Mrs. Eddy provided for the world, in The Christian Science Monitor, a tool that utilizes two of mankind's most powerful rights—freedom of the press and freedom of religion. When it is seen that these rights are basically God-derived, they take on a healing power sorely needed by mankind. The Monitor's establishment, sixty-seven years ago, was the fruit of Mrs. Eddy's developing vision of God's all-presence, all-power, and all-knowledge, before which evil fades as unreal. To live up to this heritage, then, the Monitor's hallmark must be spiritual intelligence, which destroys evil, wakens men from a merely corporeal sense of life to the humane and spiritual, and establishes God's government in both small and more consequential affairs.
In considering the role of the Monitor, it is helpful to examine what Mrs. Eddy says about human rights. In Science and Health she quotes with approval that portion of the American Declaration of Independence that acknowledges God as the source of men's individual rights.See Science and Health,p.161; Elsewhere she says, "Religious liberty and individual rights under the Constitution of our nation are rapidly advancing, avowing and consolidating the genius of Christian Science." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 200
Mrs. Eddy writes incisively about the importance of freedom of the press and also about abuse of that freedom.See Miscellaneous Writings, p.274 In her own day, the press was unwittingly, as well as sometimes maliciously, used by a few people's efforts to impede the progress of Christian Science. This trend underscored the need for a moral perspective, for more honesty and alertness in media—factors which characterized the Monitor from the beginning. Mrs. Eddy wrote of her sense of Christian Science journalism, "The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind."Miscellany, p. 353
