Monday, 9 August 2010

The Sum Total of Human Misery--Yet

The Unexpected Good

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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