transformed that painful abode into a world of joy and illumined it in so fine and pleasing a fashion that the tears that had been shed in lamentation, pity and sorrow were turned into tears of joy and gratitude for pleasures enjoyed.

Then the world of man appeared before me like a cinema screen. I looked at it through the telescope of the people of misguidance, and I saw that world to be so dark and awesome that I cried out from the depths of my heart. For men were living an extremely brief and troubled life, anxious every day and every hour about the coming of death, despite their desires and hopes extending to eternity, their imaginings and thoughts embracing the whole cosmos, their aspirations and innate dispositions desiring most seriously eternal life, eternal felicity and Paradise, their unlimited and unfettered innate powers, their needs directed to innumerable purposes, and the innumerable enemies and disasters to whose attacks they are exposed. They were, moreover, suffering the constant misfortune of decline and separation, a misfortune that is most painful and awesome for their hearts and their consciences, and looking toward the tomb and the graveyeard that appear for the people of neglect to be the gate to eternal darkness. I saw all men, singly and in groups, being cast into that pit of darkness.

When I saw the world of men in the darkness, all