Augustine had urged his readers to rise above personal feelings in order to see “the whole design, in which these small parts, which are to us so disagreeable, fit together to make a scheme of ordered beauty.” In 1710, this had been made into a formal argument by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: God could have given us a world without such things, but he didn’t, so presumably he knew that those other possible worlds would have been less good in the long run. And if this is the best world feasible, then whatever happens in it must be for the best, even if does not feel that way.
