[far greater than wickedness]

“A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness ... At the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.”  

                                                               –J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to his son Christopher, 1944