Try to account for a bit of chalk, for instance, and consider all you must know in order to enable you to do so.

To account for its weight you must know something about the motion of the whole planetary system and the law of gravity that controls that system; to account for the weather-stains upon it, you must know something about chemical reaction; to account for its being chalk and not flint, you must know something of the geological ages of the earth, and how it comes to be built up of little sea-shells; to account for its hardness, you must know something of the intricacies of molecular physics.

All this you must know to account for a mere bit of chalk.

How, then, can we expect to understand the problem of the world when we know absolutely nothing of its relations with the great moral and spiritual whole to which it belongs, and without the knowledge of which it must for ever remain an insoluble problem, presenting one term only, an enigma of which we do not possess the key?
But though we cannot understand the origin of evil and why the world is as it is, we can understand something of the processes which are at work for good or ill.

We can in a measure trace whether these processes are making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries "believe no more," "An ever breaking shore That tumbles in a godless deep." Now, I contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils.