I never know quite what to say when I’m talking sometimes to people who have lost a loved one and say ‘well it was God’s will’, when sometimes I know that to be an errant blasphemy on the love not to say the common sense of God. Much of the suffering of life is due to human sin and to say that it is God’s will is just a lie. Of course it is not (to take just the most obvious example) God’s will that so many of the best young men should be dying in the war today. But—and this is the positive thing I have to say—Christianity is at home in those places. That is where it belongs. Granted that human folly and sin has made this world a hell, it is into this hell that God comes. This is the meaning of Christmas—where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more.
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