However she asked me if I felt sure the world was governed, etc., and I said frankly that I hadn’t absolutely made up my mind,—that it seemed to me we had very small means of being ‘sure’ of anything,—but that I thought, if there was a Ruler both good and all powerful, it was at least perfectly conceivable that He might allow all the pain, etc., partly because the very theory of free will involved possibilities of evil with its consequences which not even Omnipotence could avert, and partly because He might see that pain was at any given moment the very best thing for the person who suffered it.
Then she went off to,—Did I think it possible that any Being could follow out the lives of millions of creatures at once, etc.,—to which I said that certainly I couldn’t conceive how it should be possible; but neither could I conceive many other things that yet we knew to be scientific truths,—e.g. that our whole earth could be swallowed up in one of the ‘spots’ of the sun, and not fill up the spot, and that that very sun is only a unit in a myriad of worlds whose immensities simply reduce us to silence.
However I didn’t mean to inflict a réchauffé of all this upon you, though I think you will like to know how the child’s mind is working. Let it work!—being in a wholesome atmosphere of love and labour, she will learn all sorts of practical replies to theoretical difficulties, and come to no harm.”
Interesting, as bearing on the above, is another letter written to someone else about the same time:
“It is a double principle with me never to bring forward theological questions, and never to seek to change the opinions of anyone who is satisfied with his or her own; and on the other hand to be always ready to say exactly what I think myself about any given point to any intelligent person who cares to ask me the question, and to say frankly where I feel that I know nothing. I do not think anyone can possibly be more conscious than I of the immense vastness and difficulty of questions that the general public answer glibly offhand, and of my own utter incompetency to decide in the abstract ‘what is truth’. Practically I think one is generally able to see one’s own duty day by day, and probably Browning is right—
‘... more is not reserved
To man, with soul just nerved
To act tomorrow what he learns today.’
Beyond that, I suppose that all that any of us can do is to be very chary of either asserting or denying, but to strive to keep our whole souls open to every ray of light we can get, and hope some day to learn everything that it is needful for us to know. Personally I am always getting to feel that opinions matter less and less, and motives and feelings more and more.
Excuse this long dissertation and believe me,