The Essence of Islam – Volume II — Page 452
452. Essence of Islam II action which becomes the punishment of the sin. Yet. God does not shut the door of repentance, as when the occupant of a dark room opens a window God Almighty pours light into the room. . Thus according to the Holy Qur'an, the wrath of God does not mean that He becomes angry by bringing about an undesirable change in His condition. When a person is angry, he falls into distress and feels a sort of pain and loses his happiness, but God is always happy and suffers no distress. His wrath means that as He is Holy, He does not desire that His servants should adopt ways of impurity and demands that impurity should be swept away. If a person persists in impurity, God, the Holy, deprives him of His grace which is the basis of life and joy and comfort and that condition becomes the source of torment for the disobedient one. This might be illustrated as the case of a garden which is irrigated by the water of a stream but when the owners of the garden give up obeying the owner of the stream, the latter dams up the water of the stream and deprives the garden of it so that it dries up. [Chashma-e-Ma'rifat, Rūḥānī Khazā'in, vol. 23, pp. 62-63]. Hell is Not Everlasting. It is unreasonable and is contrary to the perfect attributes of God, the Glorious, that once a person has been condemned to hell, only the Divine attributes of chastisement should be manifested in his case and the attributes of mercy and forgiveness should be suspended forever and should not come into operation. From what God. Almighty has said in His Book, it appears that those condemned to hell shall dwell therein for a long period which is metaphorically described as forever, but then