grass, rain and drought, fruitful and unfruitful years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, and everything else, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand. But in the eighteenth century, it was no longer easy for reasonable and thoughtful people to see the Lisbon horrors as the gift of God’s “fatherly hand.” The only God who could have promulgated such a cruel terror, who could have found any room in the divine will for such promiscuous suffering, was a moral monster.