It's pleasing to any editors to have an opportunity of speaking directly to readers. We're making that opportunity. We, here, feel it will be useful to share with you some of our views of The Christian Science Journal, the Sentinel, and the Herald in its several editions—to tell you also something of our aspirations, hopes, objectives.
What is the role of the periodicals? It's the same as the role of Christian Science as a whole: to inspire, to inform, to educate, and—above all—to spiritualize and heal. Whether we live in Africa, Europe, Asia, North or South America, or wherever, we live in societies undergoing much change. The Science of being is unchanging, but the world of our readers is changing much. This fact is in the foreground of our thought.
And yet, essentially, we are addressing spiritual sense. We do not accept as final the superficial appearance of writing to Europeans or Asians, black or white, young or old, well-educated or unsophisticated, the new student or the well-grounded. And we believe spiritual sense is best addressed by the strong, pure, simple statements of scientific truth. Sometimes the periodicals must reach down to take hold of the reader; but generally they need to give the reader the truth he can reach up for, and so lift the level of his thought and life. This, we believe, was Mary Baker Eddy's way, as evident in her own writings.
