Did Jesus Redeem Mankind? — Page 128
128 question that still remains is how the Messiah's one-and-a-half day long stay in the tomb could atone for the sins of the world. . According to Christian belief, hell is eternal and whoso of men is consigned to it shall stay there put for ever. But we hold that Allah will forgive after a while even the inmates of hell. . Allah says in the Holy Quran: امه هاوية i. e. , hell is like the mother's womb as a child is delivered of it after a period, so shall the inmates of hell be discharged from it after staying in it for a time, and that Allah will admit them into paradise (101:10). The Christian belief, on the contrary, is that hell is eternal and whoso enters hell shall never be able to get out of it. Now, there are, in the contemporary world, crores of men who believe in the Messiah. In this age there are some 60 to 70 crore Christians, perhaps more. . If this 70 crore were to go to hell and stay there put for ever, to what length of period would it work out, if we were to compute it by multiplying this number with eternity, and this just represents the number of present-day Christians. If we compute the total number of the people who have believed in the Messiah from his own day, taking the average age of a generation at 30 years, and the average of the Christian population at ten crores-for, they were few before and then grew into a lakh, then too lakhs, then seventy to eighty lakhs and later their numbers ran into crores till they were as many as 70 to 80 crores at a single point of time and taking ten crores as an average of this and with three generations in a 100 years period, there having passed thus 57 generations of. Christians up to the present time fifty-seven multiplied by 10 crore would make a total figure of 570 crores. Now let us multiply the punishment of this 570 crore men with eternity