two, of vice, or this calamity, has put us in this prison for fifteen, five, ten, or two or three years, and made our worlds into a prison; so to spite it, we should avenge ourselves on this calamity by transforming an hour or two of our prison lives into a day or two of worship, and our two or three-year-sentences —through the gifts of the blessed group— into twenty or thirty years of permanent life, and our prison sentences of twenty or thirty years into a means of forgiveness from millions of years of incarceration in the dungeons of Hell. In the face of our transitory worlds’ weeping, we should make our everlasting lives smile. We should show prison to be a place of training and education, and each of us try to be well-behaved, reliable, useful members of our nation and country. While the prison officers, administrators, and governors should see that the men they supposed to be criminals, bandits, layabouts, murderers, depraved, and harmful to the country are students studying in this blessed place of instruction, and should proudly offer thanks to God.

The Third Topic

This is the summary of an instructive incident which is described in A Guide For Youth.

One time, I was sitting by my window in Eskishehir Prison during the ‘Republic Festival.’ Opposite me, the older girls of the High School were laughing and dancing in the schoolyard. Suddenly their condition fifty years hence appeared to me, as though on a cinema screen. I saw that of those fifty to sixty girl students, forty to fifty had become earth in their graves, and were suffering torments. While ten were ugly seventy to eighty-year-olds who were despised where they might have expected love because they did not preserve their chastity when young. This I observed with complete certainty and I wept at their piteable states. Some of my friends in the prison heard my weeping, and came and asked me about it. I told them: “Leave me alone for now, I want to be alone.”