It was Browning’s Pippa who had sung so blithely: “God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world!” 2 Yet how could optimism rationally encompass the needless and savage horrors of a single day—including those disasters traditionally characterized as acts of God? The amiable Emerson had tried to save God’s reputation by insisting that the first lesson of history is the good of evil, as the Deists before him had cheerfully held that all partial evil is universal good. This was bleak cheer indeed for the mourners at Birmingham and Verkinodensk, and there was not much more solace in the traditional Augustinian view that evil is mere privation, as darkness is only the absence of light.
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