Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for the world or what trust in God, if they were well?” _Live_ spells _Evil_, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases.... The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes, and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame of his universe was fireproof.”
Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám, Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job, suggests the following solution: “When you suffer, your sufferings are God’s sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” F. H. Johnson, What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends; the evolution of moral character is another.” A. E. Waffle, Uses of Moral Evil: “(1) It aids development of holy character by opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the blessedness of heaven.”
Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.