The widespread area and enormous volume of pain and sorrow which have made themselves such front-rank features of human life in this generation have also made more people think about this side of the problem of their existence than ever before. The pain of the body, the sorrow of the emotions--these two dark shadows of their lives have been the subject of terrible contemplations for millions of suffering men and women. It has been hard for many of them to sustain belief in divine goodness, or at least in divine mercy. The optimistic blindness to plain appearances which would say with Browning that "all's right with the world" and see only the truth, beauty, and goodness everywhere, the intellectual one-sidedness which would prefer to hide from unacceptable realities, must have received a severe jolt in many parts of the world during the war.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 32
