Three decades ago, as The Christian Science Monitor entered its second half-century of service to mankind, the Editor wrote: "Dedicated and equipped as it is, The Christian Science Monitor is ready to be a pathfinder. The path will not be easy. These are days of struggle and of danger. But they are also days of transcendent opportunity."p. 437.
Since its founding, the Monitor has consistently served the Cause of Christian Science as a pathfinder—one that finds and illuminates a progressive course through sometimes challenging terrain. Implicitly, our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, gave the Monitor this role when she defined its spiritual mission in these terms: "...to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent."The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353. A wealth of contemporary inspiration has been drawn, by successive generations of Christian Scientists, from that compact phrase.
The Monitor's pathfinding mission includes the overcoming of divisions, whether they be national, racial, religious, or cultural. It involves, more by example and viewpoint than by direct precept, the spread of a freeing, Christianly scientific view of mankind. On one hand, it offers to a wide public the help of a trusted friend in finding the path toward greater individual and societal freedom, based on the clear perception of man as the beloved child of God. One subscriber, a writer passionately devoted to social equality, said of the Monitor: "... I admire it most because it gives no shrift to any belief in the irredeemable wickedness of man, nor in the futility of human endeavor. It is a newspaper of sober and responsible hope."
