Article November 1, 2013

The Christian Science Monitor

Originally published in the November 28, 1914 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

“Reason is the most active human faculty.” So wrote Mrs. Eddy on page 327of Science and Health, and so every thinking human being has conceded from Cornelius Gallus, before the Christian era, down to Bulwer Lytton in the nineteenth century. Because of this every Christian Scientist must comprehend the importance of the periodicals which Mrs. Eddy has placed in their hands. Every thinker, every man of action, has realized something of the influence of newspapers. “I myself,” Disraeli once declared, “am a gentleman of the press,” and Napoleon, who of all men should have been a judge not likely to err in his estimate of the power of that institution, once exclaimed that there was more danger in a newspaper than in a thousand bayonets: indeed, the bayonets quite commonly owe their thrusting power to the press.

In these circumstances it is perhaps not remarkable that the world has reached a perception of the fact that The Christian Science Monitor is a factor to be reckoned with. If it had not been so, it may be regarded as quite certain that Mrs. Eddy would not have cherished the plan of the inception of the paper for twenty-five years, until the moment came when the realization of her dream reached its maturity. Yet if there is one thing particularly certain it is that the power of the Monitor—and power it has, in the Pauline phrase, “to the pulling down of strong holds”—is not of the kind of which the human mind usually conceives. That conception is commonly “on all fours” with the Napoleonic picture. But in the first issue of this paper Mrs. Eddy wrote that “the object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” There is nothing of the bayonet in this, but there is the battering-ram against the Corinthian strongholds, for those strongholds are the fortresses of materiality.