To-day the world and the Christian Science movement are blessed by a newspaper which holds high the right ideal of receiving and dispensing the news of the day. It is international in its scope, universal in its interests and news, and was founded like the other Christian Science periodicals by Mrs. Eddy. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science did not bring out this ideal at the time when the thought of it first reached her, but as Jacob was willing to serve many years for Rachel, so she also was willing to serve God, waiting patiently for human consciousness to be ripe for the appearing of this newspaper. When the clouds lifted and the light of understanding had sufficiently pierced the gloom, The Christian Science Monitor was published. Since its first issue it has nullified one by one the evil predictions of envy and malice until it has gone to all parts of the earth on its beneficent mission.
This newspaper is exposing the fallacy that the news of the day is necessarily bad news. Humanity has suffered so long from this misconception that it has incorporated it in the saying, "No news is good news." Christian Science proves that in reality good news is the only actual news of the day, the bad news being the counterfeit, which may need to be exposed but must not be given power. News is news when we hear it for the first time; therefore the date on a newspaper does not necessarily make its columns either new or old. A string of platitudes printed in a newspaper with a fresh date does not make the platitudes fresh, nor is news printed in a newspaper with an old date necessarily stale. The dictionary tells us that that which is new is something lately manifested or discovered, although existing before. The Christian Science Monitor publishes significant news from all parts of the world because its ideal welcomes good from all quarters, and such news is not accessible to any news agency which yields to the superstition that only disaster, crime, scandal, conquest or defeat, disease and death, constitute the news of the day.
Years ago Mrs. Eddy, commenting on this perverted sense of news, wrote (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 7): "Looking over the newspapers of the day, one naturally reflects that it is dangerous to live, so loaded with disease seems the very air. These descriptions carry fears to many minds, to be depicted in some future time upon the body. A periodical of our own will counteract to some extent this public nuisance; for through our paper, at the price at which we shall issue it, we shall be able to reach many homes with healing, purifying thought."
