Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 316
316 each person to die and consigns him to the grave. ' 150 It is obvious, however, that every person is not put in the grave; some are cremated, others are devoured by wild beasts and yet others find a resting place in the sea. The grave signifies the tomb where the soul is housed, and not the place to which the lifeless body is consigned, there to remain and fulfil the eternal law of decay. The nature of the Rewards and Punishments of the Life after Death I shall next endeavour to explain whether the rewards and punishments of the life after death are physical or spiritual. Islam teaches that they partake of both. They are physical in the sense, that the soul shall have devel- oped a new body in the next life, and the pains and pleasures of that life shall be capable of being felt and experienced by that body as much as the things of this world are felt and experienced by our physical senses. They will be spiritual in the sense, that they will not partake of the material nature of the things of this world, for the object of translating the soul from this world to the next is that it should be enabled to acquire those finer perceptions by means of which it can realize those delicate conceptions, of which this denser body of ours can have no experience. It follows, therefore, that the things of the next world must be of a nature different from that to which we are accustomed in this world. If we are to be fed in the next world on milk and honey and fruit like those of this, and the fire and the smoke of 150 ‘Abasa, 80: 22.