J R R Tolkien writing to his son, Christopher during the dark days of World War II
I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days--quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil--historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects". No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success--in vain, preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives. (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, a selection edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 1981, p.76)How powerfully these themes present themselves in The Lord of the Rings! What a profound hope and belief in the Providence of King Jesus.
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