The Monitor at 75
The Monitor today begins a series of monthly articles on the occasion of its 75th anniversary later this year. This will be an opportunity not only to address some of the significant trends that have emerged in the world in this historically brief but tumultuous period, but to see these in the light of the Monitor's coverage and assessment of them.
In founding this newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy defined its religious mission to be to ''injure no man, but to bless all mankind.'' Down through the years the paper's editors and reporters have sought to keep this purpose ever before them. It cannot be said that they have measured up to the ultimate standard of that mission. But they have never swerved from the objective of analyzing and presenting the daily national and international news in an objective, balanced, fair-minded, and Christian way.
This has meant not only recording the world's crises and wars and anguishes without varnish. That is in a sense the easiest journalistic part, for it is the world war, the ravaging famine, the tyranny of a political despot - all the evils and tawdriness of human existence - that leap out for attention and preoccupy the daily journalist. Yet far more is going on in today's explosive world - a ''period of fission,'' Editor in Chief Earl Foell calls it - than quickly meets the eye. The past 75 years have seen a veritable revolution of freedom - a revolution in the political structure of nations, in the economy, in the social liberation of races and individuals, in the growth of women's rights, in the unravelling of the nature of matter, in technology, in the arts.
Above all, we have witnessed and are witnessing a spiritual revolution, a changing of thought from belief in matter and physical laws as the substance of life to a budding realization of the substance of Spirit and of the power and reality of universal spiritual laws. Even the laws of God, good, which Christ Jesus the master Christian demonstrated were supreme in human affairs and prophesied would regenerate and liberate humanity from the shackles of material limitation.
In the many signs of progress over the past seven decades the Monitor sees these biblical prophecies being fulfilled. That is the great news story which needs telling as mankind wrestles, sometimes in fear and dread, with what seem to be insurmountable problems. Certainly the nuclear threat, the dangers of genetic engineering, the gropings of individuals for identity and health, are part of the worldly scene. But these need to be put in the perspective of humanity's effectual strivings for progress, its achievements of good, its constructive purposes, and its onward march toward spiritual reality.
It is to be hoped that the series beginning today will help provide that perspective.
