Widespread threats to humanity’s safety prompt many of us to want to help. We may not be first responders on the scene, or members of law enforcement involved in preventing attacks, but all of us have the capacity to help by applying what we learn of the nature and power of God, and of man’s eternal oneness with God, to any situation.
As the Bible brings out, in the second and subsequent chapters of Genesis, for example, the source of humanity’s ills is the underlying, universal belief that matter constitutes life. The mortal sense of life, a life that seems to be separate from God and outside His loving government, includes within it the various fears and materialistic conceptions that manifest themselves in disease, lack, sin, sorrow, violence, and despair. All discords, from the smallest to the largest, stem from this overarching mistaken view of life.
In the Christian Science textbook, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “The description of man as purely physical, or as both material and spiritual,—but in either case dependent upon his physical organization,—is the Pandora box, from which all ills have gone forth, especially despair” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 170).
