Two years after the The Christian Science Monitor was founded, its editor, Archibald McLellan, gave a talk in Chicago. Newspapers, Mr. McLellan noted in those days before radio, TV, and the Internet, were “practically indispensable to the working out of human problems.”
McLellan observed, however, that publishers too often found they could profit by offering the public news that is “sensational and morbid.” That wasn’t a harmless act. It was crippling humans by “pointing back into the darkness of crude materialism and a reign of evil, instead of leading thought forward into the dawning light of Truth and of all-controlling good.”
The discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, saw the importance of persistently insisting on the light of Truth and of all-controlling good. When she founded the Monitor in 1908, she chose this motto for the editorial page: “First the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.” She did not believe that Truth should be shouted from rooftops or that, as McLellan put it, the Christian Science movement should use the Monitor as “an organ or as propaganda for its faith.” The Monitor was established as an inseparable part of the mission of Christian Science to till human thought and thereby improve human lives.
