Sin’s Blindness

Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. . . .We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. A bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not “answer,” that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.

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The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillian Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), 92.