bear and their bounties, these point out to everyone who is not completely blind a Most Merciful Provider, an All-Compassionate and Munificent One.

If it is said: The calamities, ugliness, and evils in this world are contrary to that all-embracing mercy, and spoil it.

The Answer: This question has been answered completely satisfactorily in various parts of the Risale-i Nur such as the Treatise On Divine Determining. Referring you to them, here we make only a brief allusion, as follows:

All the elements, all the realms of beings, and all creatures, have numerous duties, particular and universal, and each of those duties yields numerous results and fruits. For the most part these are beneficial, beautiful, good, and are mercy. Only a few of them encounter those lacking ability, those who act wrongly, or those who deserve punishment and disciplining, or those who will be the means of producing many shoots of good. An apparent, minor evil is ugliness; it is apparently unkind. But if for that minor evil not to occur, the element and universal being is prevented by mercy from performing its duty, then all its other good and beautiful results would not come into existence. Since the non-existence of a good is evil and the spoiling of beauty is ugly, evils, ugliness, and pitilessness would occur to the number of those results. Thus, hundreds of evil and instances of unkindness would be perpetrated just so that one evil would not occur, which would be entirely contrary to wisdom, benefit, and the mercy of dominicality. For example, things like snow, cold, fire, and rain have hundreds of benefits and purposes. If through their own choice careless or imprudent people harm themselves, for instance if they put their hands in the fire and say there is no mercy in its creation, the innumerable good, beneficial, merciful uses of fire will give them the lie, and hit them in the mouth.

Moreover, man’s selfish desires and lowly emotions, which are blind to consequences, cannot be the criteria, measure, or balance of the laws of mercy, sovereignty, and dominicality which are in force in the universe. He sees things according to the colour of his own mirror. A black-hearted, cruel person sees the universe as weeping, ugly, dark, and tyrannical. But if he looks through the eye of belief, he sees a macroanthropos clothed in seventy thousand beautiful garments one over the other, sewn of instances of mercy, good, and