Not long ago a newspaper advertisement for a famous charity showed the picture of an emaciated child. The caption read in part: "What has this child done to deserve it? An innocent child and a living skeleton. ... A picture that can be repeated all too many times in all too many countries. Hunger and malnutrition, leading to disease and despair."
Hunger can perhaps be alleviated by aid programs. But what of those other pictures "that can be repeated all too many times in all too many countries"—pictures of innocent children, born deformed or diseased, and of decent upright adults, suddenly stricken down by illness or accident, apparently beyond all human cure? No greater affront exists to humanity's sense of justice than the phenomenon of unmerited suffering. Men's hearts cry out vehemently against the unfairness of things.
Of course, in a universe of unintelligent and unintelligible things, of sheer materialism, why should there be justice? If anyone believes in a universe wholly evolved by the random interaction of electrically charged particles, he has no ground for expecting justice. But men do expect justice. In the deep crises of existence we all look beyond the physical or material; we expect the universe to be intelligible, to make some sort of moral and spiritual sense.
