account: "All the people then shouted, and said, Great is Truth, and mighty above all things."

It is surely a fact that men have sought and praised Truth through the ages and chosen its name to adorn with mottoes the gateways of colleges and other institutions of learning, but unfortunately they have not always been able to recognize the truth when it has appeared in their midst; for, like the Christ-idea, it does not come to us in the expected guise. A great and long felt need of the whole world was met when The Christian Science Monitor, an international daily newspaper which tells the truth, was given to us by the loving effort of our dear Leader, Mrs. Eddy.

Almost the first lesson a child learns from its parents is that of truth-telling. In the true home a lie is never tolerated; and how careful we are to guard against the bringing into our homes of any atmosphere of untruth, slander, or of dishonesty in any form; nor would we willingly admit anyone whom we had come to associate with these forms of evil, save only in the attempt to heal him. Is it not, however, true that we all receive in our homes as the first guests of the day, newspapers which proclaim upon their faces the very things we wish to exclude from our homes? Some years ago a young girl, recently graduated from boarding school, attempted to please her progressive moher and keep up with the times by a careful and thorough study of the daily news as presented in the regular city newspapers; but she was obliged to give up this attempt, after suffering great loss of sleep and a succession of frightful nightmares in which most of the accidents and tragedies recorded daily in her memory were reenacted in her own and her loved ones' experiences. When Christian Science found her, and the Monitor became her daily informant and friend, how great was her happiness in finding set forth in its clean, well ordered columns all that it was necessary or desirable to know of the world's events, with no sensationalism, tragic outcry, gossip, or scandal!

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