Thus, since the pleasures of this world do not satisfy the imaginative faculty, which is a servant of human nature, man’s comprehensive nature is certainly attached to eternity. For man, therefore, who despite being afflicted with these boundless hopes and desires as capital has only an insignificant faculty of will and absolute poverty, belief in the hereafter is a treasury of such strength and sufficiency; is such a means of pleasure and happiness, source of help, refuge, and means of consolation in the face of the endless sorrows of this world, and is such a fruit and benefit that if the life of this world were to be sacrificed on the way of gaining it, it would still be cheap.

Its second fruit and benefit, which looks to man’s personal life

This is a consequence of great importance which is explained in the Third Topic, and about which is a footnote in A Guide For Youth.

Man’s greatest and most constant anxiety is his entering the place of execution that is the graveyard, the same as his friends and relations have entered it. Wretched man, who is ready to sacrifice his very soul for a single friend, thinks of the thousands, millions, or thousands of millions of friends who have been eliminated and have parted for all eternity, and suffers torments worse than Hell. Just at that point belief in the hereafter comes, opens his eyes, and raises the veil. It tells him: “Look!” He looks with belief, and seeing that those friends have been saved from eternal death and decay and are awaiting him happily in a luminous world, he receives a pleasure of the spirit that intimates the pleasures of Paradise. Sufficing with the explanations and proofs of this consequence in the Risale-i Nur, we cut this short here.

A third benefit pertaining to personal life

Man’s superiority over other living beings and his high rank are in respect of his elevated qualities, comprehensive abilities, universal worship, and his extensive spheres of existence. However, the virtues he acquires like zeal, love, brotherhood, and humanity are to the extent of the fleeting present, which is squeezed between the past and the future, which are both non-existent, and dead, and black.