revelations and illuminations for them was certain, the most momentous question facing mankind is to be saved from Hell. Hell is also a vast, awesome, and supremely important truth of the universe which some of the people of illumination and witnessing and those who investigate the realities have observed, and seeing some of its distillations and shadows, have cried out in terror: “Preserve us from the Fire!”

Yes, the confrontation and interpenetration of good and evil in the universe, and pain and pleasure, light and darkness, heat and cold, beauty and ugliness, and guidance and misguidance are for a vast instance of wisdom. For if there was no evil, good would not be known. If there was no pain, pleasure would not be understood. Light without darkness would lack all importance. The degrees of heat are realized through cold. Through ugliness, a single instance of beauty becomes a thousand in-stances, and thousands of varying degrees of beauty come into existence. If there was no Hell, many of the pleasures of Paradise would remain concealed. By analogy with these, in one respect everything may be known through its opposite and a single truth produce numerous shoots and become numerous truths. Since these intermingled beings pour from this transitory realm into the eternal realm, surely just as things like good, pleasure, light, beauty, and belief are poured into Paradise; so harmful matters like evil, pain, darkness, ugliness, and disbelief flow into Hell, and the floods of this continuously agitated universe are emptied into those two pools. Referring you to the ‘Allusive Points’ at the end of the wondrous Twenty-Ninth Word, we curtail this discussion here.

My fellow students here in this School of Joseph! The easiest way to be saved from that dreadful, everlasting prison is to profit from our worldly prison, and besides being saved from the many sins we are bound to refrain from, by repenting for our former sins and performing the obligatory worship, to make every hour of our prison life here the equivalent of a day’s worship. This is the best opportunity we may have to be saved from that eternal prison and to win luminous Paradise. If we miss this opportunity, our lives in the hereafter will weep the same as our lives here are weeping, and we shall receive the slap of the verse,