No man can estimate what is really happening at the present. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made clear in his private writings he intended to proclaim a Christian message through his fictional writings. Tolkien lived through the two world wars, yet he never lost his faith that those catastrophes the devil intends for evil, God turns to good. He embedded that faith in the very creation of his famous imaginative world. In the posthumously published book The Silmarillion, Tolkien has the spirits sing Middle-earth into existence. The melody of Illuvatar (God) was "deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came." Melkor (Satan) interfered with a loud, brash tune, trying to "drown the other music by the violence of its voice." But the "most triumphant notes" of Melkor's discordant song were "taken up by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern." As a man who himself had faced the monstrous evil that lay behind war, Tolkien didn't sugarcoat his message. He knew the horrific events God uses for good are no less horrific for those who experience them. In The Silmarillion, he put it this way: "Evil may yet be good to have been, and yet remain evil."