[Milton-L] Justify God?

[Tony Demarest]

Somebody- their? when has the indefinite singular become a plural? 
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> Subject: RE: [Milton-L] Justify God?
> Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 15:25:52 -0400
> From: cmartin at thegeogroupinc.com
> To: milton-l at lists.richmond.edu
> 
> 
> Wow…somebody didn’t get their nap…
> 
> 
> 
> Charles Martin
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> From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu [mailto:milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of Margaret Thickstun
> Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 2:16 PM
> To: John Milton Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Justify God?
> 
> 
> 
> No one seems to be thinking about all the other reasons to question God's justice: diseases, death, the deaths of children, pain--and death--in childbirth, chronic pain such as severe toothache that you can't alleviate except by getting stinking drunk or maybe killing yourself.  Then looking about you, injustice, rape, murder, genocide.  Milton elaborates on these things in Books 11 and 12.
> 
> As Edna St. Vincent Millay writes "not only under ground are the brains of men / eaten by maggots."
> 
> It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
> April
> Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
> 
> So, thank God for Excedrin, morphine, epidurals, C-sections, transfusions, and all the advances in public health, but when I turn on the evening news to watch the latest who-blew-up-or-bombed-whom report, I understand the need to justify God's ways.--Margie
> 
> 
> Horace Jeffery Hodges wrote:
> 
> In answer to my question -- i.e., "Why does Milton want to justify God's ways to men?" -- Gardner Campbell quoted Milton in Areopagitica:
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> "many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress"
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> 
> 
> This implies that Milton was not simply responding to his own altered fortunes in the Restoration:
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> 
> 
> though fall'n on evil dayes,
> On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues; [PL 7.25-26]
> 
> (Luxon, Thomas H., ed. The Milton Reading Room, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton, October, 2008.)
> 
> But who were these "many . . . that complain"? Was Milton thinking of contemporaries, or was he thinking of protests raised at previous times in the history of Christianity?
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> 
> 
> Jeffery Hodges

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