How can we help those in distress? How can we improve human welfare? In most cases what is needed is more spiritual love and compassion for others. Our love may take the simplest form, for example, in a sincere hug. Or it may involve providing food for one in need or supplying a job. Whatever else we do to help, prayer is essential in our effort to love because it provides spiritual answers for meeting the human need.
There is no doubt that we need philanthropists
today. Yet we also need the higher sense of
philanthropy that helps to meet the spiritual and the
human need and can keep the need from recurring.
A philanthropy based on a spiritual understanding
of God's creation would uplift the whole of mankind.
Prayer based on learning more of God as divine Love enables us to perceive ourselves and others as, in truth, the wholly spiritual children of God. As we know more of God, we begin to understand man's inseparability from Him. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, makes clear that God's love is not an abstract concept. She writes, "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need." Science and Health, p. 494 Divine Love, God, meets the need because His law governs all.
