By Charles E. Gratke, Foreign Editor

Some years ago a visiting newspaperman asked the news editor of The Christian Science Monitor a most compelling question. "I like this paper of yours," the visitor said, "but where is the Christian Science in it?"

The news editor picked up the Home Forum page and pointed to the religious article. The visitor shook his head. "I know about that," he said. Then he pointed to a little news item, quite at random, and said, "Tell me where the Christian Science is in that."

It is a very good question. It is something that the Monitor editors have to answer every day. And it is a question that you are helping us to answer through your right concept of what Mary Baker Eddy intended the Monitor to be. For one thing, we can be sure that Mrs. Eddy did not intend the Monitor to be just another newspaper. Your chairman has referred to it as a missionary. So we may ask, "What is this missionary's task?"

Perhaps a part of our answer can be found in the record and example of Paul, one of the greatest missionaries of whom we know. It was in his first epistle to the Corinthians that he defined his task. We find it in the fourteenth chapter, where one modern scholar has freely translated: "The new tongues require interpretation. . . . We call those 'foreign' tongues which we cannot understand. . . . The tongue that the spirit speaks sounds strange . . . in the ears of those who do not understand it. It needs interpretation."

Interpretation! Surely that is part of the missionary's work. And in it we find a guide to the content of the Monitor. It is not enough simply to record the news. We must, like Daniel, seek to "shew the king's matter . . . and the interpretation thereof."

But not as the world understands interpretation. Not by knowing more than anyone else, not by being humanly wiser, not by being more clever, nor by pretending to a perfection we have not made our own. For true interpretation is obtained only as Principle to govern and in proportion as all of us who love the Monitor raise our concept of its real mission. We write of the things of this world. But what a difference there is if we do so remembering Mrs. Eddy's warning against "the ghastly farce of material existence," and her reminder that "the divine Principle of the universe must interpret the universe" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 272).

That interpretation has many facets. Within recent months one of the most difficult news days came with Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Communications were cut off; accounts were confused. And the human news certainly was not encouraging. Yet what appeared most important, after that day was over, was not the fact that we had achieved a fairly lucid and balanced account of what was happening. Nor was it that we were saved from the pitfalls of overstatement and sensationalism. It was rather an article which appeared in the Monitor by the writer "Centurion." Now you must know that "Centurion's" article was written days, weeks, before it was printed. It was even arranged for publication by the editorial page before news of the invasion came. Yet on that day, and in the midst of that need, "Centurion," through the Monitor's columns, said: "There is always a danger lest in time of stress thought should become so concentrated on the pressure of immediate circumstances as to render the whole picture of events completely out of focus. . . . Truth alone restores all things to their proper perspective."

Yes, perspective is one of the missionary's tasks.

So, too, is the quest for truth. But human truth is not enough. It is the effort to understand divine Truth, our commitment to the understanding of Principle, and the to work from that standpoint. Doing so, we naturally come closer to the human facts. The things we perceive, pattern more clearly the actualities of Spirit. And the sensitiveness to what is true and good becomes surer.

Among the manifold things which are the missionary's task are, thus, interpretation, the maintenance of perspective, and the search for truth. One of the editors recently was explaining something of this to a lad in his Sunday school class. Yet the boy had a question. He said, "Don't you ever have any scoops?" Yes, we have scoops! Suppose we follow one Monitor correspondent around Europe for the past eighteen months.

In October, 1939, he was in the Baltics. For days there was no word of him. And all the time the Russians were on the march. Suddenly the Russians went into Vilna. Suddenly the wires began humming. Our correspondent had been in Vilna all the time, waiting for the Russians. And he told the first story of the Soviet occupation. Then he went to Finland. There's an item on the expense account. It reads: "One pair of gloves: 16 Finn marks." And if you recall the exclusive stories which the Monitor carried on the Finnish war, you will agree that it was worth sixteen marks to keep his hands warm!

Then he went to Norway. His were the stories that made the Monitor one of the two papers in the world which were the first to disclose the fifth column methods of the Nazis. He saw it happen, witnessed the Nazi treachery and deception. And in an old automobile he drove over the mountains into Sweden to cable his story to the outside world.

Then he went to southeast Europe. Censors were everywhere. So he telephoned a story about a baseball game. An American baseball game. Some players wore brown uniforms. Others black uniforms. By the time the censor realized what was happening, half the story was in Boston. That was all we needed. The brown shirts were the Nazis. The black shirts were the Italians. A story of Axis penetration of the Balkans was told.

Then he went to Greece. The Monitor's story of Greek heroism was written by a man who knew the heroes. He stayed until it was too late for him to get out by way of Portugal. So he circled the Mediterranean to Egypt.

There the only transport was reserved for the British Imperial Forces. So he drove a British truck on the march into Ethiopia. After he interviewed Haile Selassie, the British flew him out. He caught another plane to Durban, South Africa. He stopped off to interview General Jan Christian Smuts, Premier of South Africa. The interview was to be for five minutes. It lasted an hour, because the famous Boer General wanted to know what the Monitor correspondent had seen on four battle fronts. Then on to Cape Town. The boat from South Africa to New York takes the better part of a month. Our correspondent has just reached home.

This is a one-man odyssey. There are others. You have read the inside story of Germany. You know from the Monitor what really happened in Italy, the story of China, the battle for Britain.

Yes, we have scoops. Only the other day I picked up the Inter-Allied Review, official spokesman of the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and France-in-exile. In that single issue I counted fourteen references from the news and editorial columns of The Christian Science Monitor. But these things are interesting only if they testify that the true mission of the Monitor is being carried out. The standpoint from which that work is done, the adherence to Principle, the enlargement of vision—these are the important things. For, as Mrs. Eddy reminds us (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 194), "The letter of your work dies, as do all things material, but the spirit of it is immortal."